Former Supreme Court judge B.N. Srikrishna and Swapnil Kothari said in an opinion piece that in addition to wording being vague, the legislation runs the risk of violating the Supreme Court’s 2018 judgment.
New Delhi: Five years ago, the Supreme Court said it was unconstitutional for private companies to use Aadhaar data to establish someone’s identity.
But the Union government is now proposing that private companies should be allowed access to people’s Aadhaar data, as long as such use promotes “ease of living” and enables “better access to services.”
Critics of the government’s proposed legislation say that the government’s use of vague wording in trying to expand access to Aadhaar data poses a risk to individual liberties.
“This legislation is pregnant with potential for mischief as the term ‘ease of living’ is undefined, nor is it made clear how one can gain ‘better access’ and to which services,” former Supreme Court judge Justice B.N. Srikrishna and Swapnil Kothari said in an opinion piece for the Hindustan Times, adding that the legislation runs the risk of violating the Supreme Court’s 2018 unconstitutionality judgment.
On the other hand, the government believes that its proposal to expand Aadhaar access to private companies will not run afoul of the top court’s decision.
“The concern then was the private sector accessing Aadhaar, but under the new proposal, no private entity will have access to Aadhaar details of a person – it is a simple yes or no authentication to establish one’s identity,” a senior government official told the Indian Express.
The government has invited comments to its draft and recently extended its deadline to May 20.
Aadhaar is a biometric identification system that the Indian government initially introduced to expedite access to food subsidies and welfare benefits, but it has become increasingly necessary for accessing services such as bank accounts, SIM cards and internet connections. It is the world’s largest system of its kind.
What the government proposed in April is a draft amendment to an older legislation called the Aadhaar Authentication for Good Governance (Social Welfare, Innovation, Knowledge) Rules, 2020. According to this law, the Union government may authorise Aadhaar access to “requesting entities” if they want to use it to verify someone’s identity with the purpose of using digital platforms for good governance, preventing welfare benefits from leaking, or “enabling innovation and the spread of knowledge”.
Srikrishna and Kothari say these terms are overly broad as well.
“What do these phrases mean? Was there any debate on them, any public discussion, or were they decided in the cloistered chambers of the executive? These rules seem to afford sufficient grounds for invalidation on the “void for vagueness” [doctrine] or [“over-broadness”] when tested on the anvil of constitutional principles,” they said.
After the Supreme Court’s unconstitutionality verdict, the government had to amend existing legislation in order to allow banking and telecommunication companies to authenticate their customers for ‘know your customer’ (KYC) requirements, the Express‘s report said.
On May 6, the government expanded the range of non-banking companies that can use Aadhaar data for KYC requirements to 22 financial entities, including Amazon Pay (India) Pvt. Ltd, Aditya Birla Housing Finance Ltd and IIFL Finance Ltd. This decision falls under the ambit of the Prevention of Money Laundering Act, 2002 (PMLA), which allows certain non-banking financial entities to rely on Aadhaar data for user verification.
The Election Laws (Amendment) Bill, 2021, which was passed in Lok Sabha on Monday, seeks to weed out fake voters from electoral rolls.
New Delhi: The parliament on Tuesday passed a Bill to link electoral roll data with the Aadhaar ecosystem with Rajya Sabha passing it by voice vote amidst a walkout by the Opposition.
The Election Laws (Amendment) Bill, 2021, which was passed in Lok Sabha on Monday, seeks to weed out fake voters from electoral rolls.
The Opposition parties were demanding a division of votes as they had moved a motion to send the Bill to a select committee, which was rejected by voice vote.
TMC member Derek O’Brien cited rules for a division of votes even as deputy chairman Harivansh urged members to go to their seats to enable the division.
However, Opposition members continued to raise slogans in the well. O’Brien threw the rule book on the table where officials sit and staged a walkout.
Ruling party members strongly condemned his behaviour.
Members of Congress, TMC, Left parties, DMK and NCP also walked out from the House in protest.
Members of BJP, JD(U), YSRCP, AIADMK, BJD and TMC-M supported the Bill, saying it will help in eradicating duplicate and fake voters from electoral rolls.
Earlier, Congress, TMC, CPI, CPI-M, DMK and Samajwadi Party opposed the Bill saying it infringes on voters’ right to privacy.
Terming the Bill “very good”, law minister Kiren Rijiju said the legislation will help end fake and bogus voting in the country and make the electoral process credible.
Dismissing the Opposition’s apprehensions about the Bill as “baseless”, the minister said the Opposition was “misinterpreting” the Supreme Court’s judgment on personal liberty.
“There is no basis of your opposition to the Bill. The Election Commission and the government have held many meetings and the EC’s biggest concern is that the same person has (his or her) name in multiple electoral rolls and there is no other system to check this,” Rijiju said.
“In our democracy, the electoral process should be clean and that can happen only if the electoral rolls are clean.
“This Bill will be opposed only by those who take advantage of fake voting. Otherwise, there is no basis for opposing this Bill,” he said.
The Election Laws (Amendment) Bill, 2021, seeks to allow electoral registration officers to seek Aadhaar number of people who want to register as voters “for the purpose of establishing the identity”.
It also seeks to allow the electoral registration officers to ask for Aadhaar number from “persons already included in the electoral roll for the purposes of authentication of entries in electoral roll, and to identify registration of name of the same person in the electoral roll of more than one constituency or more than once in the same constituency”.
At the same time, the amendment Bill makes it clear that “no application for inclusion of name in the electoral roll shall be denied and no entries in the electoral roll shall be deleted for inability of an individual to furnish or intimate Aadhaar number due to such sufficient cause as may be prescribed”.
Such people will be allowed to furnish other alternative documents as may be prescribed.
The irony is that the very issues Narendra Modi campaigned on in 2013 are the ones his government has managed to aggravate the most since coming to power.
Salman Khurshid is a former Union minister for law and external affairs and a senior advocate of the Supreme Court, and Muhammad Khan is a National Media Panellist for the Congress party and an Advocate.
It is interesting that during the campaigns for the elections to the five state assemblies, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been noticeably reluctant to talk about his government’s achievements.
This is also ironic because we know that the prime minister loves to advertise. So much so, that a parliamentary query revealed that the government has spent close to Rs 4,880 crore of tax payer money on advertising their ‘achievements’.
As we enter the last five months of this government’s tenure, it is becoming increasingly apparent that a historic opportunity has been squandered. The Modi government – which was doubly blessed by a historic mandate from the people and three years of low oil prices, had an opportunity to enact widespread reform. Instead this became a government with questionable priorities and a lack of any legislative clarity.
The successes of the Modi government are debatable. However, there were ten critical missteps which will, without a doubt, define the Modi government.
1. Demonetisation.
This would be at the top of any list for its sheer lack of success and the widespread havoc that it inflicted on the economy. While being taught now as a cautionary tale in business schools overseas, it enjoys the unique distinction of having failed on every one of its stated objectives (combatting terror funding, fake notes and black money) while having wiped out jobs. Studies by noted economist Arun Kumar and the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy continue to illustrate that we are not out of the woods yet.
2. The betrayal of farmers
Farmer suicides rose sharply during the Modi government’s tenure. In its final budget, the BJP on the demand of minimum support price plus 50%, gave a version that satisfied no one. In parallel, the Modi government imported wheat and pulses without thought – leading to the prices of domestic produce crashing. Add to this – the ill-advised venture to amend the land acquisition Act of 2013; to forcibly acquire the land of farmers.
Farmers have resorted to all manner of agitations to catch the BJP government’s attention. They have marched and held large scale agitations thrice this year. They have brought the mortal remains of their brethren, who committed suicide, to shock this government into action. The children of those farmers who took their own lives held peaceful protests barely a kilometre away from parliament. Not a single representative from the BJP Government deigned to meet with any of them or even acknowledge their presence.
There has been an enslavement of certain sections of the media which simply choke on any criticism no matter how innocuous of the prime minister and the BJP president. If a channel is less than pliant, it is blacked out for 24 hours, its premises are raided, or the offending journalists are mysteriously made to go on sabbatical or removed outright.
5. Weakening of institutions
The parliament is an inconvenience to this government which prefers to rule by fiat and ordinances. The prime minister rarely attends parliament, and when he does it is more to give electoral speeches than to lay out a legislative agenda or answer questions raised on the floor of the House. The promised Lokpal is so artfully forgotten that an irate Supreme Court has to direct action. An audacious chief minister promptly upon assuming office withdraws all criminal cases against himself and no one blinks. Electoral transparency is promised while bringing in unaccounted funding through regressive and opaque electoral bonds. The CBI is in the throes of a battle for credibility. The list goes on.
6. Perhaps the biggest failure, the cultivation of hate
There has been a sharp increase in targeted attacks on Dalits and members of the minority community. What makes these attacks unique is the state endorsement to the attackers when ministers garland them or reverentially attend their funerals. The message of support is lost on no one. In fact, the only coherent thread running through this government’s term has been the othering of a certain section of India. People who are blessed to be followed by the prime minster share only one other thing in common. They are defiantly communal and abusive. Almost as if they have official sanction.
This government deserves the credit of having alienated the Kashmiri people from the rest of India through a poorly thought out engagement policy. For the first time, since the 1996, by-elections could not be held in the district of Anantnag and had to be delayed because of the tense situation. Eight month long curfews destroyed the local economy. Worse still, there was a marked increase (72%) in the number of our soldiers martyred in just the first three years of the BJP’s term. The extremely inept handling of Kashmir deserves a study unto itself.
8. A draconian Aadhaar and the failed attempt to deny citizens a fundamental right to privacy
For months this government argued in the Supreme Court against citizens having a fundamental right to privacy. It argued for surveillance and labelled privacy an ‘elitist concern’. In parallel it struggled to explain why it ordered the mandatory linking of Aadhaar to all possible services from railway tickets to school admissions. The Supreme Court ultimately had to step in and severely curtail the domineering designs of the project.
9. Erosion of India’s influence in Asia
A small island nation like Maldives feels confident in spurning India, Nepal has no compunctions about engaging with China as does Sri Lanka. Until five years ago, India enjoyed a pre-eminent position in the subcontinent with its voice sought on resolving matters within these countries. It is clear that that influence has been eroded because of a foreign policy lacking any coherent objectives, except to promote the Prime Minister’s cult of personality.
10. Jobs
When the government has to revise the methodology for calculating GDP to make its numbers appear artificially higher, when capital flight on an unprecedented scale takes place, when companies turn to external lenders to finance operations, you know the government has failed to create jobs.
§
This is a dismal report card by any measure, but it is far from exhaustive. The sheer number of high-value defaulters who audaciously fled the country with public sector money, the almost cruel increases in oil and LPG prices, the lowering of the standard of political discourse etc.; these are just some of the several missteps this government will have to answer for.
The irony is that when the prime minister was campaigning in 2013, he promised to address these very issues. He has instead aggravated them to a point where it will take years to undo the damage.
The prime minister likes to speak of legacy issues often. The truth is his legacy is going to be an issue of sizeable concern for himself.
Section 57 of the Aadhaar act allowed private parties to access Aadhaar data.
New Delhi: The Congress Wednesday welcomed the Supreme Court decision to strike down Section 57 of the Aadhaar act, which allowed private entities to access Aadhaar data, and termed it a “slap on the face of BJP”.
The Supreme Court has declared the Centre’s flagship Aadhaar scheme constitutionally valid.
It has also struck down Section 57 of the Aadhaar Act, which allows not only the State but also any “body, corporate or person” or private entity to demand an Aadhaar.
“We welcome the Supreme Court’s decision to strike down Section 57 of the Aadhaar Act. Private entities are no longer allowed to use Aadhaar for verification purposes,” the Congress said on Twitter minutes after the verdict.
Several Congress leaders also spoke on the judgement.
The delinking of Aadhaar from private entities is a ‘slap on the face of BJP”, said Congress national spokesperson Abhishek Manu Singhvi.
“Slap on the face of BJP. Justice Sikri judgement strikes down Section 57 of Aadhaar Act, 2016, which says private body corporates can seek Aadhaar data. Says it’s unconstitutional. All plans to monetise biometric data now fail,” he tweeted.
He also hailed the Supreme Court’s move to disallow metadata to be stored in its current form.
“If the information of a person’s personal information is sought to be released, he or she shall have an opportunity to be heard.
“SC rightly appreciated brilliant idea in origin; protected its core; promoted its development and eliminated its flotsam & jetsam. SC brilliantly threw out #bjp #modi accumulated dirty bathwater and saved the baby. Org intent of UPA ie to give identity 2 marginalised ppl now shines (sic),” he said.
His colleague Randeep Singh Surjewala said the Supreme Court verdict “upholds the individual’s right to privacy”.
“Modi Govt’s draconian Section 57 quashed – Bank A/c, Mobile, School, Airlines, Travel Agents, Pvt entities requiring Aadhar Data quashed.”
“Time to take next step to destroy the citizen’s data so collected now,” he said on Twitter.
The majority verdict by Chief Justice Dipak Misra and Justices A.K. Sikri and A.M. Khanwilkar declared the Centre’s flagship Aadhaar scheme constitutionally valid but struck down some of its provisions, including its linking with bank accounts, mobile phones and school admissions.
The top court said Aadhaar serves a bigger public interest. Aadhaar means unique and it is better to be unique than be the best, it said.
You can follow our extensive coverage of Aadhaar here.
The Surat Municipal Corporation (SMC) has developed a system of ear-tagging such animals and linking it with the Aadhaar number of their owners and will impose fines if stray cattle cause an inconvenience.
Ahmedabad: In a bid to curb the menace of stray cattle, mostly cows, roaming on the city streets, the Surat Municipal Corporation (SMC) has developed a system of ear-tagging such animals and linking it with the Aadhaar number of their owners.
Each ear tag carries a Cattle Registration Number (CRN) that is linked with the Aadhaar number of the cattle owner. It helps the SMC to identify, trace and penalise the owners for letting their cattle wander on the streets and cause inconvenience to people and traffic, he said.
The civic body has so far pinned plastic tags with serial numbers to the ears of around 25,000 stray animals across the city and linked them with the Aadhaar numbers of around 1,500 cattle owners, market superintendent of SMC, Praful Mehta, said.
“We have created a computerised database of around 25,000 such stray animals belonging to around 1,500 people.
The CRN is linked with the Aadhaar number of the owners. Since the city limits have expanded, this nuisance has grown. I think we are yet to register another 25,000 such stray cattle,” Mehta said.
He said that using the number tagged on the ears of the bovines, the civic authorities can trace their owners easily, as the latter’s phone number and address are registered in the database.
“Cattle owners do not come to us voluntarily to get their animals ear-tagged. Therefore, whenever we catch a stray animal, we ear-tag it and give a CRN. Then, when the owner comes to collect his cattle, we register his details and link it with the CRN. If he does not have Aadhaar, we use other documents, such as the driving licence,” Mehta said.
“When the same tagged animal is caught again, we can trace the owner. Since the owners usually do not reveal the exact number of the cattle they own, we can trace his location using the database find out the exact number of animals in his possession. We then compel him to ear tag all those animals before releasing the impounded ones,” he said.
Presently, the corporation impounds an average of 70 stray cattle each day from different parts of the city.
The SMC imposes a fine of Rs 1,800 for the first day – Rs 200 for the ear tagging of each impounded bovine, Rs 1,000 towards cattle impound fee (one time charge), and Rs 650 each day towards administrative and maintenance charges, the official said.
The Police also book the owners under IPC section 289 (negligent conduct with respect to animals) and section 90 (a) of the Bombay Police Act, which deals with penalty for allowing their cattle to stray on the streets.
According to Mehta, this system was launched recently and it would eventually deter the cattle owners from letting their cows and other animals from straying on the streets.
“Even if a policeman notes down the CRN of a stray animal, which runs away before the arrival of the impounding team, we can trace and penalise the owner as the CRN is linked to the details of owners,” said Mehta, who in in charge of veterinary and food hygiene of the Diamond city.
Notably, incidents of attack on municipal teams by cattle owners takes place on regular basis in Surat as well as in other cities.
Last month, a civic team had to stay put in their vehicle for over an hour when it was allegedly attacked by a mob for impounding a stray cow in the city.
According to Mehta, the Aadhaar linked database can also reveal whether the owner is a repeat offender or whether he was involved in such attacks in the past.
“We do not release the cattle if the owner is caught for the fourth time. The fine increases with every offence.
Since we now know the history of offences, the owners are cautious about not repeating it,” said Mehta.
According to the official, civic authorities of other major cities, including Ahmedabad and Rajkot, have shown interest in this system and sought details from the SMC.
‘In Pursuit of Proof’ astutely captures the identity fever that afflicts contemporary India.
We live in a time when identity documents have a remarkable hold over everyday life. An endless trail of signatures, passport-sized photos, KYC forms, scans and other proxies are necessary to vote, pay tax, open a bank account, access welfare schemes, loans, send parcels and get a cell phone. Beyond establishing ‘bona fide’ identity, ‘ID proof’ is also deeply political. Each category that makes up a composite identity has a history that can be mobilised and reanimated for new purposes, including, most recently, as a fetish object of digital innovation. And as the controversy around digitisation of Assam’s 1951 National Register of Citizens (NRC) shows, the very infrastructure of identity documents – the labyrinthine procedures of recording, verifying and certifying identity – is the ground for deciding identity. This infrastructure of ID is neither merely a technical matter nor it is impartial. It too has a history. Tarangini Sriraman’s timely book tells us why.
More than anything else, In Pursuit of Proof shows, through a mix of archival research and field work, how, in India, identity is shaped not unilaterally through by law or by administrative fiat but instead by the state’s reliance on popular knowledge of ID proof to create governable populations. Through several years of archival research and ethnographic research in several field sites inhabited by Delhi’s working-class denizens to understand how individuals go about identifying themselves, Sriraman shows how there is a lot to see in the devilish details of identity proof.
IDs are produced in realms that straddle the formal and the informal and shape the administration of the poor. Furthermore, identity documents don’t die. They often outlive their original ends to shape new means. This is especially true of independent India, where the multiple lives of identity documents and welfare regimes developed in connection with each other.
In Pursuit of Proof: A History of Identification Documents in India Tarangini Sriraman Oxford University Press
Postcolonial India’s tryst with identity documents began on a new footing in the 1940s with wartime food provisioning and the ration card. The ration card entitled its recipient to food by connecting names to a household and a stable residential address. The card was not a universal document, though. It was difficult to get a ration card without a stable address. Different states were allowed to develop protocols for its production, and different card categories were created for different sub-populations. Nonetheless, the ration card’s reach grew and laid the foundation for welfare systems in India in the Nehruvian era. After Nehru, the card underpinned the ‘license raj’ established first in terms of food austerity under Lal Bahadur Shastri and then after 1965 by Indira Gandhi in the stringent control of most commodities. Access to subsidised roti, kapda and makaan required the card.
However, as Sriraman shows, even as the ration card became the most desirable but elusive piece of paper for many of India’s undocumented poor, proof of identity was also thoroughly reworked. Infrastructural stress or political reorientation or, ironically, even bureaucratic virtue, modified what counted as acceptable proof. Under the license raj, the low-level bureaucrat loosened or upheld stringent provisioning norms with innovative documentary strategies such as affidavits and confessions. Many more modifications resulted from the state having to grapple with a large population of urban poor with few ways of establishing a permanent address. When contending with the flood of refugees after Partition or much later, in 1990, when the V.P Singh government sought to widen access to the ration card to those in JJ clusters in Delhi, a degree of official latitude in the acceptance of evidence ensured participation. Rather than measure the production of ID then, in terms of coercion and consent, Sriraman argues we would do well to see how the state loosened protocols and encouraged collaboration (even allowing self-enumeration of collectives in some moments) to fill evidentiary voids. Participation did not at all mean that the poor entered a level playing field in negotiations with the welfare state. Who could shape refugee procedures in the 1950s was entirely determined by caste, religion and gender of the claimant or the collective.
In fact, the power-laden and discretionary incorporation of ‘collateral evidence’ under its official signature allowed the state to carve out niches of governance in marginal spaces occupied by refugees, migrants and the urban poor. More violent transactions were also undertaken. In moments like the Emergency, the path to the ration card was through sterilisation certificates. The moment of slum demolition became the only time that the urban poor could hope to have their hutment registered on paper and thereby begin their access to welfare. All told, the possibility of modification allowed bureaucrats and subjects to navigate India’s complex ecology of welfare using ingenuity, persuasion, moral outrage, political muscle and force. Sriraman argues this navigation often ensures the delivery of crucial welfare services. And the Aadhar biometric card puts this navigation under considerable stress.
The Aadhar project seeks to dis-embed ID proof from all its prior entanglements with the ecology of welfare. It is equally a national investment in creating data assets by interlocking databases. As elsewhere, the project relies on (and thereby stimulates) private industries of information gathering and looks to dominate a data market in which fingerprints have the largest market share of biometric modalities. Will the vision for automating Indian welfare systems through a single template ID liberate the Indian citizen from error, bureaucratic venality and corruption? Will paper residues of ID be purged and a biometrically authenticated number create a well-oiled machine? Sriraman’s research suggests otherwise. For one, because the card is linked to welfare entitlements, enrollment in its system is not ‘voluntary’ as authorities would have it. There is another serious limitation: the infrastructure of Aadhar is not independent of the infrastructure of paper IDs.
Aadhar is selectively parasitic on the continued relevance of paper ID such as ration and job cards. This means that data operators rely on old paper-based procedures to verify identity. Depending on which paper ID is rejected, sub-populations get left out. Moreover, the system is not secure. To be sure, a degree of ingenuity with paper forms and political pressure can be exercised to enroll in the system. But as Sriraman shows, it is the selective interlocking of Aadhar with other databases that makes access to welfare services more uncertain. For example, Aadhar is increasingly required to get caste certificates. This means that India’s most marginal welfare recipients are not spared the trouble of getting these paper certificates, but they also now need a smart card to do so. Thanks to the interlocking of Aadhar and the public distribution system, access to food is now increasingly managed by biometric authentication. But biometric machines cannot recognise fingerprints of manual workers, who are the biggest recipients of subsidised food. Digital interfaces are often error-prone, which means that the rapid streamlining of the public distribution system is bound to leave many out.
By flagging the dangers of thoughtless data interlocking, In Pursuit of Proof concludes that smart technology may have limited utility for welfare recipients while entrenching social disparities. There is another lesson to be drawn: how endless permutations and combinations allowed by an infinitely expanding digital database can become socially and politically hazardous. That population rolls have been used for political purposes is not new. During the colonial period, census was used to expel migrants; in independent India, electoral rolls were routinely used for ethnic cleansing.
As smart technology enters more areas of governance, beyond tailoring services which could cut off millions, digitally interlocked population data is likely to be mobilised in the politics of belonging. The Assam NRC controversy makes this amply clear. By showing that technology is part of a larger socially and politically mediated infrastructure of proof, Taraigini Sriraman provides us a powerful argument for why a purely technical solution will never assure ease, transparency or deliverance. One can only hope the technocrats will take heed.
Bhavani Raman is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Toronto. She is the author of Document Raj: Scribes and Writing in Early Colonial South India (University of Chicago Press, 2012 and Permanent Black, 2015).
RajSSO renders a sign in with Twitter/Facebook/Google link on its website. After the scope of access became a cause for concern if users signed in from twitter, the state government was quick to fix the problem.
Jaipur: Last week, the Caravan magazine reported that the Rajasthan government was seeking access to citizens’ social media accounts and Aadhaar details through its digital platform, Rajasthan Single Sign On (RajSSO), meant to deliver numerous services of the state government.
The report stated that citizens could register on the portal using any one of the five digital identities: Aadhaar, Facebook, Google, Twitter or Bhamashah account and in return, the application would seek the citizens’ personal data. Before signing in to the application, the users are required to consent to RajSSO for accessing their account’s information.
When signing in with Google, it displays: “Google will share your name, email address, and profile picture with rajasthan.gov.in.” With Facebook, it displays: “Rajasthan Single Sign-On will receive your public profile and email address.”
When signing in with Aadhaar, users are asked to consent to share their biometric. To capture the user’s biometric, RajSSO provides for registered devices services – Cogent, Digital Persona, Mantra, Morpho and others with an option to install the biometric devices.
But if users opt to sign in using Twitter, this is the message they were met with, “This application will be able to: Read Tweets from your timeline; See who you follow, and follow new people; Update your profile; Post tweets for you [and] Will not be able to: Access your direct messages; See your Twitter password.”
Interestingly, the state government was quick to fix the scope of its access it had previously on substantial part of citizens’ Twitter accounts who opted to register themselves with Twitter. Scope is an app’s access to user data; in other words, what the applications are allowed to do on behalf of a user.
Now, the scope of the application on Twitter is cut short to – ‘read tweets from your timeline’, ‘see who you follow’ and ‘see your email address.’ As per the information displayed on the authorisation interface now, RajSSO cannot follow new people, update user’s profile, post tweets for them, access their direct messages and see their Twitter password.
However, the authorities at the Department of Information Technology and Communication in Rajasthan were clueless about the changes. Speaking to The Wire, Rajeev Gujral, RajSSO project officer, said, “As soon as the users click the link to sign in with Twitter, they are directed to Twitter’s API page which is customised for all the third parties using that functionality. They cannot make crores of pages for different clients. So is the case with RajSSO. We only use the basic information of a user like name, email, address and photo which they will have to anyway upload to their profile to use various services of the state government.”
When The Wire looked for such a customised authorisation page, it found the sample on Twitter’s guide for developers which had pre-defined scope of access as RajSSO was displaying. Even the new scope of access, now changed by the application, was found on Twitter’s support for developers.
Not only this, the ‘read and write’ permission given to this application on the user’s Twitter account also got transformed to ‘read-only’ permission.
‘Read and write’ permits “access to Twitter resources, including, the ability to read a user’s tweet, home timeline, and profile information; and to post tweets, follow users, or update elements of a user’s profile information. It also allows write access to send direct messages on behalf of a user but doesn’t provide the ability to read or delete direct messages.”
Whereas, ‘read-only’ permits “read access to Twitter resources, including a user’s tweets, home timeline, and profile information. It doesn’t allow access to read a user’s direct messages”.
When asked about the sudden overhaul in the scope of RajSSO, Gujral replied, “Is it changed? We have no idea about it. Will have to check.”
Working of the APIs
To register citizens on RajSSO, the Rajasthan government uses the Application Programming Interface (API) of Twitter, Facebook and Google.
OAuth is used to provide authorised access to these APIs. OAuth is an authentication protocol that allows users to approve an application to act on their behalf without sharing their password. When a developer implements OAuth server, “they allow applications to access and potentially modify private user content, or act on behalf of the users.”
RajSSO renders a sign in with Twitter/Facebook/Google link on its website. When the user clicks the sign in button, the app requests authorisation from the user. If the user authorises, the app uses the authentication code to get an ‘access token’ from the authorisation server which typically represents a user’s permission to share access to their account with the application.
Access tokens expire when a user explicitly revokes access to the application in their Twitter/Facebook/Google settings or when the service is suspended.
Sharing of data with third-party
Twitter approves of sharing of user’s data with third-parties as mentioned in its privacy policy: “In addition to providing your public information to the world directly on Twitter, we also use technology like APIs and embeds to make that information available to websites, apps and others for their use – for example, analysing what people say on Twitter. We generally make this content available in limited quantities for free and charge licensing for large-scale access.”
In its developer policy, Twitter mandates to get the user’s express consent before taking any action on their behalf including “posting Twitter content, following/unfollowing other users, modifying profile information, starting a Periscope broadcast or adding hashtags or other data to the user’s tweets”.
It clearly says: “We share or disclose your personal data with your consent or at your direction, such as when you authorise a third-party web client or application to access your account. By submitting, posting or displaying content on or through the services you grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute such content in any and all media and distribution methods.”
Twitter tells its developers to “never derive or infer, or store derived or inferred, information about a Twitter user’s health, negative financial status, political affiliation, racial or ethnic origin, religious or philosophical affiliation, sexual orientation, trade union membership, alleged or actual commission of crime.”
However, those who use their developer platform are permitted for aggregate analysis of Twitter content that does not store any personal data (username, user IDs).
“Not only does this show a near-complete disregard for citizen privacy, it also shows how the government increasingly thinks of its role akin to a commercial service provider and to consider the citizenry as a “user base” or a “customer base” that need to be acquired, retained and monetised, either directly or indirectly,” said Prasanna S., a Delhi-based lawyer who assisted the petitioners’ side in right to privacy/Aadhaar cases in the Supreme Court. “And that is certainly not what the Constitution meant it to be,” he added.
India has no data protection law in place, and the existing legislations do not adequately protect data. In August last year, the court in the K. Puttaswamy vs Union of India case made several observations about privacy in the “digital economy, dangers of data mining, and the need for a data protection law”. It restricted the state from unfairly interfering in the privacy of the individuals and obliges it to put in place a legislative framework to restrict others from doing so.
While the Rajasthan government is consistent with the policies of Twitter on seeking consent from users to access their accounts and data, it was, until a few days ago, violating the right to privacy – simply because to access the state’s digital governance platform, people are pre-conditioned to give their consent to share their private data and even modify their data.
According to the Supreme Court bench, the re-verification of those excluded from NRC was a “sample survey” for the satisfaction of the court.
New Delhi: The Supreme Court today ordered the re-verification of 10% of the people in Assam who were excluded from the National Register of Citizens (NRC) draft published recently.
A bench comprising of Justices Ranjan Gogoi and R.F. Nariman said the re-verification of those excluded from the NRC was a “sample survey” for the satisfaction of the court and its schedule would be decided later.
The apex court also deferred the scheduled date of August 30 for receipt of claims and objections to the draft NRC, as it pointed out certain contradictions in the Centre’s Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) for filing them.
It raised doubts over the Centre’s proposal to allow a claimant to change his legacy document for inclusion in the draft.
The second draft NRC list was published on July 30 in which out of 3.29 crore people, the names of 2.89 crore were included. The names of 40,70,707 people do not figure in this list out of which 37,59,630 names have been rejected and the remaining 2,48,077 are on hold.
On July 31, the apex court had made it clear that there will be no coercive action by authorities against the 40 lakh people whose names do not figure in the NRC while observing that it was merely a draft.
It had then asked the Centre to formulate modalities and the SOPs including timelines for deciding claims and objections arising out of the publication of the draft.
Earlier, the court had also asked the Assam NRC coordinator to place before it the data of district-wise percentage of population excluded from the draft in the state.
On August 14, the Centre had told the apex court that distinct IDs will be created by collecting biometric details of the 40 lakh people filing claims and objections with respect to the NRC.
It had said that after the publication of the final list of NRC, those people whose names figure in it will be given Aadhaar numbers as applicable to legal residents in the country.
The first draft of the NRC for Assam was published on the intervening night of December 31 and January 1 in accordance with the top court’s direction. Names of 1.9 crore people out of the 3.29 crore applicants were incorporated then.
Assam, which had faced influx of people from Bangladesh since the early 20th century, is the only state with an NRC which was first prepared in 1951.
The idea of one’s own identity is sold through perfectly curated advertisements where inclusion, identity and access are conditionally granted through the Aadhaar and not by default.
For the last four years, the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), the bureaucratic machine that governs India’s biometric authentication programme, has been extremely defensive. The authority’s CEO regularly uses one of the country’s most-respected newspapers as a platform to unilaterally dismiss the security and privacy concerns emanating from the Aadhaar project as “Luddite paranoia”. He has also dismissed concerns raised over reports of large-scale exclusion, especially in welfare schemes, as anecdotal evidence and a narrative pushed forth by corrupt people looking to “demonise Aadhaar”.
Where carefully-crafted op-eds don’t work, police cases do. The UIDAI has filed three FIRs against critics who have documented security flaws and data breaches within the larger Aadhaar ecosystem, two of them being journalists. The original tech architect behind the initiative staunchly believes that most Aadhaar critics are part of an “orchestrated campaign” to malign the biometric authentication programme.
It is unsurprising, therefore, that the advertisements the UIDAI has commissioned over the last few years come from a moralistic high-ground, where nothing is wrong in Aadhaar-land and everything works as it’s supposed to. As we show below, these advertisements masquerade under the guise of serving a public good while conveniently sidestepping legitimate concerns regarding failures of the project.
An advertisement titled ‘Aadhaar – the most trusted ID in India’ was uploaded to the UIDAI’s official YouTube channel in May 2018. The advertisement features three subjects, of which two are upper-class women of the same household, and the other a domestic help which they are looking to hire. One of the women in the ad questions the domestic help on matters such as her identity, her past employment, whether she possesses a voter ID card, PAN card or any other forms of identification, to which the help responds by saying “How would I have one of those?”.
The advertisement goes as far as to portray Aadhaar as being ‘the most trusted ID’ in the country due to the ease and perception of security presented by the prospect of being able to verify the validity of a card online, something which, according to the advert, no other ID available in India offers.
While this claim in itself is not entirely true – as PAN card and voter ID details too can be verified online – this message of a trusted, spotless ecosystem is portrayed despite the widely known instances of false entries in the database, as well as reports of rampant misuse due to cracked enrollment software and abuse by fraudulent operators.
In September of 2014, The Hindu published an article about an Aadhaar card being issued in the name of the Hindu god Hanuman. The card and its relating information had undergone the enrollment process, and had even been dispatched to the listed address. However, before the card was delivered to the address provided during enrolment, the postal worker responsible for its delivery caught on and alerted senior officials, who had the card sent back to Bangalore on the basis of that there was no recipient available to whom the card could be delivered.
While the fact that someone attempted to enroll the Hindu god may seem innocuous at first, several other individuals who might not be as innocuous were issued real and valid Aadhaar cards – including an Uzbek national by the name of Zeboo Asalina, who was involved in the illegal sex trade in Bhubaneshwar. She was found possessing an Aadhaar card bearing her picture, a New Delhi address and the name ‘Duniya Khan’. To this date, the Aadhaar number for Asalina’s card is still valid, according to the UIDAI website and is registered under the same phone number which was seized by the police. These are not one-off instances either, as a man who was suspected to be a Pakistani high commission official planted in India to spy and commit acts of espionage was found possessing a valid Aadhaar card bearing his picture under the name ‘Mehboob Rajput’. The individual’s identity was later confirmed as Mehmood Akhtar, a Pakistani national and an officer of the ISI.
In all three of the above mentioned instances, the recovered Aadhaar cards were not cases of forged identity documents, but rather cases of real entries in the database itself, with the cards being issued by the UIDAI.
Ration deception
In another instance, an advertisement for Aadhaar which was uploaded on the UIDAI’s official YouTube channel in June 2018 depicts an elderly woman attempting to avail her rations, but her biometric identifiers are not recognised by the machine. This is followed by the ration shop owner telling her that there is nothing that could be done in the case, essentially denying the woman her rations. An onlooker chimes in to let the elderly woman know that rations cannot be denied for want of Aadhaar or inability to properly authenticate it using one’s biometrics.
This advertisement completely ignores the reality that Aadhaar has, in fact, cost many their rations due to mandatory linking as well as a spate of glitches, errors and faults in the system. It even ignores the grain-pilfering scam which took place in Gujarat and was in-part enabled by Aadhaar and the availability of fingerprints of beneficiaries. Additionally, it also ignores the tragic starvation deaths of at-least five people in Jharkhand, which were caused due to the mandatory integration of the Public Distribution System (PDS) with Aadhaar.
These ads intentionally omit any aspect which could be deemed negative or unsavoury, and in doing so utilise a deceptive tactic seen usually in cases of false or misleading advertisements. Additionally, since these advertisements are not restrained by regulations applicable to advertisements for products such as life insurance or mutual funds, we do not hear a ‘speed-talker’ listing disclaimers which any reasonable consumer, or in this case, user, would consider relevant.
Aadhaar is shown as a unidimensionally beneficial identity document. A necessity to living life in India, a hurdle that need only be crossed once to avail benefits for a lifetime. However, this prospect is presented to the public only through tantalisingly veiled indications. Never asserted, merely suggested.
Take, for instance, an advertisement from June 2017, which portrays a series of incidents which are seemingly commonplace. A line at the bank shows a clerk confidently proclaiming that a bank account has been opened for the client she is addressing, and this step is depicted to the viewer as being completed only once a scan of the biometrics is taken.
Similarly, another instance in the same advertisement depicts the principal of a school congratulating the mother of a young girl on her child receiving a scholarship. What is this doing in an Aadhaar advertisement, you might ask?
The question that begs to be asked in both these instances involves considering a paradigm where having an Aadhaar does not automatically permeate and saturate the fictional ad universe as a pre-made success story. What happens when the young girl is unable to receive her scholarship due to the lack of an Aadhaar? What consequences would this hold for economically underprivileged individuals who are dependant on that very scholarship for their education?
In the cushy universe of the ever-happy bank clerks and ration shop owners, questions such as these remain unanswered. In addition to this, an article written by Sukriti Dwivedi of NDTV points to the difficulties which were encountered by over 25,000 people in the National Capital Region when attempting to obtain their guaranteed rations – caused simply due to the mandate of requiring an Aadhaar card – whether due to mismatch of fingerprints, internet connectivity issues in Aadhaar biometric machines or dubious ration shop owners pilfering subsidised grains. In Uttarakhand, more than 53,000 people were denied their pension for lack of Aadhaar.
If the advertisements espoused by the UIDAI were to be believed, the prospect of biometric failures and internet connectivity issues do not even figure in to the day-to-day business of the coercive practice of making Aadhaar an unsubstitutable instrument of citizen life in India.
Another important aspect to note is the use of children as mouthpieces, or promoters of Aadhaar. In an advertisement released in October of 2016, we see a school child, no older than six years, run up to his mother and ask about his Aadhaar card. He states that his teacher had said it was important for him to have an Aadhaar, as well as his younger sister, who is an infant. The visibly alarmed mother listens on and the next scene cuts to an Aadhaar registration centre, ending with the mother confidently asserting, “Mera Aadhaar, Meri Pehchaan”, the Aadhaar slogan. The figure of the child is utilised here dubiously – as a force for conveying the critical importance of having an Aadhaar card, valid because of their vulnerability.
In the advertisement from July 2017, the concern of the two visibly upper class women is shown to stem fundamentally not from their class-ridden tendency of assuming an inherent lack of security and safety that the idea of a lower class domestic help represents to them, but instead a displacement to the very idea of vitality, security and the critical nature of taking care of an innocent and helpless child.
The act of verifying identity melds with the critical importance of the life of the child being in safe hands, ridding the subject matter of the advertisement into a broader version of a seamless, transparent, digitally connected India, where problematic classist tendencies are first justified, subsequently left unaddressed and ultimately forgotten as identity is now available at one’s fingertips.
Speaking of children, until a few months ago, schools in the National Capital Region were demanding Aadhaar numbers of children seeking new admissions – that was until the Delhi High Court revoked the ‘No Aadhaar, No Admission’ rule in late July. This was a matter of relief for parents who did not possess the identity document for their kin. In several other states, however, both private as well as state-run schools are still demanding students’ Aadhaar numbers as one of the grounds for admission.
If one is in a situation where they have either lost or misplaced their mobile phone while their Aadhaar biometrics were set to ‘locked’, they essentially face a deadlock scenario where they lose the ability to reclaim their phone number (as telecom operators demand to authenticate customers through their Aadhaar and biometric identifiers, which, since they are locked, would not allow successful authentication), thus also meaning that they lose out on the ability to re-enable biometric authentication for their Aadhaar, as that requires receiving a one-time-pin to the linked phone number. A situation such as this could be described as the ‘civil death’ of an individual, wherein services that mandate Aadhaar authentication are rendered inacessible.
American whistleblower and former CIA employee Edward Snowden used the term when discussing Aadhaar remotely during a recent event held in Jaipur. Senior advocate Shyam Divan had also argued that project could cause the civil death of an individual during the Supreme Court case regarding the project as all power rested with the state, describing it as “tethering every resident of India to an electronic leash”.
Teleological certainty
The idea of Aadhaar being convenient stems fundamentally from the systematic exclusion of all other forms of identity and access. However, by making Aadhaar mandatory – and with it rendering the use of all other forms of identity a doubly time-consuming, torturous affair – the metaphorical equivalent to this could only be forcefully destroying all routes surrounding a destination, barring one, and subsequently declaring that it is the best of all possible routes.
Perhaps the most sinister of all propositions is that the advertisements espoused by the UIDAI all contain within themselves a curious trait. A cursory glance reveals a noticeable similarity between these advertisements and those made for popular consumer products such as Colgate. Much like an ad for Colgate, these advertisements situate themselves within the space of the homely and domestic; featuring subjects which arguably fall into a pan-India demographic. This includes rural India, invoked in the advertisement of the six year old child and his mother, urban class dynamics conveyed in the advertisement about the two upper-class women and their domestic help and the advertisement featuring the bank clerk and the school girl with the scholarship.
The question arises, do these advertisements fulfill the purpose of serving a public good, or are they merely attempts at public-service-propaganda being paid for by taxpayer money? (Rs 30 crore was spent for an ‘image makeover’ of Aadhaar in the fiscal year 2014)
The marginal figure of the old lady at the ration shop, the concern of children, infants and Aadhaar, all conveniently and enticingly teeter on the edge of definite and conclusive allocation to a single, overriding demographic placeholder. In invoking Aadhaar as an almost apolitical entity spanning so many different demographics and ‘situations’ seemingly faced by almost everyone, the advertisements ultimately convey to the public an image of a wide and voluntary acceptance of a ‘product’ that could (and has), in cases, led to non-payment of MGNREGS wages in Telangana, non-receipt of government subsidies in Gujarat as well as starvation deaths in Jharkhand and curtailment of the constitutionally guaranteed Right to Education in areas such as the National Capital.
Biometric verification of Aadhaar has experienced various troubles. Credit: Reuters
While Aadhaar has always been insisted upon as a proof of identity and not of citizenship, in conveying the image of a pan-Indian accessibility and progress that magically open up upon the procurement of an Aadhaar, the document itself becomes a necessary institution to the acts that constitute citizen life.
The idea of one’s own identity is sold to them through perfectly curated advertisements where inclusion, identity and access become tangible realities that are conditionally granted to one through the Aadhaar and not by default. Aadhaar and its various tools of propaganda attempt to create a cultural foreground that does not forge the entity of a individual as somehow separate from his or her 12 digit unique identification number.
The portrayal of seamlessness regarding the steps surrounding Aadhaar seek to diminish its mandatory status in everyday life – just as much as it dissolves the demographic specificities of its perilous lapses in a solution that is as opaque as much as it is anthemic.
Aadhaar, through these advertisements, becomes a force of cultural and social acceptance and not as much a socio-economic fundamental that could, for all practical purposes, and never in an advertisement, render one stateless.
Anandita Thakur is a student of literature and culture studies. Her research interests include East Asian cinema, culture theory and the identity politics introduced by new technologies.
Karan Saini is a security analyst and consultant from New Delhi. He writes on issues relating to web security, privacy and open source intelligence.
During the hearings, one judge had observed that the ‘right to privacy’ is not absolute and it can’t stop the legislature from imposing reasonable restrictions.
During the hearings, one judge had observed that the ‘right to privacy’ is not absolute and it can’t stop the legislature from imposing reasonable restrictions.
The Supreme Court of India. Credit: Reuters
New Delhi: On the second day of arguments on the ‘right to privacy’, petitioners reiterated in the Supreme Court that “the right to privacy is part of the basic structure of the Constitution and it cannot be tinkered with by the state under the pretext of collecting data and monitoring it”.
A nine-judge bench, comprising Chief Justice J.S. Khehar and Justices J. Chelameswar, S.A. Bobde, R.K. Agrawal, Rohinton Nariman, A.M. Sapre, D.Y. Chandrachud, Sanjay Kishan Kaul and S. Abdul Nazeer, is hearing arguments on a batch of petitions questioning the violation of privacy in the guise of collecting information under Aadhaar.
On July 18, a five-judge Constitution bench had referred the issue to a nine-judge bench to revisit the 1962 judgment by a six-judge bench, which had held that the right to privacy is not a fundamental right. This bench had relied on the verdict given by an eight-judge bench which ruled the same in 1954.
On Wednesday, the court had observed that the ‘right to privacy’ is not absolute and it can’t stop the legislature from imposing reasonable restrictions.
Even as senior counsel Arvind P. Datar was making his submission, Justice Chandrachud said, “The right to privacy can’t be defined by the court as its contours are amorphous. He asked the counsel, “Can this court define privacy? You can’t make a catalogue of what constitutes privacy. Privacy is so amorphous and includes everything from liberty, dignity, religion to free movement.”
Justice Chandrachud told the counsel, “If we make any attempt to catalogue privacy, it will have disastrous consequences. Privacy is a sub-sect of liberty and not necessarily co-exists with data protection. Every fundamental right can be subject to reasonable restrictions under Article 19 (2) of the Constitution and the state is entitled to regulate the right”.
Citing examples, Justice Chandrachud said, “The right to make a decision will not come under privacy. If I decide to co-habit with my wife, the police can’t barge into my bedroom. That’s my privacy. Whether I send my children to school or not, is not a matter of privacy”.
Senior counsel Gopal Subramanium argued, “Privacy is a broader concept and data sharing is only one aspect of privacy. Privacy is about the freedom of thought, conscience and individual autonomy and none of the fundamental rights can be exercised without assuming a certain sense of privacy”. He argued that the state is under an affirmative obligation to protect the fundamental rights. He said, “Liberty existed prior to constitutional era and the law had merely recognised its existence. Liberty is fundamental to democracy and citizens cannot exist without privacy”.
Former Attorney General Soli Sorabjee also said, “Privacy is not explicitly laid out in the Constitution. But that does not mean the right to privacy does not exist”. He argued that “the freedom of the press has been derived from Article 19 and similarly, the right to privacy can be derived broadly from Article 21”.
Shyam Divan argued that “the right to privacy itself couldn’t be defined with any specificity. However, it extends to several aspects including bodily integrity, personal autonomy, right to be left alone, informational self determination, protection from state surveillance, dignity, confidentiality and freedom of movement”.
Divan brought to the notice of the court the speech made by finance minister Arun Jaitely in the parliament during the discussion of the Aadhar Bill in March 2016. Mr. Jaitley had said, “It is now accepted that privacy is a part of individual liberty. So when Article 21 of the Constitution (right to life and liberty) says that no person shall be deprived of his right of life and liberty without procedure established by law, then let us assume that privacy is a part of liberty.” He said even the Centre had recognised that right to privacy is a fundamental right which cannot be taken away by sharing information under Aadhar.
The court observed today, “When 99% of the citizens are ‘unconcerned’ about sharing personal data with private players like Apple, how is it qualitatively different if the state has the same information?”
Posing this question, Justice Chandrachud told the counsel, “Most citizens are unconcerned about where or how their personal data is used. You say there are 35 crore internet users and 18 crore telephone users, but 99% of people are not concerned. When you operate your iPad with your thumbprint, your data is public and there it is.”
He also observed, “The moment you want to travel from Mumbai to Delhi, you will get 100 suggestions. Your private and personal data is in private hands, so is there anything qualitatively different when the state has it? You have surrendered your personal life to private parties, but here we are saying that state should be restricted from having it.”
Justice Chandrachud told senior counsel Sajan Poovayya that right to privacy is not dependent upon the majority willing to surrender or forego this right. He said that numbers alone are not a good test to examine the worth of a right such as privacy where constitutional issues were involved. The counsel said, ” It is the state’s obligation under the Constitution to protect one’s dignity and privacy. The right to privacy does not stand on the pedestal of secrecy; it holds forth from the pedestal of dignity”.
Poovayya submitted, “Apple even has watches monitoring my heartbeat. My informed surrender of data to a private player in this digital age is not my surrender of my personal data to all. If this private player takes my data and gives it to all on the internet, then I can sue him for breach of contract. But if I give it to the state, where are the corresponding restrictions and deterrents? No reasonable expectation of privacy is ill-suited in a digital age.”
Senior advocate Anand Grover argued that the right to privacy must be given a flexible meaning. He referred to the Protection of Human Rights Act, 1993, specifically Section 2(f) to suggest that international human rights law had been read into the Indian law. Locating dignity within Article 21, he said privacy must be cultivated from dignity.
He highlighted the hyphenation of “privacy-dignity claims”, quoting from the 1975 order in Govind vs State of MP: “There can be no doubt that privacy-dignity claims deserve to be examined with care.” He said the state was duty-bound to protect, by enacting a law as needed.
To a question on whether the violation of right to privacy occurs during the collection of data or its misuse, he reiterated that the limited purpose of collecting that data must be recognized by law, adding that, without informed consent, even collection would be a violation.
Senior advocate Meenakshi Arora concluded that even the majority judgment in Kharak Singh had been interpreted by later decisions of the Supreme Court as having incorporated a right to privacy, such as in R. Rajagopal v. State of Tamil Nadu as well as PUCL v. Union of India. Arora added that the right to privacy can be drawn from Articles 17, 24, and 25 of the Constitution, not just Articles 14, 19, and 21.
Arora took the court through an evolution of the right to privacy and compared a world without privacy to an existence under one unending general warrant. She examined the German Constitution, which evolved through the country’s experiences to further secure the privacy rights of German citizens. She concluded her arguments for the privacy of personal information and personal choice. Petitioners have concluded arguments and Attorney General will begin his arguments on July 25.
