{"id":15307,"date":"2017-12-23T12:10:26","date_gmt":"2017-12-23T12:10:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/punjabnews24.com\/?p=15307"},"modified":"2017-12-23T12:10:26","modified_gmt":"2017-12-23T12:10:26","slug":"p-chidambaram-narayana-murthy-spar-over-aadhaar","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/p-chidambaram-narayana-murthy-spar-over-aadhaar\/","title":{"rendered":"P. Chidambaram, Narayana Murthy spar over Aadhaar"},"content":{"rendered":"

P. Chidambaram flags concerns on mandatory Aadhaar linking, Infosys co-founder N.R. Narayana Murthy stresses on need for parliament to enact laws to protect privacy<\/strong><\/p>\n

Mumbai:The controversial Aadhaar on Friday triggered a heated spat between P. Chidambaram and N.R. Narayana Murthy, with the lawyer-politician flagging concerns from a libertarian perspective and the Infosys co-founder stressing on the need for parliament to enact laws to protect privacy.<\/p>\n

Flaying the Modi government\u2019s strident move to get everything linked to this national identification number, Chidambaram said the \u201cgovernment is completely deaf\u201d to any reasoning against linking Aadhaar to everything under the sun.<\/p>\n

Like any other modern country, there is a need to establish individual identities in the form of a driving licence, at the same time ensuring that there is no violation of privacy with such an identification, Murthy said, speaking at IIT-Bombay\u2019s annual Mood Indigo Festival in Mumbai on Friday evening.<\/p>\n

Chidambaram on the other hand argued that using Aadhaar for every transaction has \u201cserious consequences\u201d that will turn the country into an \u201cOrwellian state\u201d, compromising the ideals of a liberal democracy and an open society. \u201cIf a young man and a young woman want to have a private holiday, they may not be married, what\u2019s wrong with that? If a young man wants to buy condoms, why should he disclose his Aadhaar or identity?\u201d the former finance minister quipped.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhy should the state, that is the government, know what medicines I buy, what cinemas I visit, what hotels I stay in, who are my friends?\u201d he asked further. \u201cIf I am in the government, I should resist the temptation to know about all these activities which individual citizens do,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Retorting back, Murthy said, \u201cI disagree with you… all of the things you talked about are available through Google today.\u201d Chidambaram said he has not linked his bank account with the Aadhaar number and appealed for a pause on linking activities till 17 January, when the a five-judge constitution bench is slated to resume hearing the bunch of petitions on the matter.<\/p>\n

He further said right now, all the Aadhaar linking is being done not voluntarily by the people but as a tool to \u201cconform\u201d because of the barrage of SMSes and mails. \u201cThe question is: there are many agencies which say, \u2018give me your Aadhaar. And even crematorium is asking for Aadhaar today!,\u201d Chidambaram said, clarifying that he doesn\u2019t oppose Aadhaar as a means to establish identities and help extend government subsidies.<\/p>\n

When pointed out about the potential misuse of the individual data while availing of services by the chair of the panel, Murthy said we should not \u201ctrash\u201d Aadhaar and took jibes at parliamentarians for not coming out with a privacy law that can help protect an individual\u2019s data.<\/p>\n

In the wake of criticism of hiding wrongful transactions against those opposing Aadhaar, Chidambaram made it clear that there is nothing to hide and any investigative agencies can access details if needed. \u201c…that record should not be accessed by a hacker or a big brother in the government using my Aadhaar. That\u2019s my objection,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

The former two-time finance minister in the Manmohan Singh government that brought in the Aadhaar pointed out that the original idea of Aadhaar was to help transfer government benefits and subsidies and plug the leaks. \u201cWhere there are no government subsidies or benefit being transferred, there is absolutely no reason to link to Aadhaar. There are serious consequences of doing that. But this government seems to be completely deaf to any reasoning against linking Aadhaar to everything under the sun.\u201d<\/p>\n

Picking up quickly on it, Murthy shot back saying \u201cthat responsibility is of Parliament\u2026to ensure that the executive does not do it. You have all the powers.\u201d Murthy further said, \u201cAadhaar is nothing but a simple verification of the identity of an individual. There is no privacy issue here. We\u2019ve a certain way of identifying individuals and it\u2019s like a driver\u2019s licence in which there is no privacy violated by that.\u201d<\/p>\n

To this, the former home minister retorted saying Murthy is \u201cdisarmingly innocent\u201d, and private people do listen-in to calls. The two finally did agree, with Murthy saying, \u201cas long as there are laws that protect privacy, there is no issue. I\u2019m not saying you need an Aadhaar to book a film ticket, or some other trivia.\u201d<\/p>\n

This led Chidambaram to say \u201cin the revised formulation, I entirely agree with Mr Murthy\u201d. \u201cThe beauty of disagreeing with Mr Chidambaram is that you can disagree with him as long as you are not disagreeable,\u201d Murthy concluded.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

P. Chidambaram flags concerns on mandatory Aadhaar linking, Infosys co-founder N.R. Narayana Murthy stresses on need for parliament to enact laws to protect privacy Mumbai:The controversial Aadhaar on Friday triggered a heated spat between P. Chidambaram and N.R. Narayana Murthy, with the lawyer-politician flagging concerns from a libertarian perspective and the Infosys co-founder stressing on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":15308,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[315],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15307","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-top-stories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15307","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15307"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15307\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15309,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15307\/revisions\/15309"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15308"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15307"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15307"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15307"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}