Polity

IAS Parliament 7 years

KEY POINTS

Social Contract

· It is, in political philosophy, an agreement between the ruled and their rulers, defining the rights and duties of each.

· In primeval times, according to the theory, individuals were born into an anarchic state of nature, which was happy or unhappy according to the particular version.

· They then, by exercising natural reason, formed a society (and a government) by means of a contract among themselves.

Breach of a social contract

· From voluntary to coercion - Aadhaar is a scheme that was supposedly voluntary was now proving to be nothing.

· Citizens were coerced into parting with private information, compelled by threats from the government such as person should be denied a service simply because he or she hadn’t enrolled themselves with the UIDAI.

Lack of privacy

· The government has an untrammelled authority to insist on expropriating our identity as a precondition for it to do its job.

· It ought to be clear that this vision, this basic hypothesis on which the Aadhaar Act operates, militates against the principles that lie at the foundation of any democracy.

· The essence of individual freedom, of the right to life that Article 21 of the Constitution guarantees, is that every person has a basic entitlement to bodily integrity, to decide for themselves how they want to lead their lives.

· It is difficult to be free, when the state is watching our every step.

Police state

· Aadhaar Act, in centrally maintaining all this data, enables a form of super surveillance, permits the creation of a perfect police state, allowing the government to track every one of our activities in real-time, to trace, at any given point of time, a person’s physical location.

· This mechanism for surveillance is further facilitated by the Aadhaar Act’s central design, which vests in the UIDAI a conflicting dual responsibility –

a) To act both as the custodian of all the information that it collects and

b) To act as a regulator of the Aadhaar database.