Mainstream Weekly"I have a file on you."
— M. K. Narayanan’s routine threat to his adversaries as National Security Adviser (NSA) quoted in Sanjay Baru’s book ’The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh’
"One way to ensure that the unique identification (UID) number is used by all government and private agencies is by inserting it into the birth certificate of the infant. Since the birth certificate is the original identity document, it is likely that this number will then persist as the key identifier through the individual’s various life events, such as joining school, immunizations, voting etc."
— A confidential document of UIDAI titled ’Creating a unique identity number for every resident in India’, leaked by Wikileaks on 13 Nov 2009
The concerns over the Citizen Amendment Act (CAA) has prompted several state governments to halt the ongoing data collection process for a National Population Register (NPR). The fear is that the information sought under NPR is much wider in scope and could potentially be used to target a section of the society.
What these anti-CAA advocates do not realise is that there are more solid reasons to fear that NPR is not just a census exercise, but a larger data convergence project that can result in the government putting its citizens under surveillance, that is unwarranted and dangerous to the secular and constitutional credentials of the country. NPR’s linkage with Aadhaar number plays a central role here.
In fact, NPR of Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) and UIDAI’s Central Identities Data Repository (CIDR) of UID/Aadhaar numbers of Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MEITY) are aimed at creating an architecture for indiscriminate mass surveillance of the present and future voters who are being structurally coerced to give their consent to the immoral and illegitimate exercise of their profiling for countless times.
It has turned every newborn into a suspect. There is a file being created to track and profile him for good. Like Indian NSA’s threat to his adversaries about having a file on them, having a UID/Aadhaar number and NPR automatically creates a file of the Indian residents in question. Even infants are not spared in this cruel scheme of things.
There was never an occasion wherein there was an all-party meeting to seek the consent of all the political parties with regard to such use of "electoral roll database". This framework tantamounts to rewriting the political geography of the country with hitherto unknown consequences for political rights.
Ignorance about link between NPR, NRC, CIDR of Aadhaar Number
“Aadhaar was a scheme rolled out by the Congress government but they never gave it the mass reach that the BJP was able to. Now, shouting for credit over it makes little sense as the PM Modi-led government was the one who saw an opportunity in the scheme as rolled it out on a mass scale