A Journey: How Gandhi Had Opposed the Biometric Project (Transvaal)
 
Mahatma Gandhi had opposed a law similar to UID as a Black Act in South Africa from 1906 to 1914.
 
In August 1906, the Asiatic Law Amendment Ordinance was signed into law in the Transvaal. It was humiliating & discriminating law forcing Indians in the Transvaal to register with the ‘registrar of Asiatics,’ submit to physical examinations, provide fingerprints, and carry a registration certificate at all times. Otherwise, Indians & other ‘Asiatics,’ as they were called, could be fined, imprisoned, or deported. It became known as the ‘Black Act’. 
 
 Immediately, the ordinance was translated and published in the Indian Opinion along with articles denouncing it. Within days, mass meetings were organized. Thousands attended and pledged not to cooperate with the Black Act. Leaders in the Chinese community were contacted, including Mr. Leung Quinn, as they too were affected by the Act. It was the beginning of an eight-year-long resistance campaign. 
 
Prominent leaders pledged their support including Abdul Gani, the Chairman of the Transvaal British Indian Association, Yusuf Ismail Mian (The Chairman of the Transvaal Indian Association, later called the Transvaal Indian Congress), & Ahmad Muhammad Cachalia, a wealthy merchant.
 
A delegation of Indians sailed to London to meet with Secretary of State Lord Elgin, who then publicly renounced the Black Act, but privately only advocated for superficial revisions to the Act.
 
When the certificate offices opened on July 1, 1907, resisters picketed outside the office and dissuaded passing Indians from registering. They gathered support for the noncooperation in temples, mosques, and churches. 
 
Initially known as the ‘Passive Resistance Campaign,’ Gandhi coined the term ‘Satyagraha,’ literally ‘truth-force,’ as an alternative name. 
 
Satyagraha developed as a paradigm for waging nonviolent struggle, advocating ‘active resistance to oppression,’ and would profoundly influence the Indian struggle for independence in later decades. 
 
At the closing of registration, only 511 out of the 13,000 Indians in the region had registered. Some who had registered faced shaming by the resisters, with some tearing up their certificates afterward
 
UID Project 
 
The government wants to simply showcase this project as a means to providing social security to the poor so that it is not deemed unpalatable.
 
A very famous Italian historian said that all history is contemporary history. 
 
When the social security number project started in the US, it was also replicated in Germany. 
 
The social security numbers (SSN) were tattooed on US citizens before (first SSNs were issued in 1935) tattoos were used in Germany under the Nazi Party. 
 
The US numbering programme was known as the “social security” programme, or SS programme. 
 
The Unique Identity Number (UID) project in India is being promoted under the e-governance programme. 
 
The German Nazi Party’s tattoo programme was operated by the social security (SS) division, which had learnt it from US. 
 
In fact, the infamous Auschwitz tattoo began as a number provided by IBM (International Business machines), multinational computer company & funded by Rothschild (Banking Family Member & Founder of East India Cos.) supply machines to the Nazis which produce punch cards to help organize and manage the initial identification and social expulsion of Jews, the confiscation of their property and their extermination.
 
IBM now claims that it had no control over its subsidiaries in Germany after the Nazis took control of them. 
 
What if a similar situation emerged in India, which is not unlikely after UID database is ready? The UID project is going to do almost exactly the same thing, which the predecessors of Hitler did, else how is it that Germany always had the lists of Jewish names even prior to the arrival of the Nazis? 
 
The Nazis got these lists with the help of IBM, which was in the ‘census’ business that included racial census that entailed not only count the Jews but also identifying them.
 
At the United States Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC, there is an exhibit of an IBM Hollerith D-11 card-sorting machine that was responsible for organising the census of 1933 that first identified the Jews. 
 
The government of the day cannot guarantee that in future, when the Nazis or some such sort come to power in India, they would not have access to UID database for vindictive measures against certain sections of the citizenry. 
 
 This is evidently the journey of ‘identification’ efforts from January 1933 to January 2009, when the UID Authority was announced. 
 
The UID and National Population Register is all set to do what IBM did in Germany, Romania and in Europe and elsewhere through ‘solutions’ ranging from the census to providing list of names of Jews to Nazis.
 
This UID Number project seems to be oblivious of the history of numbering human beings. Numbering human beings is like dehumanising them. In fact, Mahatma Gandhi had opposed a law similar to UID as a Black Act in South Africa from 1906 to 1914.
 
He said, “…I have never known legislation of this nature being directed against free men in any part of the world. I know that indentured Indians in Natal are subject to a drastic system of passes, but these poor fellows can hardly be classed as free men” and “…giving of finger prints, required by the Ordinance, was quite a novelty in South Africa.

Source: Wikipedia
 
Here is the Copy of Transvaal Asiatic Registration Certificate:

 (Then Time Aadhaar Letter)

The post A Journey: How Gandhi Had Opposed the Biometric Project (Transvaal) appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Hearings in the Supreme Court to decide if Indians have a fundamental right to privacy ended on August 2.

The judgement is expected by August 28, as that’s when the term of Chief Justice of India JS Khehar — who’s heading the 9-judge Constitutional Bench deliberating the question — ends.

The apex court’s decision — whether privacy is indeed a Constitutionally protected fundamental right or a common law right (which, according to experts,can be taken away by any enacted law) — will have far-reaching consequences for the civil liberties of Indian citizens.

It will also bring to climax a roughly 9-year-old fight, inside and outside court, between a heterogeneous group of activists and the state — irrespective of the ruling governments in that time — over the project of Aadhaar, the 12-digit biometrics-linked Unique Identification (UID) number to be issued to all residents.

If the 9-judge bench rules that privacy is a fundamental right, a five-judge bench will decide whether Aadhaar violates such a right. There are at least 20 petitions in the Supreme Court challenging Aadhaar on various grounds, including it being made mandatory for provision of essential state services for citizens—despite SC orders that it cannot be made mandatory except for six schemes.
The brainchild of tech billionaire Nandan Nilekani, the UID project has been dubbed variously as “the world’s largest mass surveillance project ”, “the biggest social project on the planet ”, and the like.

It has also been pushed along, mostly illegally, by the state since 2009 — the UPA and the current NDA, of course, setting precedents for much in the country.

Why did first-world countries that took up similar projects abandon them?

The United Kingdom, for example, had a biometrics-linked National Identity Card project to create a centralised register of sensitive information about residents similar to Aadhaar, which was scrapped in 2010.

The reasons were the massive threat posed to the privacy of people, the possibility of a surveillance state, the dangers of maintaining such a huge centralised repository of sensitive information, and the purposes it could be used for,  and the dangers of such a centralised database being hacked. The other reasons were the unreliability of suh a large-scale biometric verification processes, and the ethics of using biometric identification.

In India, the government has resorted to all kinds of arguments and claims to make the case against the Constitutional guarantee of privacy, and to knock down the last obstacle against Aadhaar.
The government has called privacy an “elite” concept, pitched the Right to Privacy against Right to Food that they claim can be fully realised only through Aadhaar, and even made the claim that it is “impossible” to track citizens using Aadhaar.

Whose interests will the UID database serve? The poorest of the poor, claims the government. Not so, says the opponents. It is a surveillance measure in the guise of welfare.

Hurting welfare
The premise on which the Congress-led UPA (then opposed by the BJP) and now the BJP-heavy NDA have pushed the UID project is welfare — as the instrument to ensure smooth, efficient, ‘targeted’ implementation of the Public Distribution System (PDS) as well as all other social welfare schemes in the country.

The state has maintained that Aadhaar will eliminate corruption and “leakages” in delivery of benefits, weed out “ghost” beneficiaries by way of de-duplication of identity, resulting in huge savings for the government exchequer, and of course, end poverty. 

Now, the importance of ‘identification’ cannot be overstated for ensuring that benefits reach those they are meant for, especially in a country like India. A substantial part of the population has an unrecognised, informal existence and subsistence—many without a single official documentation of their identity, which bars them from accessing government benefits. The UPA used this argument as basis for Aadhaar,  but was opposed by the BJP, worried primarily over illegal immigrants  being given a UID number as well.  

But with the NDA now, the focus seems to have shifted to fighting “ghost” beneficiaries and saving big money .

In the Supreme Court, the Attorney General KK Venugopal, returned to the inclusion argument, and said that Aadhaar was essential for the Right to Food, claiming that “Aadhaar has ensured that food reached 270 million persons who live below the poverty line through social welfare schemes.” He then went on to argue that the Right to Privacy for a small elite group of people could not override the Right to Food, which is part of the Right to Life.

This drew a vehement response from the Right to Food Campaign , which issued a statement highlighting the massive exclusions that have taken place by linking Aadhaar to everything from PDS, pensions, mid-day meals, MGNREGA wages, and nearly all other social welfare schemes and benefits.

The campaign said, “According to data put out by state food departments, in Rajasthan 33 lakh families are unable to access their Public Distribution System (PDS) ration entitlement each month due to the linkage of the PDS with Aadhaar. Similarly in Jharkhand, 2.5 lakh families are deprived of their grain entitlements on a monthly basis.

In June 2017, in Ranchi District, only 67% were able to buy their grain through Aadhaar-Based Biometric Authentication.”

Speaking to Newsclick, Dipa Sinha of the Right to Food Campaign said, “Aadhaar has created problems for beneficiaries at all stages, from failure in biometric enrolment to the monthly verifications. The most common reasons are finger prints not matching, poor internet connectivity that is required for Point of Sale machines to work and verify, etc.”

“The UIDAI admits an error rate of around 5%. Even that is a very large number in terms of everyday transactions. But we have found an error rate of 25-30%. Now imagine how large a number that is of people being denied their basic entitlements like food, pension, wages, etc. And these are the most vulnerable sections of society, the poor, the old, the daily wage workers, the impoverished disabled, among others,” she said.

Over the past few years, there have been numerous studies and reports of the devastation that Aadhaar linkage has caused to the welfare schemes, including by civil society group Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan and economist Jean Dreze .

Dreze has also refuted the claims of Aadhaar exposing “ghost” beneficiaries getting mid-day meals, for instance.

Economist Reetika Khera told Newsclick, “The government tried to tell the Supreme Court that the right thing life is above the right to privacy and that Aadhaar was essential for the realisation of the right to life. This is so far from the truth. The application of Aadhaar in the PDS, NREGA, pensions, etc has in fact endangered the right to life of lakhs of people by denying them their right to food and work.”  

*Source: http://food.raj.nic.in/DistrictWisePOSDetails.aspx

# Percentage calculated based on number of beneficiaries as on 04/06/2017: 99,77,909

The Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS) analysed the Rajasthan state food department data for monthly Point of Sale (PoS) machine transactions for wheat in all 33 districts.

In Rajasthan, Aadhaar was made mandatory for getting supplies from PDS from September 2016. The pilot linking of Aadhaar to PDS was started in January 2016.

Courtesy: Newsclick.in
 

The post When Aadhar has Wrecked the Concept of Welfare why is NDA II Claiming the Opposite? appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Some people have written in, worried that the SC yesterday directed that the government can ask for the UID for Income Tax and PAN card. That is just a misinformation coming to us through the press. 

For one, what transpired happened during a ‘mentioning', that is, where the lawyer mentioned the matter only to the court to ask that the matter actually be listed and heard on 3rd April. Earlier the case was listed for 27th March, but then it got shifted in the list to 3rd April. The lawyer took the matter to court to ask the court that there should be no further delay, and that it should be heard on the 3rd April.

The court turned down the request for such an assurance.

While doing that, the court looked at para 5 of the order of the 5-judge bench in its order dated 15th October 2015. There it said that even when it is used in PDS, NREGA, pensions, LPG, JDY and provident fund, it cannot be made mandatory.
That is it.

The court nowhere said that the UID can be asked for other services. That is wrong reporting.

Anyone who knows court proceedings knows that the court could not have made any such order, firstly, because it was a `mentioning' that was underway, and that was only to fix a date, and such an order cannot be passed without hearing the parties to the case. Secondly the October 15, 2015 order was by a 5-judge bench, and 3 judges cannot revise/rewrite/override that order.

For your information, the October 15, 2015 order said:

• The UID can be used in six services: PDS, LPG, NREGA, JDY, EPFO, pensions such as disability, widow, old age pensions which are seen as services provided by the state.
• Even in these services, its use "is purely voluntary, and cannot be made mandatory till the matter is finally decided by this court one way or the other".
• The UID number cannot be used in any other service. It is not a matter of whether it is voluntary or mandatory. It cannot be used at all. 
• All earlier orders from the first order of the court on September 23, 2013, when it directed that no one can be denied any service only because they do not have a UID card or number, shall be `strictly followed'. That includes the order dated August 11, 2015, which, among other things says that enrolment is not mandatory (which makes their notifications saying that those who do not have a UID number should be shepherded to the enrolment station is in contempt of court).
•  

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 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 press 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. 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. This is what is called an order -per incuriam' (i.e. being in disregard of the facts or the law, in this case because they were kept in the dark about what had happened before the 5-judge bench.)

So, the government attempt to make UID mandatory for income tax and PAN card is in contempt of court. Not just making it mandatory, but even using the UID in these fields is in contempt.

The reason the court so restrained the court is because it had seen the various dimensions of the project that made up the challenge before it, including
 

• surveillance
• profiling
• tagging
• tracking
• insecurity of the data base
• national security issues, posed both by the creation of such data bases, and because of the companies involved which includes L-1 Identity Solutions, Morpho and Accenture, which have close connections to the intelligence establishments of foreign governments.
• lawlessness
• the use by private actors, and
• importantly, the denial of the right to privacy of the people that the government had asserted before them. Like the court said: without the right to privacy, "the fundamental rights guaranteed under the Constitution of India, and more particularly the right to liberty under Article 21 would be denuded of vigour and vitality."

That is why they said that their order would be till the court has heard and decided these matters – not till passage of a law or any other such circumstance.

There is another thing, and of much significance. When the government directs that we put the UID number on various data bases, 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 data bases. It allows only two things:
 

1. authentication, which means that biometric or demographic data can be sent to the UID's CIDR (Central Identities Data Repository) to return a ‘yes/no' reply to the question whether you are who you say you are.
2. eKYC, which does something they had said they would never do, viz., give the data on their data base (except core biometric data – but they have no means of stopping any agency from collecting and keeping biometrics when it is given for authentication) to an Authorised Service Agency.

Section 8(2)(b) is categorical that an agency requesting authentication “ensure(s) that the identity information of an individual is only used for submission to the CIDR for authentication". There is no authorisation to hold on to the number. So, seeding the number is itself beyond the law. And this is how it makes sense anyway if establishing identity was indeed the purpose of this project, as claimed.

I hope this clarifies some of the confusion caused by the reportage on hearing that happened during mentioning on 27 March 2017.

Courtesy: Newsclick.in

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