On Monday (31 October), the Supreme Court issued a notice to the central government on a plea challenging the power of the Election Commission of India (ECI) to link the Aadhaar database with voter ID cards.
A bench of Justices Sanjay Kishan Kaul and Abhay Shreeniwas Oka also directed to tag the petition with two other similar pleas.
According to LiveLaw, the petition, filed by Major General (retired) SG Vombatkere, challenges the constitutional vires of the Election Laws (Amendment) Act, 2021, amended Section 23 and Section 28 of the Representation of People’s Act, 1950, the Registration of Electors (Amendment) Rules, 2022 and two notifications regarding Aadhaar-Voter Card linkage.
Why was the petition filed in the top court? What does the former Army General’s petition against linking Aadhaar numbers with voter IDs argue? Why is there opposition and what are the concerns about mapping the Aadhaar database with voter cards?
We explain.
What prompted the petition?
The petition comes in the wake of the Centre passing the Election Laws (Amendment) Bill, 2021, in December last year amid a huge uproar from the Opposition.
The Bill made certain amendments to the Representation of the People Act, 1950 and the Representation Act, 1951 to introduce some electoral reforms.
The amended bill allows electoral registration officers at the constituency level to ask for Aadhaar numbers of people seeking registration as voters to confirm their identity, and also of the existing voters in the electoral roll to weed out duplicate entries, as per The News Minute.
Law minister said linking Aadhar with Voter IDs is ‘voluntary’. News18 Hindi (Representational Image)
Section 23(4), which was added to the Representation of the People Act, 1950, mentions electoral registration officer “may” require a person to furnish their Aadhaar number for the purposes of “establishing the identity of a person” or for the “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”, reports Indian Express.
The updated Bill states that no one will be denied inclusion in the electoral roll and no entries will be deleted from the roll if an individual fails to furnish their Aadhaar number. However, the provision adds “due to such sufficient cause as may be prescribed”.
According to Scroll, the Union government in June specified the “sufficient cause” under which a person can avoid providing their Aadhaar to the electoral office and it is if they did not have the card. In these cases, 11 other identity proofs, including driving licence and passport, can be submitted to avail voter IDs.
Earlier, Union law minister Kiren Rijiju had clarified linking Aadhaar with the voter ID card “is voluntary”.
“It is not compulsory or mandatory”, he added.
What is the petition about?
Senior advocate Shyam Divan, appearing for the petitioner, argued that the right to vote, “one of the most sacred rights”, cannot be denied if a person does not possess an Aadhaar card.
Citing the Supreme Court judgment which upheld the Aadhaar Act 2016, he said that Aadhaar can only be used for providing benefits and not made mandatory while exercising rights.
“Your argument seems to be that one lacking Aadhaar, voting should not be denied or even on having it, shouldn’t be compulsory”, Justice Kaul said while hearing the case.
“Your contention is you have Aadhaar and passport, but you are not being allowed to rely solely on passport”, Justice Oka was quoted as saying by LiveLaw.
The senior advocate further stated that according to Form 6 and Form 6B, an individual has the option to use another identity proof for their voter ID cards only if they don’t have an Aadhaar card. “An option of being unwilling to furnish an Aadhar number if alternatives are available is not permitted,” Indian Express cited Divan as saying.
The petition alleges that through the Act and rules notified by the Centre, the ECI “seeks to mandate people to link their Aadhaar numbers to the electoral rolls”, reports LiveLaw.
The plea in SC has challenged the power of the Election Commission to link the Aadhaar database with voter ID cards. Moneycontrol (Representational Image)
“This proposed linkage would have a detrimental impact on people’s ability to exercise their constitutional and legal right to vote, as it is reasonably certain to cause mass disenfranchisement, through mass exclusions from voter rolls as people are removed from the voter list without due process,” claims the petition.
The petitioner has approached the apex court seeking to declare Registration of Electors (Amendment) Rules, 2022 “void and unconstitutional as it is against Articles 14, 19 and 21”, reports LiveLaw.
Opposition and concerns
Earlier, Congress MP Manish Tewari had said, “The linking of voter IDs and Aadhaar violates the fundamental right to privacy as defined by the Supreme Court in the judgement.”
Objecting to the 2021 bill, Congress’ Shashi Tharoor had said that Aaadhaar was only meant to be a “proof of residence and not of citizenship”.
All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (AIMIM) MP Asaduddin Owaisi, had opposed the bill saying it would allow the government to “disenfranchise some people and profile the citizens”. “This Bill is outside the legislative competence of this House… The linking of voter ID with Aadhaar violates the fundamental right to privacy defined in Puttaswamy (case),” Owaisi had said.
The Communist Party of India (Marxist) had also raised objections over the Aadhaar linkage claiming it would “violate the secrecy of the vote and undermine the fundamental right to privacy of the voter”, reports Indian Express.
Raising doubts about the government’s claims that the linkage will resolve the issue of multiple enrollments of the same person at different regions, Maansi Verma, lawyer and trustee at Article 21 told Scroll, “we do not know how many duplicates exist in the electoral rolls”.
She added that it remains unknown how linking Aadhaar with voter IDs or EPIC (Electoral Photo ID Card) will tackle this problem. “Even Aadhaar has duplicates,” she contended.
Experts have also expressed concerns about voters getting disenfranchised due to the Aadhar linking.
As many as 55 lakh voters’ names were deleted from the electoral list following the linking of voter IDs to the Aadhaar database in Telangana and Andhra Pradesh, notes Scroll.
Former IAS officer PV Ramesh, who was in charge of Aadhaar enrolments for Direct Benefit Transfers in united Andhra Pradesh, told The News Minute, that this step could be used to disenfranchise the marginalised groups.
“Voter enrollment in any democracy is considered sacrosanct and is supposed to be politically neutral. But that doesn’t happen in Indian reality. Unless there is a very conscientious effort, if technology is applied without a humane understanding towards the complexities of our society, and the heterogeneities of language, region, religion, case, gender. If the process is not sensitive to this, the natural process is to exclude the weakest. This (Aadhaar-voter ID linkage) can be used as a weapon to exclude all minorities, all Adivasis, or at least majority of them,” Ramesh was quoted as saying by The News Minute.
With inputs from agencies
Read all the Latest News, Trending News, Cricket News, Bollywood News,India News and Entertainment News here. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.