In 2009, I became extremely concerned with the concept of Unique Identity for various reasons. Connected with many like minded highly educated people who were all concerned.
On 18th May 2010, I started this Blog to capture anything and everything I came across on the topic. This blog with its million hits is a testament to my concerns about loss of privacy and fear of the ID being misused and possible Criminal activities it could lead to.
In 2017 the Supreme Court of India gave its verdict after one of the longest hearings on any issue. I did my bit and appealed to the Supreme Court Judges too through an On Line Petition.
In 2019 the Aadhaar Legislation has been revised and passed by the two houses of the Parliament of India making it Legal. I am no Legal Eagle so my Opinion carries no weight except with people opposed to the very concept.
In 2019, this Blog now just captures on a Daily Basis list of Articles Published on anything to do with Aadhaar as obtained from Daily Google Searches and nothing more. Cannot burn the midnight candle any longer.
"In Matters of Conscience, the Law of Majority has no place"- Mahatma Gandhi
Ram Krishnaswamy
Sydney, Australia.

Aadhaar

The UIDAI has taken two successive governments in India and the entire world for a ride. It identifies nothing. It is not unique. The entire UID data has never been verified and audited. The UID cannot be used for governance, financial databases or anything. It’s use is the biggest threat to national security since independence. – Anupam Saraph 2018

When I opposed Aadhaar in 2010 , I was called a BJP stooge. In 2016 I am still opposing Aadhaar for the same reasons and I am told I am a Congress die hard. No one wants to see why I oppose Aadhaar as it is too difficult. Plus Aadhaar is FREE so why not get one ? Ram Krishnaswamy

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.-Mahatma Gandhi

In matters of conscience, the law of the majority has no place.Mahatma Gandhi

“The invasion of privacy is of no consequence because privacy is not a fundamental right and has no meaning under Article 21. The right to privacy is not a guaranteed under the constitution, because privacy is not a fundamental right.” Article 21 of the Indian constitution refers to the right to life and liberty -Attorney General Mukul Rohatgi

“There is merit in the complaints. You are unwittingly allowing snooping, harassment and commercial exploitation. The information about an individual obtained by the UIDAI while issuing an Aadhaar card shall not be used for any other purpose, save as above, except as may be directed by a court for the purpose of criminal investigation.”-A three judge bench headed by Justice J Chelameswar said in an interim order.

Legal scholar Usha Ramanathan describes UID as an inverse of sunshine laws like the Right to Information. While the RTI makes the state transparent to the citizen, the UID does the inverse: it makes the citizen transparent to the state, she says.

Good idea gone bad
I have written earlier that UID/Aadhaar was a poorly designed, unreliable and expensive solution to the really good idea of providing national identification for over a billion Indians. My petition contends that UID in its current form violates the right to privacy of a citizen, guaranteed under Article 21 of the Constitution. This is because sensitive biometric and demographic information of citizens are with enrolment agencies, registrars and sub-registrars who have no legal liability for any misuse of this data. This petition has opened up the larger discussion on privacy rights for Indians. The current Article 21 interpretation by the Supreme Court was done decades ago, before the advent of internet and today’s technology and all the new privacy challenges that have arisen as a consequence.

Rajeev Chandrasekhar, MP Rajya Sabha

“What is Aadhaar? There is enormous confusion. That Aadhaar will identify people who are entitled for subsidy. No. Aadhaar doesn’t determine who is eligible and who isn’t,” Jairam Ramesh

But Aadhaar has been mythologised during the previous government by its creators into some technology super force that will transform governance in a miraculous manner. I even read an article recently that compared Aadhaar to some revolution and quoted a 1930s historian, Will Durant.Rajeev Chandrasekhar, Rajya Sabha MP

“I know you will say that it is not mandatory. But, it is compulsorily mandatorily voluntary,” Jairam Ramesh, Rajya Saba April 2017.

August 24, 2017: The nine-judge Constitution Bench rules that right to privacy is “intrinsic to life and liberty”and is inherently protected under the various fundamental freedoms enshrined under Part III of the Indian Constitution

"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the World; indeed it's the only thing that ever has"

“Arguing that you don’t care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don’t care about free speech because you have nothing to say.” -Edward Snowden

In the Supreme Court, Meenakshi Arora, one of the senior counsel in the case, compared it to living under a general, perpetual, nation-wide criminal warrant.

Had never thought of it that way, but living in the Aadhaar universe is like living in a prison. All of us are treated like criminals with barely any rights or recourse and gatekeepers have absolute power on you and your life.

Announcing the launch of the # BreakAadhaarChainscampaign, culminating with events in multiple cities on 12th Jan. This is the last opportunity to make your voice heard before the Supreme Court hearings start on 17th Jan 2018. In collaboration with @no2uidand@rozi_roti.

UIDAI's security seems to be founded on four time tested pillars of security idiocy

1) Denial

2) Issue fiats and point finger

3) Shoot messenger

4) Bury head in sand.

God Save India

Tuesday, February 18, 2014

5115 - Divided right and left, united in objective to scuttle Aadhaar - Indian Express


Written by Ravish Tiwari | New Delhi | January 28, 2014 2:08 am

SUMMARY
Six groups have filed cases in the Supreme Court against UIDAI, the unique identification authority.

In contrast, the other four petitions don’t raise Aadhaar’s prospective coverage of non-citizens.

Right-wing and left, opponents to the Aadhaar project appear bunched together in two distinct formations as they separately seek to scuttle a project that aims at providing every citizen a unique identity number for targeted benefits from the government.

Six groups have filed cases in the Supreme Court against UIDAI, the unique identification authority. These have been filed during the last one year; the UPA-II government had set up UIDAI in 2009 and issued the first Aadhaar numbers in September 2010.
Several of the arguments overlap but what sets two petitions apart from the remaining four is that the former’s objections are based on right-wing principles and the latter’s on left-wing ones.

A petition by Justice (retired) Puttaswamy and Parvesh Khanna, and another by Maj. Gen. (retired) S G Vombatkere and Bezwada Wilson, both raise an objection identical to what the the BJP has been raising — that the project has no preventive to block illegal immigrants or non-citizens from getting an Aadhaar number.

In fact, BJP Rajya Sabha MP M Rama Jois, also a former chief justice of the Punjab and Haryana High Court, is backing the petition by Justice Puttuswamy.

“Yes,” Rama Jois replied to a question by The Indian Express about his support. “Puttuswamy was a colleague of mine. I had raised my objections in Parliament as well. I had written to the Prime Minister. I am opposed to the Aadhaar project going ahead without legislative sanction. The government cannot go ahead with an executive order alone.”

In contrast, the other four petitions don’t raise Aadhaar’s prospective coverage of non-citizens. The four petitions, including one by Aruna Roy and Nikhil Dey, have raised instead the left-liberal concerns of privacy, infringement of personal liberties and Aadhaar’s being mandatory for welfare schemes. Usha Ramanathan, a campaigner against Aadhaar on left-liberal arguments, is learnt to be actively supporting some of these petitioners.

“As for which side I stand on. I have been researching the UID project almost since its inception, and I find that the handing over of data to all kinds of companies, the corporatisation of an exercise in generating identity; the fact that this is not about identity but about identification; and that these are about how citizens get converted into subjects — and more such questions are what bother me,” she told The Indian Express in an emailed reply. “If we are going to be looking for the illegal immigrant through this project, we will miss what actually is the problem.”

Ramanathan is learnt to have roped retired Delhi chief justice A P Shah into this cause in the past. Justice (retired) Shah refused to speak on this issue, citing his current job as the chairman of the Law Commission. Shah has, however, spoken publicly against the Aadhaar project in the past. In fact, along with several left-leaning activists, he was a signatory to one of the petitions to the government opposing the project.

The political orientation of the challengers has not been lost on UIDAI. “This appears to be an unholy nexus between the left and the right to kill the project through legal means,” agreed a UIDAI functionary.

Another functionary, however, said that politically there did not appear many objections either from the left or from the right to the implementation of the project. The functionary stressed that the BJP governments in Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh and Goa have been cooperative in the implementation of the project, and that the Left Front government in Tripura has not placed no obstacles either.

Yet the concerns persist. “Though these cases from the left-leaning and right-leaning individuals have not affected UIDAI’s enrolment, which stands about 51 crore, there is a fear of the judicial sword killing the entire initiative in one go the way 122 telecom licenses were scrapped with a single stroke of the Supreme Court’s pen,” said a UIDAI functionary.

“These small groups of activists can bring this entire project to a halt after welfare programmes have leveraged this project for better service delivery,” said another. The functionary pointed out how direct cash subsidy for 12.2 million gas cylinders is now directly credited to the bank accounts of beneficiaries thanks to Aadhaar.