For All Its Worth, Aadhaar Is Just A Hyped-up ID Document
The much-vaunted aadhaar is under cloud in the runup to the Bihar Assembly elections with no less an authority than the Election Commission (EC) ticking it off as being unacceptable in proving the citizenship of its holder. The Supreme Court of India (SC), on July 10, in its interim order, however, joined issues with the EC by observing that while voting rights in India are indeed the exclusive preserve of citizens of India, the EC cannot arrogate to itself the power of determining who is a citizen and who isn’t by bypassing aadhaar, ration card, etc.
It went on to observe that the power to determine who a citizen is vests with the home ministry. That, with due respect to the Apex court, is quibbling. For, the EC, at par with the CAG, is a constitutional authority answerable to no ministry or minister. If its writ has to run in conducting a free and fair election, it must have the power to ensure that only Indian citizens vote, period.
The home ministry, on its part, has been itching to go ahead and start the process of National Registry of Citizens (NRC) but has been stymied by the shrill reaction from the opposition that NRC would be a thinly disguised attempt to oust Muslims from Indian citizenry and usher in Hindu Rashtra by the ruling right wing BJP. Only Assam has bestirred itself to have an Assam-specific citizens register. Using its plenary powers, the Apex court should have directed the home ministry to roll out the NRC within a specified time, while allowing Aadhaar, voting card and ration card as proof of citizenship for the time being.
The truth is, all said and done, India doesn’t have the data to compile a foolproof voter list. Till the POTUS Trump rocked the citizenship boat by excluding children born in the US from that status unless they are born to the citizens of the US, the country set the ball rolling immediately on birth of a child in the country by dispatching his/her US passport within a week of birth by coordinating with the hospital where the child was born. In other words, passport has been the mainstay of the US. Alas, we too had adopted this system but then, given the larger size of our population and children often midwifed by neighborhood quacks, that wouldn’t have been feasible.
Our own feeble attempt was through aadhaar. Launched in 2009 with a lot of fanfare, its centre piece is identifying each resident by a unique 12-digit number further buttressed by his/her fingerprint and iris. As of February 2023, as many as 136 crore aadhaar cards had been issued by the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI). Allowing for deaths, it is guesstimated roughly 130 crores out of 140 crore people are aadhaar holders. An impressive accomplishment indeed but critics wonder to what avail? The card itself disabuses the possible notion that aadhaar is a citizenship document.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi preens with pride at most of the election rallies that the first thing he did on assumption of office in 2014 was to eliminate some 4-crore fictitious ration card owners through the scanner of aadhaar that, thanks to its biometric features, isolates the charlatans or persons with multiple identities. While this is true, what is equally true is aadhaar can be obtained without much ado. Look at the acceptable documents.
By way of identity of the aadhaar applicant, the documents that make the grade are passport, PAN card, ration card, voter ID, driving license, photo ID issued by the government or PSU, school ID card, in addition to bank ATM card with photo, freedom fighter photo card, pensioner photo card, kissan photo passbook, CGHS/ECHS card with photo, arms license, etc. And by way of proof of address, the documents that make the grade are passport, voter ID, driving license, ration card, bank passbook, utility bills (electricity, water, gas), post office account statement/passbook, registered lease/sale agreement, address card issued by the department of posts, etc.
And for rural folks there is a leeway—a certificate of identity issued by the village head or panchayat head is accepted as proof of address. With such a licentious regime for obtaining aadhaar, intruders from Bangladesh and Myanmar are having a whale of a time, cocking a snook at the government.
The travesty is, while shutting out impostors from public distribution system, intruders are availing of welfare schemes and direct transfer benefits (DTB) by flaunting their aadhaar cards. In other words, through the aadhaar instrument, we are losing on swings what we have won on the merry go rounds. In fact, the exhortation by the EC to link their voting cards with aadhaar runs counter to the UIDAI disclaimer that aadhaar must not be construed as conferring citizenship. Some states have also linked their ration cards with aadhaar, thus providing succour to intruders, among others, who ought not be cossetted by state indulgence.
Yes, the ultimate solution to the problem of ineligible voters exercising franchise in India is a robust NRC. To be sure, every democracy doesn’t have one. But India is the world’s largest democracy with porous borders. Ergo, it must have an NRC lest the universal adult suffrage is undermined and made a travesty of. The compilation of NRC can be dovetailed with census.
Ancestry and other cognate factors would play a vital role in a country where birth certificates often elude even the literates as candidly admitted by a SC judge hearing the Bihar election matter. A robust system of grievance redressal must be put in place for those excluded.
Coming back to the issue of aadhaar, rather its achievements and failings, it must be acknowledged that it has been a mixed bag. Just as it has ejected ghosts from the PDS regime, it has also removed many benamis from the income tax ecosystem. Before PAN-Aadhaar dovetailing, there were thousands of fictitious PAN cards so as to benefit from the lower slab rates of taxes.
But the PAN-aadhaar mandatory linkage has smoked out the ghosts or benamis to a large extent. Its failings, by and large, have been two—it is available for the asking, especially in rural areas, and the influx of intruders prevents it from being used as the base for NRC. It has lent itself admirably for banks, railways and airlines to verify the identity of the customers but to say that it has been a panacea for all the identification ills is a stretch.
S Murlidharan is a freelance columnist and writes on economics, business, legal and taxation issues.
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