Beginning in February 2017, mobile phone users in India started receiving messages informing them that the government had made it mandatory for mobile phone numbers to be linked to Aadhaar card numbers failing which the phone number would be deactivated. But unlike the order that made it mandatory to link your PAN with your Aadhaar, most people did not sense any urgency to this order since the deadline notified was February 2018. There was equally a lull on the part of telephone service providers in following up on the notification, but in the past two weeks, there seems to be renewed interest, with customers receiving numerous reminders from their service providers.

It's curious that this increasing insistence comes in the aftermath of the Supreme Court's recent ruling in the privacy judgment where a nine-judge bench has unequivocally affirmed that the right to privacy is a fundamental right in India. While the privacy judgment itself does not say anything about Aadhaar, it has to be remembered that the judgment came out of a reference made during the hearing of cases challenging the constitutional validity of Aadhaar. The implementation of Aadhaar was challenged in 2012, and in the course of arguments, there were serious disagreements between the petitioners and the government, with the latter claiming that there was no fundamental right to privacy in India (on the basis of the M.P. Sharma and Kharak Singh eight- and six-judge benches, respectively) while subsequent judgments by smaller benches had held privacy to be a fundamental right. In August 2015, a three-judge bench referred the question of whether privacy is a fundamental right to a higher bench resulting in the Puttaswamy decision of August 2017. The affirmation of the decision provides us a good sense of the standards that will be used to decide the primary Aadhaar case as well as the challenges to the incidental policies arising from it.

In addition to people who have deferred their decision to link their mobile numbers with their Aadhaar number for reasons of convenience, there are many others who were awaiting the decision of the Supreme Court in the privacy judgment to see if it would have any bearing on the implementation of Aadhaar. In light of the privacy judgment, citizens concerned about the arbitrary manner in which Aadhaar is being tied to every single transaction of the government, have good reason to believe that some of these policies of the government will not withstand a constitutional challenge.

It seems reasonable to conclude that the renewed urgency with which service providers are pressuring customers to link mobile phone numbers to Aadhaar is at the behest of the government. By exploiting the fact that there exists a legal vacuum about the overall legality of Aadhaar, the government is effectively enforcing a policy whose legal validity remains in grave doubt. While it's not illegal per se, their insistent messaging certainly smacks of illegitimacy, and at the very least-in the aftermath of the privacy judgment-one would have expected the government to suspend the extension of Aadhaar into domains such as mobile phones.

Consumers cannot be faulted for succumbing to the combined pressures of the state and their service providers given the level of inconvenience involved in having your number deactivated. But the policy of executing the Aadhaar through a logic of a fait accompli reveals, following Hegel's memorable phrase, a cunning of reason of the state. It is worrying that rights that are formally granted to citizens run the risk of being undone by policies that target them not as vulnerable citizens but as vulnerable consumers.

At a time when it appears that the judiciary remains one of the last bastions against the caprice of the state and its willing accomplices-the private service providers in this case-it is likely that this compulsory linking will be challenged in the courts and one hopes that the judiciary will uphold its own judgments and end the uncertainty that citizen-consumers face since what is at stake is not just a choice of toothpastes but the fundamental right to communicate and to do so with your privacy intact.

Lawrence Liang is professor, School of Law, Governance and Citizenship at Ambedkar University, Delhi