Five years ago, on this day, the Supreme Court made one its most important judgments. A nine-judge Constitutional bench ruled that the fundamental right protections under the Constitution’s Part III (and Article 21 in particular) extend to an individual’s privacy. By recognising privacy as an independently enforceable right, the court bolstered freedom of expression and specified that citizens have the right against arbitrary, unregulated State surveillance. It gave supremacy to the individual over information relating to their personhood and recognised
Five years ago, on this day, the Supreme Court made one its most important judgments. A nine-judge Constitutional bench ruled that the fundamental right protections under the Constitution’s Part III (and Article 21 in particular) extend to an individual’s privacy. By recognising privacy as an independently enforceable right, the court bolstered freedom of expression and specified that citizens have the right against arbitrary, unregulated State surveillance. It gave supremacy to the individual over information relating to their personhood and recognised privacy as intrinsic to dignity, liberty and autonomy, albeit with reasonable restrictions. Even for these exceptions, it laid down clear red lines: Limits on privacy can only be placed by a law, correspond to a legitimate interest of the State, and be proportional to that objective.
The ruling’s thrust on individual rights was captured in another part of the verdict that struck down the 1976 ADM Jabalpur ruling, which at the time held that liberty was a regulated freedom and could be set aside in certain circumstances. The verdict’s import was such that the then attorney general KK Venugopal, who argued against overturning past judgments that left privacy outside fundamental protections, called it “extraordinary”. Speaking at then Chief Justice JS Khehar’s farewell dinner two days after the ruling, Venugopal said the ruling was one of the “greatest things” that the Supreme Court had done. A little over a year later, the verdict would form the foundation on which the court would strike down the colonial-era law criminalising same-sex relationships.
Today, the protections the Supreme Court accorded to Indian citizens is ever more relevant. Technology tracks every step we take and some tools are so powerful that they can even predict many of our choices, undermining our autonomy. They are central to what is referred to as surveillance capitalism: A model of business that makes profits by maximising predictive marketing. At the same time, they also give the government unprecedented power to reach beyond walls meant to hold them accountable. The future, if the present is any indication, will only have sharper versions of the Facebooks and Pegasuses of today. Faced with such a tomorrow, the citizens of India need to look to the Puttaswamy order and press lawmakers for protections, processes and laws that they are now constitutionally entitled to.
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