Dhananjay Mahapatra | TNN | May 4, 2018, 02:39 IST
NEW DELHI: The Centre on Thursday sought dismissal of Congress leader Jairam Ramesh’s petition challenging the Lok Sabha Speaker’s decision to categorise the Aadhaar Bill as a money bill by arguing that the Speaker’s decision was final and not open to judicial scrutiny.
Ramesh’s counsel P Chidambaram had said the Speaker arbitrarily decided to categorise the Aadhaar Bill as a money bill to deprive Rajya Sabha, where the ruling NDA did not have majority, from amending the bill.
“Why should the House of Elders be shut off from suggesting changes in the law? Why should the President be deprived of giving his suggestions by marking Aadhaar as a money bill?” he had asked. Attorney general K K Venugopal met these arguments by citing Article 110(1), which deals with use of Consolidated Fund money, which was utilised to create Aadhaar identity for every Indian and the required infrastructure, and said this warranted the bill to be categorised as a money bill.
Moreover, constitutional provisions and parliamentary rules and tradition left the categorisation entirely and exclusively to the Speaker, whose decision was final and non-justiciable, the AG argued. However, a bench of CJI Dipak Misra and Justices A K Sikri, A M Khanwilkar, D Y Chandrachud and Ashok Bhushan put a caveat by saying it was open to judicial scrutiny if gross irregularity was pointed out in the procedure to categorise a bill as money bill.
Venugopal said of the estimated expenditure of Rs 13,663 crore for implementation of Aadhaar scheme up to the 2016-17 financial year, a sum of Rs 6,844 crore had been spent for payments towards enrolments, logistic operations, Aadhaar Sampark Kendras, technology infrastructure and operations. Another Rs 408 crore was spent towards establishment cost, he added.
The AG said the petitioners had argued that Aadhaar would be used to launch surveillance on citizens. “What is alleged is that the government would enter into a conspiracy with UIDAI to put political opponents and other prominent citizens under surveillance by committing offence under the Aadhaar Act, which punishes storage of activities or sharing of data following authentication of identification through Aadhaar,” he said.
“It was totally wrong on the part of the petitioners to argue that Aadhaar has made citizens live in a totalitarian regime or in a concentration camp where they are electronically leashed. A dog gets leashed. No one can argue that a democratically elected and constitutionally formed government can violate law to leash its citizens, who are the ultimate holders of power in a democracy,” the AG added.
The Centre and the UIDAI concluded their arguments on Aadhaar and the petitioners will present their reply from Tuesday.
