West Bengal challenges Aadhaar in SC

Bengal government on February 6 quoted Prime Minister Narendra Modi's speech at Davos that "whoever controls data is the most powerful and can shape the world" to assail the Centre's ambitious Aadhaar scheme before a five-judge bench of the Supreme Court. It told the Bench, which is hearing a batch of petitions challenging the constitutional validity of the Aadhaar programme and its enabling Act of 2016, that Centre would control personal information of citizens to have a grip over them. In consecutive hearings during the week, the Bench asked the state government what was wrong in a "one-nation, one-identity" for all Indians through Aadhaar. The state government said Indianness has nothing to do with a particular kind of identity. The apex court held that issues such as denial of benefits to citizens for either want of Aadhaar or due to its nonauthentication may not be a ground for holding the law as "unconstitutional".