Linking Aadhaar with essential activities will turn the nation into a concentration camp, SC told

Lashing out at the move to link Aadhaar to the permanent account number and filing of income tax returns, senior advocate Shyam Divan told the Supreme Court on Thursday that the Constitution was not a charter of servitude.

“We are independent citizens who cannot be forced by the State to part with our fingerprints in exchange for being able to file our income tax returns,” he said.

He termed the newly inserted Section 139AA in the Income Tax Act, which mandates the linking of Aadhaar with PAN, a “Faustian bargain”.

Linking Aadhaar with essential activities of life, such as opening a bank account, filing returns and buying property or a vehicle, would turn the “entire nation into one large concentration camp where citizens are under State surveillance round-the-clock.”

Limited authority

A Bench of Justices A.K. Sikri and Ashok Bhushan assured him that the court was still alive to its past orders that Aadhaar should be “purely voluntary” and not forced on citizens.

“In our Constitution, we have given ourselves the right to govern through our elected representatives. Government has limited authority over us. You [State] don’t want to give me benefits, that’s all right. But you cannot, for your tax-efficiency purposes, force me to part with my fingerprints without my free, informed and voluntary consent,” Mr. Divan argued.

At this point, Justice Bhushan wondered why people should have a problem parting with their biometric particulars for getting Aadhaar when they have none whatsoever for procuring a passport to go abroad.

“State has a legitimate interest in getting a citizen’s biometric details for a passport,” responded Mr. Divan, who represents petitioners, including the former Army officer S.G. Vombatkere.

“For one, God forbid, if something happens to him when he is abroad, the State needs these particulars to identify him. These are permitted and legitimate purposes for collecting biometric data. Besides, if you go to another country, you have to abide by the laws of that country. But Aadhaar is being insisted in every walk of life.”

Privacy of the body

The law had stopped considering the physical body as a domain of the state since the times slavery was abolished.

“I am a law-abiding person. I am a tax-payer. Every man has a property in his own person. The philosophical foundation of the ‘body’ is that it is my self-authenticated source of valid claims. They are collecting biometric details of even children,” he said.

Respect for privacy

Mr. Divan said the State had respected the privacy of the body of its citizens even in the pre-constitutional times.

He referred to the Identification of Prisoners Act of 1920 in this context.

“The Act allowed authorities to take finger and foot impressions of the inmates. These were used to identify them in case of a prison break, etc. However, these records were to be destroyed immediately at the end of their prison term. Collection of biometric details had always been for narrowly-limited purposes even in times before the Constitution was framed,” Mr. Divan pointed out.