Constitution Bench to decide if Aadhaar violates right to privacy

Chief Justice of India JS Khehar on Wednesday agreed to set up a five-judge Constitution Bench to decide if the Aadhaar scheme violated an individual’s right to privacy. The five-judge Constitution Bench will hear it for two days commencing July 18 and decide if the issue needed to be referred to a larger Bench of nine judges. The CJI’ decision to set up a five-judge Constitution Bench came after Attorney-General KK Venugopal and senior advocate Shyam Divan mentioned the matter before him. Divan submitted that last week a three-judge Bench headed by Justice J Chelameswar had asked both the petitioners and the government to approach the CJI for setting up of a Constitution Bench. The Attorney-General supported it. “If it could be heard and disposed of early, it would be in public interest,” Venugopal told the Bench. He said an eight-judge Bench had earlier ruled that right to privacy was not a fundamental right. The petitioners have challenged the government’s ambitious Aadhaar scheme on the ground that the biometric details taken from individuals violated their right to privacy. A three-judge Bench had in August 2015 referred the issue to the CJI for setting up of a Constitution Bench to decide the issue of right to privacy. The NDA Government on July 7 had taken strong exception to petitioners in the Aadhaar case describing India as a “concentration camp”, leading to a spat between the Attorney-General and Divan in the top court. A Vacation Bench had on June 27 refused to pass an interim order against the Centre’s notification making Aadhaar mandatory for availing benefits of social welfare schemes after the government assured that no one would be deprived of their due for want of this identification. Another Bench headed by Justice AK Sikri had on June 9 upheld the validity of a provision of the Income Tax Act that mandated linking of Aadhaar number with PAN for filing IT return from July 1, 2017, saying Parliament was competent to enact such a law. However, it had read down a part of Section 139AA – added to the Income Tax Act by the Finance Act, 2017 — to save those who don’t have the unique identification number until the main challenge to the Aadhaar law on the basis of right to privacy was decided by a Constitution Bench. Earlier, the apex court had passed a slew of orders asking the government and its agencies not to make Aadhaar mandatory for extending benefits of their welfare schemes. However, it had allowed the Centre to seek Aadhaar voluntarily from citizens for extending benefits of schemes such as LPG subsidy, Jan Dhan scheme and Public Distribution System.
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