The government’s move to amend the Aadhaar legislation to link the electoral rolls with the unique identification number is bad in concept and fraught with serious problems in practice. The plan is to empower the Election Commission of India (ECI) to do the linking so that there is maximum enfranchisement of people and voter verification is easier and more efficient. But the idea contravenes the Supreme Court judgement on Aadhaar which specified that it should be used only for some purposes like the delivery of government services to citizens. The government has however sought to add more uses to Aadhaar since then. Making the linkage of electoral rolls with Aadhaar mandatory is clearly a violation of the judgment and the move is unlikely to pass legal muster. There are other issues also which make the proposal wrong and unacceptable.
One purported aim of the linkage is the facilitation of voting by migrant workers and other citizens who are on the move or are stationed away from their electoral addresses. There are millions of such citizens and it is necessary to enfranchise them and enable them to vote. Democracy will become more complete and meaningful if they are given remote voting rights and can vote from where they are. But mandatory Aadhaar linkage with electoral rolls is not the right means for it, and it is wrong to make it compulsory for all citizens. This is similar to the idea of making a national register of all citizens just to identify illegal immigrants. The question is why a person who is already a citizen and has proof of it is told to link that proof with a less reliable and less important marker of identity. Authentication by Aadhaar on a large scale is not a good idea as it is prone to mistakes. Instead of cleaning up the electoral database and helping in the de-duplication of electoral rolls, it can lead to the disenfranchisement of large numbers of people. The Election Commission has been using other methods to rectify mistakes in electoral rolls and to update them. These are safer and more reliable.
The Supreme Court has ruled that privacy is a fundamental right, and this ruling covers all the individual-specific data encapsulated in the Aadhaar number. The Aadhaar ID containing such private and sensitive data should not be used for all purposes that the government sets for itself, especially when there is no data privacy law. The government does not seem to have any plan to enact such a law. So a mandatory linking of Aadhaar with the electoral rolls will have unwelcome and even dangerous consequences, including the exclusion of citizens and violation of their rights.
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