- The Union Government is apparently getting into a practice of forcefully thrusting laws without the required debate, acceptance, eliciting, and incorporating opposition viewpoints during the Parliamentary sessions on matters of national importance. The nation is witness to how the contentious three Farm Laws were first promulgated as ordinances and passed into Laws by disallowing thorough debate in both houses of Parliament. We all know how the farmers union went about agitating for over a year forcing the Union Government to repeal the much-required farm reforms bowing to the relentless pressure exerted by the persevering farmers.
PC: Sruthisagar Yamunan
- Now comes the news that amendments to the Representation of the People (RP) Act requiring voters to furnish their Aadhaar numbers to electoral registration officers were introduced, considered, and passed in both houses of Parliament, all in a few hours, without resorting to any meaningful debate. The ostensible reason given by the Union Law Minister was the need to clean up the electoral rolls, specifically, RP Act provisions barring people from being registered as voters from more than one constituency and thereby preventing bogus voting. He also claimed the amendments met the Puttaswamy judgment’s triple test of legality, need, and proportionality.
- However, the achievement of the legality requirement to meet privacy safeguards would have been bolstered manifold by a thorough discussion in Parliament, allowing further finetuning of the Act’s provisions. Trust me, the Union Government has not learned a valuable lesson after the Farm Law debacle, unnecessarily exposing itself to stiff legal challenges anticipated to ensue. Note that the Bill only sanctions Aadhaar numbers and not biometric verification essentially boiling down to a test of identity between details in the voter ID and Aadhaar card. This will invariably lead to even small variances in name, address, age, etc., seeing lower-level bureaucrats enjoying outsized discretion to accept or reject electoral roll entries.
PC: RAM SEWAK SHARMA
- Looking at some of the salient features of the Act would throw ambiguities as well. RP Act’s new Section 23(6) allows those unable to furnish Aadhaar numbers for prescribed reasons to produce alternate documents. The question here is how the poor, without other documents to provide their identities and whose details may vary between their Aadhaar and voter card would be able to convince the authorities. Another sticking point is the Minister mentioning linking as voluntary and not mandatory as amendments say electoral officers may ask for Aadhaar. Make no mistake, this may become worryingly widespread.
- Further, Section 23(5) suggests that the Government of India could notify a date in the gazette by which time every person in the electoral roll may intimate his/her Aadhaar number to authorities. The question to ponder over here is what happens if a citizen does not do this. Mind you, the right to vote is a statutory right and it must not be denied to citizens without rigorous due process and just cause. Thus, the onus is on the Election Commission to ensure every electoral roll entry struck off through this new process is independently verified by booth-level officers on the ground. The electoral rolls should be foolproof and abuse-proof, nothing less.
