AADHAAR’S ITCHY FINGERS

The Election Commission of India (ECI) is reportedly making renewed efforts to link citizen voter IDs to Aadhaar—the UIDAI’s contentious biometric ID, whose creeping overreach was halted by the Supreme Court in September this year. A previous linking effort in 2015, under the ECI’s grandiosely named ‘National Electoral Roll Purification and Authentication Programme (NERPAP)’, had seen an estimated 320 million voter IDs linked to Aadhaar, but the so-called purification drive also led to the deletion of several million voters from the electoral rolls (‘The Case of the Missing Voters,’ india today, November 26, 2018). Given this, the ECI’s repeat effort comes as a surprise wrapped in a mystery.

The ECI apparently believes that said linkage with Aadhaar will enhance the credibility of electoral rolls. Given that the reliability of Aadhaar itself is under a cloud, it is hard to understand the ECI’s faith in it. Doubts over the efficacy and intent of the NERPAP drive, ostensibly to create “a totally error-free and authenticated electoral roll”, resurfaced in early 2018 with the discovery of missing voters in some states, starting with Karnataka, where some 6.6 million voter names, out of a total of 50 million, had gone missing. Also, NERPAP data sheets were found “lying around” in several locations because at least some personnel tasked with collecting the data had continued to do so for quite some time after the August 2015 ban order of the Supreme Court kicked in. This was because follow-up instructions from the ECI took time to reach the ground level. Even after the data-collection drive had finally stopped, in the absence of clear instructions on how to store and/ or dispose of data sheets, they were apparently put away quite haphazardly, wherever the ground personnel deemed it fit to do so. This only served to further underline doubts over how the linking exercise might have led to the deletion of voter names. So far, there has been no satisfactory resolution of these doubts.

Another reported reason for the ECI’s renewed vigour is worthy of note: the Commission, reports have said, feels it is on a strong wicket as nearly all political parties backed the idea of the proposed EPICAadhaar linkage at a meeting in August. The planned linking and voter authentication will also be critical, according to some reports, to the ECI’s plans to implement “advanced mechanisms such as electronic and internetbased voting”. That sounds plausible, but what the ECI seems to have overlooked is that the same parties are the loudest in complaining about the unreliability of electronic voting machines (EVMs) and demanding a return to paper ballots despite the VVPAT (Voter Verification Paper Audit Trail). Whether they will support said “advanced mechanisms such as electronic and internet-based voting” is anybody’s guess.

If indeed, as reported, the ECI wants to build a water-tight case for a mandatory Aadhaar linking through enabling amendments in the Representation of the People Act, 1951, it will do well to remember the Supreme Court judgment of September 26, 2018 in the Aadhaar case. The court recapped an earlier order with approval: “We will also make it clear that the Aadhaar card scheme is purely voluntary (emphasis added) and it cannot be made mandatory till the matter is finally decided by this Court one way or the other.” And because the court has not “finally decided [the matter] one way or the other”, it remains ‘purely voluntary’ and cannot be made mandatory. Even if the ECI makes such a recommendation to the government, the government and Parliament will have to think about the implications of making it mandatory in the light of the Supreme Court order.

And, finally, the Supreme Court also said: “No deserving person will be denied service for failure of authentication.” The Supreme Court is specifically forbidding denial of service and the ECI proposal, if implemented, will risk the possible consequence of exclusion of voters and a denial of the constitutional right to vote.

The ECI plan to link voter IDs to Aadhaar risks a repeat exclusion of voters, and thus falling afoul of the SC order that forbids denial of service

The author is former dean and director in-charge of IIM, Ahmedabad, and a founder-member of the Association for Democratic Reforms