HYDERABAD: All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen president and Hyderabad MP Asaduddin Owaisi on Monday opposed linking of Aadhaar and voter I-cards, alleging that the Centre was trying to curtail the independence of the Election Commission.
Through a series of tweets, Owaisi said he opposed the bill but the government passed it amidst din in the house. Stating that linking Aadhaar card with voter card violates the fundamental rights of privacy, he said the Indian democracy is too precious for experiments where one’s right to vote is made dependent on some computer algorithm that no one understands.
Linking Aadhaar with a voter card will make voters easily identifiable. Parties in power will be able to profile voters based on identity and the likelihood of favourable voting.
“They’ll be able to discriminate in welfare schemes to punish their opponents and reward their supporters,” he said. “Once the government is able to identify if someone is unlikely to vote for them, it will be extremely easy to delete them from electoral rolls claiming that their authentication ‘failed.’ What’s the remedy for people who are excluded in such an arbitrary manner?” asked Owaisi in another tweet
“The law was passed as a farce. I wasn’t even allowed any time to raise my objections, while the chair allowed the minister to make a detailed statement. It’s quite obvious that this law was urgently passed keeping Uttarakhand and Uttar Pradesh elections in mind,” he tweeted. “It also violates the Supreme Court’s judgement which recognised privacy as a fundamental right. This will just simplify the process and allow exclusion at a larger scale. A similar effort in 2015 to link Aadhaar was stayed by SC,” he said.
“Aadhaar data has been breached repeatedly. It was stolen and sold online for Rs 500. Data of 10 cr citizens of Punjab, AP and Telangana was stolen and used by political parties. Madras HC also raised doubts over use of Aadhaar by BJP in profiling and targeting voters for Puducherry elections. Aadhaar database is error prone and self-reported errors are 1.5 times higher than errors in electoral rolls. So why is a dubious database mandatory to authenticate the superior and reliable database of ECI?” Hyderabad MP Asaduddin Owaisi tweeted.
