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The Supreme Court has rejected a plea which sought extension of the deadline for seeding Aadhaar to a host of services, such as banking and mobile phones, beyond March 31 on the grounds that the hearing into a slew of petitions challenging the mandatory linkage of the 12-digit unique identity number would not be completed by the end of next month.A five-judge bench led by Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra on Thursday rejected the petition filed by senior advocate Shyam Divan, who has been leading the legal battle against Aadhaar.However, the bench, which has been hearing petitions challenging the validity of the Aadhaar Act 2016 for over a fortnight now, indicated that it would take care of all concerns when it concludes its hearings and reserved its judgement on the issue.So far only the Aadhaar opponents have placed their case before the court for striking down the Act.The government and the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) will place their defence of the programme after that.The top court during the course of the day-long hearing also sought to know if self-styled Aadhaar bridges, private agencies with access to the Aadhaar database, were passing on the information for commercial use to third parties, a charge levelled by opponents of the scheme.Appearing for the opponents of Aadhaar, senior advocate Gopal Subramanium argued that the state cannot insist on biometrics sans any criminality, especially when the top court has ruled that no one would be forced to part with such information even when they were accused of being involved in criminal offences.In this context, he drew the court’s attention to two notifications issued by the government extending Aadhaar seeding to voter identity cards to ostensibly “purify” the electoral rolls.“The flawed Aadhaar architecture will be used now to enfranchise and deenfranchise,” he argued. He cited a January 10, 2018, notification which also extended the biometrics to include facial recognition.Subramanium questioned the moral presumptions built into all the 139 notifications of the government, asking if it could be presumed that all citizens were imposters, and were indulging in money laundering, to justify a database that could be used for surveillance.He said the “creeping” nature of the scheme, based on an omnibus consent taken at the time of enrolment, cannot be justified as it was an unreasonable invasion of a citizen’s right to life and liberty.He urged the court to strike down the Act.In absence of a data protection law, the individual’s vulnerability is further heightened when data is stored in many places, he said. The UIDAI said that all biometrics collected by state resource hubs have since been destroyed over such fears.Subramanium said that the metadata collected by the authority was not owned by it and could be used by a foreign entity for commercial purposes. He demanded exemplary compensation for all those who have died for lack of Aadhaar authentication.“Universalisation of Aadhaar is contra-indicative. For claiming benefits of Part III (rights) you can abrogate Part III. The overarching revelation demanded by the state of citizens is constitutionally impermissible,” he said.