CHENNAI: The Madras high court on Thursday refused to accept the claim of the BJP that mobile numbers of voters linked to Aadhaar which were used for election campaigning were collected by their karyakartas (party workers) going door-to-door in Puducherry.
The first bench of Chief Justice Sanjib Banerjee and Justice Senthilkumar Ramamoorthy instead said that the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) should answer how information furnished to it by citizens in hope that the confidentiality would be preserved had been breached.
This part, the court also made it clear that the Election Commission of India (ECI) should deal with the perceived breach of code of conduct without putting a lid on the issue and a separate criminal investigation initiated against the party should go on.
The court passed the orders on a public interest litigation moved by A Anand, president of the Puducherry unit of the Democratic Youth Foundation of India (DYFI) alleging that the local BJP candidates had obtained the cell phone numbers illegally from Aadhaar data and were creating WhatsApp groups in their respective constituencies for election campaigning.
Opposing the allegation, the BJP contended that phone numbers of voters it used to send propaganda SMSes had been collected by the party’s ‘karyakartas’ over a period of time and ‘not stolen from Aadhaar data’.
“All such numbers are available in the public domain. The party engaged the services of bulk SMS senders by paying them,” senior advocate V Kathic said, representing BJP.
On its part, the UIDAI also submitted that Aadhaar data had not been compromised or shared with anyone.
“We have found no tampering of records whatsoever,” UIDAI’s counsel V Chandrasekar said.
“Information collected by the UIDAI is not used for any purpose other than the generation of Aadhaar numbers and authentication. It is not possible to share Aadhaar details in bulk with any entity,” he added.
Representing the petitioner, senior advocate R Vaigai informed the court that the BJP had been illegally sending such SMSes till March 29 even after the court had taken cognizance of the issue.
She wanted the court to direct the ECI to act on promptitude and with all seriousness.