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