This is a decision that will touch the lives of all 134 crore Indians, a nine-judge Supreme Court bench will pronounce judgment today on the complicated issue of whether the privacy of an individual was a part of his/her inviolable fundamental rights. There will be six judgments on the issue by the bench.
The question about the constitutional status of the right to privacy arose in a bunch of petitions, led by retired HC judge K S Puttaswamy, which had, in 2012, challenged the UPA government’s decision to introduce the biometric data-enabled Aadhaar ID for citizens. This question was referred to a five-judge Constitution bench on August 11, 2015.
The five-judge bench, led by Chief Justice J S Khehar, met on July 18 to decide the issue, but was told by the Centre that the strength of the bench was inadequate as an eight judge bench in the M P Sharma case in 1954, and a six judge bench in the Kharak Singh case in 1962, had ruled that right to privacy was not a fundamental right. The bench was quick to refer the matter to a nine-judge bench, which began hearing arguments on July 19 and concluded hearing on August 2, after a lively debate involving renowned lawyers to greenhorns.
The Centre, through attorney general K K Venugopal, had said, “Privacy, even if assumed to be a fundamental right, consists of a large number of sub-species… It will be constitutionally impermissible to declare each and every instance of privacy a fundamental right. Privacy has varied connotations when examined from different aspects of liberties.
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