The Centre on Wednesday told the Supreme Court that the right to privacy cannot be a fundamental right in a developing country like India as it will deprive 270 million citizens living below the poverty line of access to their basic needs of food, shelter and employment, forming part of right to life.
Talking in the context of Aadhaar which kicked off the debate on privacy, Attorney General KK Venugopal representing the Centre told a nine-judge Bench that even if privacy is assumed to be a fundamental right under right to liberty of citizens, it must yield to the right to life of 270 million citizens who will receive the benefit of social welfare schemes with Aadhaar.
He said, “A large section of the people would be deprived of their basic needs and rights if the claim of the petitioners to a fundamental right to privacy is accepted…Even otherwise, there can be no claim to a privacy right against identification for the purposes of public welfare and social schemes of the Government, and to plug leakages and corruption in the administration of such schemes.”
Venugopal took the debate a step further with his argument terming those opposing Aadhaar on the ground of violation of their privacy to be an “elitist” approach. “In a developing country where millions of people are devoid of the basic necessities of life and do not even have shelter, food, clothing, or jobs, and are forced to sleep on pavements even in the height of winter, and perhaps, to die, no claim to a right to privacy of the nature claimed in this case, as a fundamental right would lie.
Any such claim…would be based on an approach which is esoteric and elitist, in the light of allegation that Aadhaar would convert India into a totalitarian state.”
The Bench of Chief Justice JS Khehar, Justices J Chelameswar, SA Bobde, RK Agarwal, RF Nariman, AM Sapre, DY Chandrachud, SK Kaul, and S Abdul Nazeer told the A-G that the issue of Aadhaar was not before it as this issue would arise later. When the Bench specifically wished to know the stand of the Centre on privacy, Venugopal said that privacy cannot be treated as one single right.
He said that privacy is a homogenous group consisting of several rights and each constituent right cannot be elevated as a fundamental right. The Constituent Assembly too deliberately avoided inclusion of right to privacy in the Constitution, the A-G submitted as doing so would have serious implications in crime control, preparation of the National Census, etc where personal details are collected on a routine basis.
The Bench wondered that the State was free to do anything in the absence of a constitutional safeguard. But the Centre submitted that privacy has many “species” of rights and combining all under one single right was not possible as each required to be dealt with on a case to case basis. The arguments will continue on Thursday.