On Thursday, May 10, a five-judge Constitution Bench of the Supreme Court of India finished hearing arguments from the batch of 29 petitions (led by K.S. Puttaswamy v. Union of India) that had challenged the constitutional validity of the Aadhaar scheme on various grounds.

On the last day (day 38) of the final Aadhaar hearing, Senior Advocate, Gopal Subramanium resumed his submissions for the State. He started by asking the bench, “Is Aadhaar really affirmative action? Is the Act an enabler or is it in the guise of enabler? The Act is not an instrumentality to deliver services. It is only a means of identification.” He contended that the bench has to read the true purpose of the law and whether the impugned law seeks to achieve that purpose Mr. Subramanium was of the view that dignity and autonomy is not preserved by Section 7 of the Act.

On day 37 of the final Aadhaar hearing, Senior Advocate Shyam Divan resumed his submissions for the petitioners by stating that banks and telecom operators were linking individuals’ Aadhaar with their bank accounts and mobile numbers without their permission. This is called inorganic seeding. He asserted that UIDAI collected biometrics of a hundred crore people which is the entire population of Europe and North America without any statutory backing.

On day 36 of the final Aadhaar hearing, Attorney General K.K Venugopal resumed his submissions and stated that Article 110(1)(g) is a standalone provision and there can be a money bill that does not relate to Article 110(1)(a)-(f) of the Constitution but is still covered independently under Article 110(1)(g). Therefore, the Aadhaar bill did not have to be passed by the Rajya Sabha. Chief Justice of India, Dipak Misra interjected and said that Section 57 is an enabling provision that allows state legislatures to introduce Aadhaar for various services.

On day 35 of the final Aadhaar hearing, Advocate Zoheb Hossain, appearing for the State of Maharashtra and UIDAI continued his submissions. He began by handing over a bunch of international charters and covenants to the bench on harmonization of socio-economic and civil-political rights. J. Chandrachud remarked that directive principles of state policy are essential for good governance and are a guarantee of reasonableness of a law and even though they are non-justiciable, they are read into Article 21. Mr.

On day 33 of the final Aadhaar hearing, Senior Advocate, Rakesh Dwivedi appearing for the State/UIDAI resumed his submission on Aadhaar by stating that the standard of control exercised by UIDAI on requesting entities is “fair and reasonable” as laid down under Article 21. He further pointed out that the data collected by REs is segregated and there is no way to aggregate it as there are over three hundred REs. J. Chandrachud asked about misuse of data by individual REs, to which Mr.

On day 34 of the final Aadhaar hearing, Advocate Gopal Sankarnarayanan appearing for Centre for Civil Society submitted that the right to identity is an absolute fundamental right and it stems from recognition of an individual. He stated that Aadhaar provides one kind of proof of identification but an individual has more than one kind of identity, for e.g, father, brother, son, among others.

On day 32 of the final Aadhaar hearing, Senior Advocate, Rakesh Dwivedi, appearing for the State and UIDAI resumed his submission on Aadhaar.

On day 31 of the final Aadhaar hearing, Senior Advocate, Rakesh Dwivedi resumed his submission on Aadhaar by quoting Nobel laureate Amartya Sen, “Development requires the removal of major sources of un-freedom: poverty as well as tyranny, poor economic opportunities as well as systematic social deprivation, neglect of public facilities as well as intolerance or over activity of repressive states.