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

Monday, May 30, 2016

10047 - Two Years of Living Dangerously - The Wire



The impulse to disenfranchise runs as a streak through not just the idea of a monocultural, majoritarian nationhood but also in the social sector priorities of the Modi government.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi with his ministers in a file photo. Credit: PTI

As the second Bharatiya Janata Party-led government completes two years in office, one of its major ‘accomplishments’ is surely the manner it has gone about disenfranchising some of the most vulnerable sections of Indian society. This disenfranchisement is party the result of direct state actions but also a consequence of the work outsourced to the regime’s support base or ‘parivar’ – the family of organisations linked to the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh.

The impulse to disenfranchise runs as a streak through not just the idea of a monocultural, majoritarian nationhood but also in the governance and social sector priorities of the Narendra Modi government. When this impulse is at odds with the laws and the institutional mechanisms as they exist, the BJP seeks bypass routes in order to maintain the constitutional shell. This is accomplished through restricted implementation or non-execution of laws, as well as by manufacturing or enforcement of consent through the instigation of media hysteria and mob aggression.

This process began even before Modi came to power. By violently and aggressively targeting Muslims during the run up to the 2014 elections, in keeping with the RSS-BJP idea of nationhood, the resulting polarisation paid the BJP rich electoral dividends. That polarisation was a well thought-out ideological and electoral strategy is attested to by the fact that Modi himself in his speeches from the Malwa region of Madhya Pradesh right up to south Bihar raked up the rhetoric of matar (greenpeas) versus mutton. Invoking the stereotype of supposedly antithetical Hindu and Muslim food habits provided the cue for other BJP campaigners, including elected government and public functionaries. This aggressive targeting of Muslims around food became particularly virulent, as is well known, after the BJP came to power – resulting in draconian new laws and sustained low intensity mob violence against the minorities on the issue of cow slaughter and beef eating. This has resulted in sporadic acts of murder in Uttar Pradesh, Jharkhand, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh and Jammu, but the sense of fear, discrimination and exclusion has spread much further. Christians too have begun to feel besieged; not only have there been the odd act of violence against their places of worship, but also legal action against preachers and nuns for allegedly indulging in illegal conversions.

If the ruling dispensation’s concept of majoritarian nationalism is being rolled out aggressively by its support base and is aimed at deepening existing communal fault lines, the impulse to disenfranchise is also affecting other vulnerable populations.
The first instances in this regard are the laws passed by the BJP governments of Rajasthan and Haryana that prescribe educational qualifications for contesting Panchayati Raj elections.

In the interest of universal adult franchise and the universal right to represent, so central to real universal democracy, the constitution and the Representation of People Act had rightly desisted from prescribing educational, property and income qualifications for electors or aspirant public representatives for parliament and state legislatures.

The BJP-ruled Gujarat had earlier surreptitiously brought in a property qualification for panchayat representatives by prescribing pucca toilets in a candidate’s house as a precondition for contesting panchayat polls. To have a pucca toilet one must own enough pucca residential space, in short, one must have property. Such restrictions mean that the uneducated and the un-propertied or dispossessed can’t get anyone from among them to be their representative. If people are uneducated or can’t afford property, it’s not their fault. It’s because the state has failed in its constitutional responsibility to guarantee them sufficient education and livelihood for which it is punishing the people and depriving them of their electoral rights in a representative democracy. The whole move hits at the base of the principle of universal adult franchise and representative democracy.

This year’s severe drought proved more painful for the poor because of their disenfranchisement from entitlements granted by laws passed by parliament guaranteeing minimum permanent security from misery.

The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) and the National Food Security Act (NFSA), even though they might not be fully sufficient, would have provided minimum relief in terms of income and food to the most vulnerable in times of such a calamity. But the NFSA is not yet fully operational across the country because of bottlenecks in the states related mainly to selection of beneficiaries – which hasn’t kept in step with marriages, births, migration, homelessness, nomadic tribes, proof of identity et al. The Central government could have ameliorated this by making the provisions of the Act universal in the calamity-hit areas and foregoing the question of establishing identity, which the Supreme Court finally ordered.

The MGNREGA allotment, despite this year’s crisis, remained less than last year’s in real terms as the Rs. 38,000 crore allotted didn’t account for inflation. And of this, Rs. 12,000 crore was earmarked for payment of previous year’s arrears. Even the first instalment of wage arrears was released during the pendency of a petition in the Supreme Court. Despite the court order, the government hasn’t released the amount for further arrears. The central government is yet to honour the court order for the full amount of grain under the NFSA to be fully distributed by all fair price shops. The judicial order regarding mid-day meals to be served in drought-affected areas even when the schools are closed, and the immediate supply of fodder and water to scarcity-hit areas also remains to be fulfilled.

The disenfranchisement being pursued is not just effected by ideological aggression, misguided policy and law, and deficient implementation. Even the deliberately blinkered application of technology becomes a means to disenfranchise the poor from their entitlements.

Ground-level media reports and surveys by activists in Rajasthan have found major malfunctions in the Aadhaar card-based sale of subsidised grains from public distribution system shops that deprive the poor of their precious food entitlements during this crisis. The Aadhaar technology has failed to solve the problem of changing biometrics – due to hard manual labour and malnourishment – of the working class population. Many times, biometric identification fails because of deficient network connectivity too and the fact that not everyone owns a mobile phone. Because of manual error or negligence also at the time of data entry, the card, the UID number and the real identity of the beneficiary get mixed up and the machine sometimes ‘locks’ the poor beneficiary out. Since the poor have no control over the technology, nor over the system that operates it, and the support staff at the PDS shop or the local level is unequipped to solve the malfunction at the sale point or local administrative level, the poor are often deprived of their food entitlement or have to spend much time and money on multiple trips to get the system error corrected. This they cannot often afford. 

Considering the mass resentment because of this, the Rajasthan government gave shop-keepers one-time discretion to sell grain at below-poverty-line prices to the beneficiary – discretionary power that Aadhaar was supposed to eliminate. According to a recent survey by activists covering all the divisions in Rajasthan, only 45% of the  beneficiaries had received their grain entitlements under the NFSA in the last three months.

Such apprehensions, apart from those over privacy, were probably behind the Supreme Court order to not make Aadhaar enrolment compulsory for various government schemes. But, first the UPA, and now the NDA government more robustly, effectively made Aadhaar compulsory by threatening the poor that they would be deprived of their entitlements under various schemes if they don’t enrol.

Linking a poor person’s most essential food entitlement with Aadhaar is in the interest of the powers that be because if people don’t avail of their entitlement, they can argue that the poor are not interested in getting subsidised food. They can then use the poor as an alibi for eliminating the public distribution system and subsidised food altogether – thereby disenfranchising them from an important part of their socio-economic rights. Exclusion on various grounds has always been the bane of our system. The Modi government’s reflexive impulses are towards gradually rolling back to the greatest extent possible whatever universal entitlements the excluded have acquired over the years.

No wonder then that this trend, coupled with a jobless stagnant economy, has caused a great deal of angst among students, especially those coming from a deprived background. It was in the fitness of the regime’s reflexes that it clamped down on the campuses when young students started actively expressing their angst. Activists already engaged with the fault lines of exclusion were being targeted anyway. The net of disenfranchisement is now falling upon a dissenting intelligentsia with the help of spurious legal and mob aggression spurred by an ultra and insincere nationalism.

Neelabh Mishra is a senior journalist and former editor of Outlook Hindi