Media reports that the Supreme Court has allowed the Government to link Aadhaar identification to PAN cards and make it mandatory for Income Tax Returns are wrong and misleading, confirm Supreme Court lawyers.
What a large section of the media reported erroneously or mischievously was what happened when a lawyer ‘mentioned’ the matter pending before the apex court and prayed that it be actually listed and heard on April 3, to which it had been shifted from March 27. The lawyer sought an assurance that there would be no further delay.
While turning down the request, the court looked at the order of a five-judge bench in its order dated October 15, 2015 and remarked that the bench had clearly ruled that even for Public Distribution System, Pension, LPG, PF, Jan Dhan Yojana or MGNREGA also Aadhaar “cannot be made mandatory”.
“The court nowhere said that the UID can be asked for other services. That is wrong reporting,” said a lawyer closely associated with the case, adding, “anyone who knows court proceedings knows that the court could not have made any such order, one, because it was a 'mentioning' that was underway, and that was only to fix a date, and such an order could not be passed without hearing the parties to the case, and also because the October 15, 2015 order was by a 5-judge bench, and 3 judges cannot revise/ rewrite/ override that order.”
The October 15, 2015 order had laid down the following:
On October 15, 2015, the 5-judge bench heard a series of applications for expansion of the use of the number, including the TRAI that came to court saying that they could deal with terrorism if they were able to use the UID number for giving and checking SIM cards.
The 5-judge bench refused this use. This refusal by the 5-judge bench was suppressed by the Attorney General, says a senior lawyer, when he told the court in a matter taken to court by Lokniti, an NGO, that they intended to make SIM cards secure by having it checked against the UID. The court reproduced this submission and disposed of the matter.
This has been read by some part of the media as an order by the court that SIM cards should be checked against the UID, which is inaccurate. This did, however, mean that the court did not object to such use. That was a 3-judge bench, and could not have overridden a 5-judge bench.
The senior lawyer added, “This happened because the Attorney-General did not inform the court, and since it was not a UID matter that was being heard, there was no one challenging the UID project who could have pointed this out to the court. The Attorney General, in other words, kept the three-judge bench in the dark about what had happened before the five-judge bench.”
Usha Ramanathan, a lawyer and activist who has been opposing the UIDAI, is also emphatic that the government’s attempt to make UID mandatory for filing Income Tax returns and PAN card is in contempt of court.
The reason the court so restrained the Government, she says, is because it had seen the various dimensions of the project that made up the challenge before it, including:
Ramanathan points out that when the Government directs that we put the UID number on various databases, they are violating not just the order of the Supreme Court, but their own law (which they passed as a Money Bill, to stifle discussion and dissension). Nowhere does the Act of 2016 authorise the ‘seeding' of numbers in databases, she says. It allows only two things:
Published: undefined
Follow us on: Facebook, Twitter, Google News, Instagram
Join our official telegram channel (@nationalherald) and stay updated with the latest headlines
Published: undefined