---
title: "Rethink Aadhaar Campaign Update On The Uid Hearing In The Supreme Court"
description: "The Supreme Court’s Constitution Bench concluded its final hearings of the matters challenging the constitutional validity of the Aadhaar project on Thursday, May 10, and reserved its judgment. Reserv..."
pubDate: 2018-05-14
author: Rethink Aadhaar
category: Uncategorized
originalUrl: https://rethinkaadhaar.in/blog/rethink-aadhaar-campaign-update-on-the-uid-hearing-in-the-supreme-court
---

The Supreme Court’s Constitution Bench concluded its final hearings of the matters challenging the constitutional validity of the Aadhaar project on Thursday, May 10, and reserved its judgment. Reservation of judgment is routine and means that the bench will take some time to give its final judgment. We expect the judgment sometime around July - August, after the Supreme Court’s summer recess. In the more than four-month long final hearings of the Aadhaar matters by the Supreme Court’s Constitution Bench, the petitioner’s lawyers covered the many criticisms of the Aadhaar project. Documents and submissions submitted in Court can be found [here](https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/13xvMNblbEy0K4tWbY9Ddaw_juFeMt-8n) and present a repository of valuable, historic documents.
This past year, conversation around the Unique Identification (UID) or Aadhaar has grown significantly largely because the government coercively pushed Aadhaar into every aspect of residents’ lives. Partly in response, people began engaging with concerted social and mass media campaigns, live tweeting of court proceedings, and academic research and writing about the project.
In 2016, some of us came together to formulate a response to the Aadhaar onslaught and attempted to organise resources to challenge Aadhaar. We also worked to raise awareness and developed resources to help others understand - and critique - the project. We thought we would be focused on both “welfare and privacy” - two worlds that did not seem particularly connected until the UID project attacked our rights in both spheres. Some of us loosely began calling for “Rethink Aadhaar” (or “no2UID”). Since then we have supported public hearings, conducted signature campaigns, and had conversations on Aadhaar in public places including outside the UIDAI regional office in New Delhi, and at India Gate. During this time of campaigning, most significantly, the Supreme Court affirmed our fundamental right to privacy. In this time we also became a proxy grievance redressal centre for UIDAI with people calling us from across the country to help them with filing taxes, getting mobile phone connections, scholarships, etc without Aadhaar!
For many of us, the destruction of welfare [accompanied by bogus claims of savings](https://twitter.com/AnjaliB_/status/994849582684270595?s=19) deserved criticism and called for a rethinking of the UID project. In Court and outside, the response of the State has been that welfare is a burden not a responsibility on the State, and the barter of our fundamental right to privacy is an inevitable part of the social contract. We have fought against this (mis)conception of welfare, and our own understanding of the idea of privacy and its intrinsic link to liberty and freedom has expanded and deepened.
The Aadhaar project has needed welfare schemes to spread itself, and welfare suffers because of it. Having made Aadhaar mandatory to access any government service or entitlement, the State has managed to get Aadhaar numbers seeded into every database creating a gold mine of data that can potentially enable 360º surveillance. We have been told, “Data is the new oil”. In the age of Cambridge Analytica and breaches in the famed Social Security Number (SSN) database in the US, it is clear that no database, whether maintained privately or by government, is truly secure. That a data protection regime is being created in India in a secretive, opaque manner with the active participation of Aadhaar officials only compounds matter further.