Rights should be subject to reasonable restrictions: Govt

NEW DELHI: Welcoming the Supreme Court verdict holding privacy as a fundamental right, the Government on Thursday said the right should be subject to “reasonable restrictions”. Law and IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said that much before the nine-judge bench was constituted in the apex court to decide on the issue of privacy, the Modi government had told Parliament that privacy is a fundamental right.

“We welcome the Supreme Court judgement that privacy should be a fundamental right... The government has been consistently of the view, particularly with regard to Aadhaar, that right to privacy should be a fundamental right and it should be subject to reasonable restrictions,” he told a press conference convened to respond to the landmark apex court verdict.

Prasad also quoted Finance Minister Arun Jaitley’s statement in Rajya Sabha in March last year where he said that privacy as a right is subject to restrictions. The law and IT minister said that even the right to expression is fundamental. But no one is allowed to protest before Rashtrapati Bhawan without clothes. Even freedom of speech cannot cross the threshold set by the defamation law.

Responding to a series of questions on Aadhaar and the data linked to it, he said that only a limited set of information is in the public domain, the encrypted data, including biometrics is “completely safe and secure”. He claimed the previous UPA government had introduced Aadhaar scheme without any legislative support.