SC reserves judgment in Right to Privacy case

By the end of this month, the Supreme Court will make it clear whether citizens enjoy privacy as a fundamental right under the Indian Constitution. The debate, triggered by a batch of petitions challenging the constitutional validity of Aadhaar, was heard by a rare nine-judge bench led by the Chief Justice of India JS Khehar.

Over an almost three-week period, a battery of lawyers representing various petitioners, the Centre, and various states argued on whether privacy is a common law protected by statutory rights, or it is fundamental to human existence.

Senior Advocates Gopal Subramanium, Soli Sorabjee, Shyam Divan, Anand Grover, Arvind Datar, Kapil Sibal, and Meenakshi Arora all argued for the petitioners and sought the elevation of privacy as a fundamental right.

Subramanium, who opened the arguments on this issue, spoke for more than an hour and touched upon various concepts of liberty and dignity. "The locus of the Constitution lies with the individual. The citizen is above the state. If there is no citizen, there is no state. And the state is the creation of the Constitution," he said. "Our request is not for you to expand it, rather simply uphold it."

Opposing them, Attorney General KK Venugopal, Additional Solicitor General (ASG) Tushar Mehta with Senior Advocates CA Sundaram and Rakesh Dwivedi, along with advocate Gopal Shankarnarayan and Arghya Sengupta, argued that privacy was a common law right and had enough protection through statutory provisions.

Interestingly, Sengupta, who closed the arguments on Wednesday, argued that the existing fundamental right to liberty sufficiently covers privacy and hence, no new jurisprudence is required.

Right off the bat, the nine-judge bench observed that privacy is not an absolute right. However, during the course of the hearing it recognised that though privacy is a Constitutional issue, steps need to be taken to give data protection a statutory recognition.

The order in this historic case is expected to be delivered shortly before the CJI retires on August 27.