Aadhaar electronic mesh, will turn India into surveillance state, SC told

Bench excludes the 4 senior judges who challenged CJI Deepak Misra's decisions last week

Terming Aadhaar as "an electronic mesh", a senior lawyer on Wednesday told the SC that the government could completely destroy an individual by "switching off" the 12-digit unique identifier number.

 
However, the bench, also comprising Justices A K Sikri, A M Khanwilkar, D Y Chandrachud and Ashok Bhushan, countered senior advocate Shyam Divan, asking whether the state "cannot say that it has every right to find out the number of schools, children or the real beneficiaries of a welfare scheme and verify the real beneficiaries of huge funds which it is spending, it needs Aadhaar number. This is a valid argument." It posed whether the government does not have the right to say that it was spending crores of rupees on welfare schemes and needed to verify whether benefits reached the needy and the leakages or pilferages of resources stopped.
 
The four seniormost  (after the CJI) judges who held a press conference last Friday alleging they were ignored by the chief did not find any place in Court Number 1 hearing the Aadhaar case. In fact, judge J Chelameswar, who led the protest from the front on Friday, did not attend the SC at all.  He had earlier passed orders in the Aadhaar case.
 
The judges hold a common lunch on Wednesdays and the CJI's bench rose early for the function. What happened during the lunch is not known, as a strict curtain has fallen on the meetings of judges. Attorney General K K Venugopal said it would take a few days to defuse the tension among the judges. Efforts to end the crisis are reportedly on.