Indians have forever been all about everybody else’s business. Absolute strangers one meets on the train, flight, the street, in the mall, or the person next to you in line at the vegetable shop, feel well within their rights to interrogate you about your religion, caste, marital status, children or the deplorable lack of them, age, salary, whether one is vegetarian, non-vegetarian or a vegetarian who eats eggs. Yes, it has to be that specific. Nowadays one even gets asked for one’s cell phone number as if it is public information. But then, because it is India, it probably is. So in this background, the Supreme Court recently has gone and meddled with our basic Indian-ness by bringing in this outlandish, alien and western concept of privacy, and held that privacy is a fundamental right. Now what are we supposed to do with it?
A nine-judge Constitution Bench of the Supreme Court in the case filed by Justice K.S. Puttaswamy (retd.) of the Karnataka High Court (yay!) unanimously held (in its 547-page judgment) that privacy is a constitutionally protected value. In so doing the court overturned older judgments (some of them notorious and harking back to the Emergency) and decided that since privacy is an inherent constitutional right, it is not a right granted by the state and cannot therefore be taken away by the state. Which also means our biometrics belong to us. Whaaa…? That too after we went through all that hassle to get our stupid Aadhar cards.
Different rights
The judgment also has implications, except no one as yet knows exactly how, for people’s right to eat certain kinds of food (read beef), the way they dress (please note all the people who live to tell women how to dress), what they do in their bedrooms, maybe even what they drink (States imposing prohibition may have a problem) and not to have our online movements and information sold to social media giants and advertisers. How that last one will be regulated is anyone’s guess.
How are we going to cope with all this change? What about the people (men and women) with nosy ‘aunty’ tendencies? Will they be told when going about their usual day-to-day enquiries that the subjects of their questioning have the fundamental right to be left alone? How will they deal with it? And having lost their chief vocation in life, will they then turn to crime? Or will they legitimise their natural tendencies by opening detective businesses?
The judgment has raised so many questions and only time will answer some of them, not to mention a diligent reading of all 547 pages. But no matter the detailed repercussions, the idea itself will take some getting used to. Welcome India, to the concept of Privacy!
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