Aadhaar case: Second longest hearing ends; SC reserves order

The Supreme Court on Thursday reserved its order on petitions challenging the Constitutional validity of Aadhaar Act. In his concluding remarks, Attorney General K K Venugopal said this is second longest oral hearing in the history of the apex court. The first longest hearing was of Keshavananda Bharti case that lasted for 68 days. The hearing in the Aadhar case lasted for 38 days.

The apex court had on Wednesday acknowledged that failures in Aadhaar authentication could pose problems for the needy and said that the issue would have to be addressed.

The Supreme Court was hearing a batch of petitions challenging the constitutional validity of the Aadhaar scheme on the touchstone of the fundamental right to privacy filed by former Karnataka High Court Judge KS Puttuswamy, Magsaysay awardee Shanta Sinha, and researcher Kalyani Sen Menon and others.

A five-judge constitution bench headed by Chief Justice Dipak Misra directed all the parties concerned to file their written submissions to put forth their case.

A battery of lawyers including Attorney General K K Venugopal, who represented the Centre and senior advocates like Kapil Sibal, P Chidambaram, Rakesh Dwivedi, Shyam Divan, Arvind Datar, Rakesh Dwivedi had appeared for various parties.

The constitution bench also comprised Justices A K Sikri, A M Khanwilkar, D Y Chandrachud and Ashok Bhushan.

During the arguments spread over four months, the Centre had vigorously defended its decision to seed Aadhaar numbers with mobile phones, telling the top court that it could have been hauled up for contempt if it did not undertake the verification of mobile users.

However, the court had said that the government had misinterpreted its order and used it as a “tool” to make Aadhaar mandatory for mobile users.

Former Karnataka High Court judge Justice K S Puttaswamy, and other petitioners had challenged the constitutional validity of Aadhaar.

The court had also not agreed with the government's contention that the Aadhaar law was correctly termed as a Money Bill by the Lok Sabha Speaker.