NEW DELHI: The Centre on Wednesday invoked the right to food, shelter and employment for millions of impoverished people to justify
Aadhaar and countered the petitioners’ focussed attack on the unique identification number as a gross violation of right to privacy.
For the Centre, attorney general K K
Venugopal told a bench of Chief Justice Dipak Misra and Justices A K Sikri, A M Khanwilkar, D Y Chandrachud and Ashok Bhushan that Aadhaar is meant to facilitate 350 million people living below the poverty line, who have been ignored for decades by governments and society and left to live on the fringes with their entitlements under PDS and NREGA pilfered by middlemen.
“Aadhaar was to ensure that these impoverished lot did not have an animal existence and lived with dignity with assured entitlement to food, shelter and employment, which are all part of right to life guaranteed under Article 21 of the Constitution,” the AG said. With the SC’s nine-judge Constitution bench having already ruled that right to privacy is intrinsic to right to life,
Justice Sikri said this stand brings an intriguing question before the court — both the government and petitioners seek to validate their arguments by invoking the right to life.
“While the government is invoking right to life to justify Aadhaar as an injector of dignity to lives of millions of impoverished, the petitioners are seeking to invoke the right to privacy, also a part of right to life, to counter Aadhaar,” Justice Sikri said and added that the court may have to employ the doctrine of proportionality to decide this conflict between two limbs of right to life over Aadhaar.
At the outset,
CJI Misra startled the petitioners as well as the government by succinctly summarising the 19-day-long arguments spanning more than two months by precisely identifying 10 grounds through which petitioners have faulted Aadhaar. After doing so, he innocently asked the lawyers whether any ground was left out. It invited an awe-struck shrug of shoulders from senior advocate K V Vishwanathan, who said not a single ground has been left out by the CJI.
Venugopal argued that the right of the impoverished to get food, shelter and livelihood stood on a higher pedestal than right to privacy. “There is no comparison between two aspects of right to life — right to privacy as against deprivation of basic things to sustain life,” he said. Justice Chandrachud said: “In order to achieve economic liberty, we will have to give up political liberty cannot be an argument. Political rights (privacy) and economic rights (ensured through Aadhaar) stand on different footing.”
Justice Bhushan added, “Even if the government argued that the right of downtrodden to food and shelter was on a higher pedestal, still it has to ensure that privacy of the very same class of people is not violated.” AG said the SC has to strike a balance between the two.
