SC reserves verdict on Aadhar challenge
10 May 2018
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The Supreme Court on Thursday reserved its verdict on a the petitions challenging the constitutional validity of Aadhaar that was enacted as law in 2016.
Former Karnataka High Court judge Justice KS Puttaswamy, now 92, and other petitioners had challenged the constitutional validity of Aadhaar.
The judgment reserving the verdict by the five-judge constitution bench headed by Chief Justice Dipak Misra and comprising Justices AK Sikri, AM Khanwilkar, DY Chandrachud and Ashok Bhushan, came at the end of a marathon hearing, which lasted for 38 days, spread over four months.
Top lawyers like Kapil Sibal, P Chidambaram, Rakesh Dwivedi, Shyam Divan, Arvind Datar and Rakesh Dwivedi had appeared for various petitioners, while the centre was represented by Attorney General KK Venugopal.
During the arguments spread over four months, the centre had strongly defended its decision to seed Aadhaar with mobile phones, arguing that it could have been hauled up for contempt if the verification of mobile users was not undertaken by it.
However, the court had said that the government had misinterpreted its order and used it as a "tool" to make Aadhaar mandatory for mobile users.
The court also disagreed with the government's contention that the Aadhaar law was correctly termed as a Money Bill by the Lok Sabha Speaker as it dealt with "targeted delivery of subsidies" for which funds came from the Consolidated Fund of India.
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