By K. Raveendran
2018 will go down in history as a
year in which Indians experienced bouts of ecstasy as well as agony when it
came to intrusion of the state into their private lives. We hardly finished
celebrating the Supreme Court verdict in Aadhaar case, which upheld privacy as
a fundamental right, though with certain riders, drawing strength from the
historical verdict of a 9-member bench pronounced a year earlier, unanimously
declaring that the citizen’s right to privacy was guaranteed by the
Constitution. But as the year wound down to a close, dark clouds hang over the
horizon, threatening to undo whatever we had achieved in the past couple of
years by way of judicial backing for privacy of the individual.
Years of efforts by privacy
soldiers, judicial work and debate have been brought to naught in one stroke by
the Modi government through its act of bringing a draconian rule through the
back door. The snooping order authorised 10 agencies, including the
Intelligence Bureau, the CBI, the National Investigation Agency, RAW and the
Delhi police, all of which have been abused by the ruling parties as political
tools to hunt down opponents, to intercept, monitor and decrypt any information
generated, transmitted, received or stored in any computer resource in the
country.
Then comes another ominous report
that the government is considering changes in the IT Act to force internet,
chat and social media companies to trace and identify people using messaging
platforms. It is believed that the move, which was discussed during a meeting
with internet companies and the IT ministry, will impact platforms like
WhatsApp that promise encryption and enhanced privacy to users. These companies
have been resisting attempts by the government to harvest data, but changes to
the IT Act would make it difficult to them to refuse such requests in future.
The new developments bring the worst
fears that Justice Chandrachud expressed in his dissenting note in the Aadhaar
constitutionality case. Chandrachud had concluded that there was real danger of
India becoming a surveillance state even with the limited privacy breaches for
Aadhaar. He maintained that the government cannot justify the intrusion on
people’s privacy just by insisting that it will be used to provide welfare
services. “Dignity and the rights of individuals cannot be made to depend on
algorithms or probabilities. Constitutional guarantees cannot be subject to the
vicissitudes of technology. Denial of benefits arising out of any social
security scheme which promotes socioeconomic rights of citizens is violative of
human dignity and impermissible under our constitutional scheme,” the lone
dissenting note asserted.
While Justice Chandrachud was
discussing the threat to privacy in the context of Aadhaar, the new regulations
take this intrusion to much deeper levels. The feared Orwellian state seems to
be already upon us. The government wants to put in place such an oppressive
regime in the defence of national security. National security is, of course, of
paramount importance and a certain amount of surveillance is definitely called
for. But that should not reduce us into a police state where fear of government
drives us to a state of nervous breakdown, as it happened to the American
psyche in the wake of the Homeland Security tyranny. In the aftermath of the
9/11 attacks, successive administrations converted America into a colossal
surveillance state that seeped into the lives of millions of ordinary citizens,
creating an apocalyptic dread. Homeland security measures made life difficult
not only for the Americans, but the rest of the world as well. Finally, the
Americans have realised the folly of living in constant fear and many of those
programmes have been phased out.
The government’s oppressive
surveillance regime promises a long struggle ahead for those who value personal
liberty and freedoms. But that is no reason to get disconsolate as Indians have
proved time and again that, when challenged, they are capable of taking their
affairs into their own hands. Lord Krishna proclaims in Bhagvad Gita how He
incarnates himself whenever adharma crosses the limit. The Indian voters have
made Bhagvad Gita a living doctrine: Whenever they find government tyranny
crossing all acceptable levels, they have been making effective interventions.
They did it in 2014 and the recent assembly election results provide a trailer
of what is coming up in 2019. Gone are the days when the Indian voter can be
led up the garden path with empty slogans and gimmicks. Today they are a
matured lot, capable of seeing through games played by scheming politicians.
So it can be safely assumed that the
repressive mechanism being put in place by the Modi government has only limited
life. Two public interest litigations, one by ML Sharma and another by Ami
Sahni, are already before the Supreme Court, which had once warned the
government against any plan to snoop on WhatsApp, email accounts or social
media posts on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram while dealing with a petition
challenging the move to set up a social media monitoring hub, which the
government was forced to drop. The latest PILs accuse the government of
treating every citizen as a criminal, which is the essence of the home ministry
order.
(IPA Service)
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