The Aadhaar verdict and class bias

So far, only the Delhi government has discontinued monthly Aadhaar authentication in ration shops

One year ago, 11-year-old school girl Santoshi Kumari died of starvation in her mother’s arms, crying out for bhaat (rice). Her dalit family had both ration and Aadhaar cards, but since the two were not linked, the family was denied foodgrains for six months at a stretch. Local activists had even complained repeatedly to district officials about the family’s worsening plight. But in twenty-first century “Digital India”, Santoshi’s starvation death is symbolic of the schizophrenic apathy of the administrative machinery to India’s impoverished citizens.

The Supreme Court majority judgment on Aadhaar also displays this singular class bias. On the one hand, the apex court has imposed Aadhaar for 260 different government welfare subsidies. So, 800 million Indians will over time have to seed their ration cards, and also authenticate their fingerprints every month to purchase foodgrains. Already, 100 million NREGA workers have had to fish out this number to receive their own hard-earned wages. On the other hand, the court has severely clamped down on the private sector's access. So, the middle classes who have gravitated toward private services in the post-liberalisation era have been surreptitiously freed from Aadhaar, with the odd exception of annual submission of income tax returns. 

Thus, the chattering classes have been spared the niggling harassment from private banks and mobile phone companies. One judge during the proceedings even candidly admitted, “I am also receiving such messages”. But similar first-hand insights into the harsh realities of the impoverished are naturally limited in the confines of Lutyens Delhi.

Further, this constitutional bench, in a distinct departure, permitted the CEO of the Unique Identification Authority of India to make a Power Point presentation. But at the same time, the petitioners couldn't ensure that Koyli Devi, the mother of Santoshi Kumari, testified before the judges about how her child had died of starvation. 
 

Instead, as per media reports, one judge in open court expressed deep concern about the rights of non-resident Indians: “There are many pensioners who live with their children who are settled abroad. Can such category of pensioners be told that they would not be granted pension unless they have an Aadhaar card?” Mercifully, another judge at least enquired about the plight of manual labourers in remote areas resulting from frequent biometric failure and electricity disruptions. Bafflingly at this juncture, the Attorney General apparently claimed that no excluded citizen had ever presented themselves in the precincts of the court. 

If only the judges had invited Koyli Devi to testify or visited one of the 27 families with starvation deaths directly attributable to Aadhaar since 2017, perhaps the majority verdict may have had a different tenor. In Rajasthan, as petitioners Nikhil Dey and Aruna Roy point out, a day after the judgment, septuagenarian Chunni Devi passed away. She and her husband had not eaten a meal for five days, as they hadn’t received either their pensions or their rations for two months owing to mismatches in their Aadhaar biometric fingerprints.  

But these starvation deaths are only the tip of the iceberg of the scores of Indians who are denied welfare services owing to Aadhaar and have submitted affidavits in court. In 2016-17, the names of 300,000 Jharkhand pensioners were deleted as “fake”, though many were genuine. In Khunti town 35 per cent of these “ghosts” were found alive, and with Aadhaar numbers (Malhotra and Somanchi, 2018, EPW, 53:36).

One reason for this disregard for the underprivileged is that as Chanel and Picketty's research illustrates, income inequality in India is now at its highest since the days of the British Raj. Predictably, since the distance between the classes (and castes) grows, the ability to empathise with dissimilar lives grows dimmer, even as the assertion of class interests amplifies. Therefore, it is no coincidence that despite the world’s largest pool of 300 million illiterate Indians, as one villager aptly remarked, we increasingly have an “online sarkar.” The IT pundits of this transmogrification, who enjoy a revolving door relationship with the structures of power, drenched with conflict of interest, aggressively lobby for this biometric technology as benign, unmindful of its macabre consequences.  

So far, only the Delhi government has discontinued the meaningless monthly Aadhaar authentication in ration shops. The central government too has the prerogative to amend Section 7 to make Aadhaar voluntary. Review petitions could also draw on the dissenting minority judgment which highlights that “the marginalised sections of society, who largely depend upon government’s social security schemes and other welfare programmes for survival, could be denied basic living conditions because of a mismatch in biometric algorithms.”

Until then, there is ample evidence that Indian society’s class and caste cleavages are amply mirrored in the country’s judicial corridors, as so subtly and eloquently portrayed in the award-winning Marathi movie Court.

The writer is a research scholar at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences