Demonetizing the most widely-circulated banknotes and now 'no consent required' by the government to get fingerprints. So much for the world's largest democracy.
Why bring Demonetization into this? That was an excellent move by the govt. Sure, the implementation could have been better but there is no change in this world that has not caused pain to the citizen. Maybe you can enlighten me of some radical changes which were super smooth and caused no trouble to anyone?
I don't know what macro economic impact it had. Pretty much all the currency came back through the various loop holes in the rules. The liquidity crunch continues to create lot of problems to majority of the country who do not have access to banking and financial services. Nobody really knows the cost of all this and all for what? I still see unaccounted money floating every day and nothing seems to have actually changed
Because we programmers tend to pick up on patterns forming. Once the Indian government sets a trend of repressive anti-citizen behavior, then we can trace it back to the earliest steps in this direction and maybe come up with a solution after understanding the cause.
How is this supposed to be undemocratic? The prime minister is still polling very high and his party had emphatic victories in recent state elections. This is what democracy looks like - the enforcement of the will of the majority.
The case is on whether this democratic law is constitutional. They're backing a social security number with biometrics, and for that to be implemented, people will need to consent.
I didn't say it was undemocratic. But it is a sign of a government going down a path of no longer putting the interests of the citizens first. And we have many lessons from the past about governments who don't mind curtailing the liberty of people, all for the sake of security.
It never reflected modern systems of government (neither those that come close to respect for individual liberties nor those that do not) and its adjective form democratic really only refers to the processes of appointing leadership. A better word for the sort of thing happening here in America and (it would seem) in India might be anti-liberal, but then that word has political baggage of its own in the United States, and a similarly distorted meaning. Perhaps 'illiberal-democracy,' as a liberal democracy implies a republic with at least semi-democratic election to leadership underpinned by a lowest common denominator of shared values: peace as an ideal, individual liberty, some property rights, and an amount of cultural openness or tolerance.
In the United States, we've seen Trump rise in the wake of two waves of Republican success in the low turnout midterms of 2010 and 2014 and after even earlier stratagems to control State governments and thereby all the redistricting following the 2010 census (to jam a proverbial foot in the door of every valuable Congressional election until 2020). All very Late-Roman-Republic maneuvering and none of it 'democratic.'
Of course, if we had a more directly democratic system things would likely have been even uglier, independent of who came out on top. When 51% of people get their hands on the power tap, they like how it feels, and not in a good way for the other 49%. Though, I suspect from your comment you might agree. Feel free to snark at me if I'm wrong.
> This is what democracy looks like - the enforcement of the will of the majority.
Change 'will' to 'whims' and we're on pretty much the same page. Though what's happening in India sounds more like the gradual march of bureaucracy and its exploitation by interested parties rather than a will or even whim of the majority of voters.
> ...its adjective form democratic really only refers to the processes of appointing leadership
Not only. Democratic also (but not only) refers to the rule of law, separation of powers, branches of government, bicameral legislative branch, independent judiciary, and associated checks and balances.
> what's happening in India sounds more like the gradual march of bureaucracy and its exploitation by interested parties rather than a will or even whim of the majority of voters.
Voters are a) whimsical because of and b) manipulable thru appeals to blind emotions (e.g. fear and hope). The antidote is a thoughtful electorate. This requires an educated society but more importantly a highly ethical society.
And so I believe what's happening in India is a program based on the realization that you can't have individual liberty and collective democracy without personal responsibility and civic accountability. There is and will be resentment - so until it becomes a way of life some broad coercive measures are being used to enforce policy. You can call this illiberal or authoritarian - or you can call it pragmatic. The key for it to be perceived as pragmatic is for the central government to swiftly take down any internal corruption. It will reinforce the integrity of such coercive measures and amplify the ethos of "accountability".
p.s. an ideal/utopian liberal democracy might be a fiction but so are all of our aspirations
Indian Democracy has its similarities and differences from (classical)liberal democracies, which are themselves are rarity in the West.
The Central government in India is weak, Modi is trying to accumulate power and steps like these concentrate more power to Center than States. Mostly to kick in economic reforms among other things, and with great confidence I can tell, it will fail.
Having said, that an imperfect democracy is acceptable over some idealistic vapor-cracy. There is room for improvement, heck yeah, but delivering Democracy to 1.2 billion people even in its crude form is not a small feat.
With culture as diverse as India , Central government is be weak by design.
The current government does not represent all the different people in the country. For example the current ruling party has never won even the smallest of representation in any election in the history of my state and for good reason Both BJP and Congress have Delhi centric view points and in the case BJP strong communal tones as well. If the state powers are not strong then who will represent people like me?
Yeah democracy is not easy to deliver to a country like ours, but we already had it in good measure and now we are loosing it piece by piece .
If we did have an absolute right, then suicides and late stage abortions would be legal.
So the question isn't whether citizens have an absolute right. Because that's already been decided. The question is where do you draw the line.
Personally, I do think we should have an absolute right (therefore I'm in favor of late stage abortions and suicide). But clearly others, and the law, think differently.
Or death sentences, prisons, quarantines, private property... there are lots of situations where government decides what you can or can't do with your body.
I wonder if anyone has even tried that trick in practice? (Ie when the intention is not to produce profitable pornography, but just to make 'normal' prostitution legal.)
You are entirely correct that the practice is weird, but the weird part is banning prostitution. After all as the late and great George Carlin pointed out: "fucking is legal, selling is legal, why isn't selling fucking legal???"
The reason pornography is legal in the US, is the First Amendment, because the US Supreme Court has always and probably always will be very lax with the requirements for the "speech" part of "free speech" and very strict in imposing the "free" part of the bargain on the government. As such pornography is legal because it is an expression, and it is almost impossible for the government to ban these.
Had the founders of the US, when they wrote the Constitution, included the right to free trade I am sure prostitution, and many other things among it, would have enjoyed similar protection. As things stand, they didn't, and they don't.
Oh, I wasn't aware we were talking about the US only.
They legalized prostitution a while ago in Germany (where I originally come from). There were some---probably predictable---consequences and I can see why a democracy might not want to do that. I might disagree with that perhaps pragmatic stance of the voters in most countries, but I wouldn't call them weird for it. Laws don't always have to be ideologically pure.
About the US constitution: it doesn't care about free trade, just the opposite. Wasn't the federal government mostly financed by obstructions to free trade like tariffs in the beginning? In any case, the whole country is founded on a disregard for lawful government and an insurrection against it anyway.
The arguments raised in favor of this motion, sound reasonable and applicable here in the West as well.
> "Rohatgi contended that the right over one's body was not absolute as the law prohibited people from committing suicide and women were barred from terminating their pregnancy at an advanced stage. Had there been absolute right then people would have been free to do whatever they wanted to do with their body, but the law did not recognise the absolute right of people over their bodies, he contended."
shouldn't even be controversial, more extreme examples are organ trade, completely unregulated drug use, self-harm, prostitution in some countries among other things.
Equating suicide to a flimsy ID program, meant to track everything you do is disingenuous.
There is zero transparency on the security of the system. Even if there was transparency, I would not trust the people running the system to store my private biometric data safely. Unlike a password which gets leaked i cannot change fingerprint or retina at will can I ? Using it authentication is just stupid . There is no real need for collecting forcibly collecting bio-metric data,
This is a question of fundamental right to privacy , despite whatever the court and government may have you believe . Just like the government does not have the right to capture nude pictures of you , it does not any inherent right to your biometric information .
I'm not sure who your comment is addressed towards, because I didn't say anything about ID programs. If you want to make an argument in favor of privacy, then make an argument in favor of privacy. But that argument has nothing to do with "absolute rights over your body".
My apologies, it was not in reply to your comment directly, I was talking about how the media and entire story about this is being framed as something it is not about at all. Your comment was on top and I did not articulate it well that the issue should be discussing something else entirely.
As another poster below summed it better than me, the framing is conflating forced bio-metric collection without any real use , security or benefit with some very real and needed restrictions on your rights over your body
This voluntary program is now being mandatory to file income tax returns among other things. The ongoing hearing in the Supreme Court (the argument in the linked article was made during the hearing) is regarding the voluntary ID being made mandatory for filing tax returns.
The increasingly anti-privacy moves via the Aadhaar card which now links your driving license, bank account(s), mobile number and everything you can think of, banks charging you for withdrawing cash more than 4-5 times a month to incentivize digital payment, this is making me really scared right now
This is nothing new. I think digitizing records of citizen can get hairy but it also has some pros.
The title of this report taken at face value sounds shocking, but the arguments raised are perfect here. You do not have the right to suicide or commit infanticide after a certain stage, nor can you take drugs. The point raised was, if we had 100% right over our bodies, we would have been allowed those things. Since we aren't, it is used as a means to explain why Finger prints and eye scans are irrefutable when getting the Adhaar card.
The worrying bit about this statement is not what was said but the fact that the media is getting fixated on this intentionally ambiguous statement to conflate the real issue of forced biometric data collection into a black box central database with no clear and well defined purpose or use, security or benefit.
This is a dangerous argument. Peoples' rights over their bodies must be absolute. Suicide, abortion at any stage, voluntary organ trade, drug use, prostitution - all these should be legal as they follow from one's right to her body.
Banning suicide is as effective as declaring pi as 3 via legislative fiat. At least in my mind.
For one, it is hard to enforce; those who choose to end their own lives may not show any signs until the attempt. If they succeed, they cannot be punished. If they fail, what is a "just" punishment? How do you effectively punish someone who wants to die so that after their punishment, they want to live?
I guess, philosophically, we do have absolute control of our bodies in practice. Making laws that defy the reality of what humans are is a path to tyranny. If people dont have absolute rights, does the state? There is talk of balancing individual rights against the state, which shallowly encouraging, but to me any system where the individual is not free to not make choices about their body will always be able to justify actions that trade more rights for "security".
The basic summary of the situation so far (somewhat simplified) :
- Aaadhar is brought in as a national identification system, originally for benefit distribution
- The Supreme Court in a judgement on October 2015 notes that there is no legal framework for aadhar and restricts it to only 3 schemes. It notes that aadhaar cannot be made mandatory for any scheme
- The current government rushes the aadhaar act as a money bill (the constitutional validity of which is also being challenged) on 11 mar 2016
- Several government departments start issuing gazette notifications making aadhaar mandatory for various schemes (including benefits for AIDS patients, bhopal gas victims, college entrance examinations, birth certificates among others).
- The Finance Bill of 2016 passes several amendments to make linking your aadhaar mandatory with your PAN card. Historically, a PAN card was the entity on which you filed your taxes, and with this in place, you cannot file taxes as your PAN card becomes invalid if you don't link it.
The case being argued today is one that challenges the amendments making aadhaar mandatory. If you are interested in the court proceedings and the arguments laid by both sides, here is a long summary (today was day 5 of the proceedings): https://indconlawphil.wordpress.com/2017/05/03/the-constitut...
Aadhar is expensive, intrusive and ultimately futile for the stated objectives.
More than $1.5B have been spent on it with more being allocated every budget. For context Mangalyan's budget was $74M.
I haven't been able to find how much it has helped save. There is no cost/benefit analysis.
It was started as a way to ensure proper delivery of subsidised services to the poor, it has since enhanced its scope
to encompass all government services. One needs it for
1) getting a sim card,
2) filing tax returns
3) train journey(for seniors but won't be surprised if it soon becomes mandatory for everyone)
4) school admissions - really kids cannot be enrolled in school without Aadhar
with proposals to use the biometrics for
5) domestic air travel
6) biometric enabled POS
7) replace debit/credit cards
Somehow this will magically solve all our problems and make us a developed nation by virtue of
using a biometric enabled digital tracking service.
For a nation of bilion people, even a faboulous error rate of 0.01% will affect 10M people.
People responsible for it claim it is secure and hackproof. I am having a hard time trying to decipher if this is ignorance, incompetence or malice or all three mixed in.
The current goverment is drunk on power. Obvious comparisons with previous dictatorial regimes gets laughed at.
But the signs are there to see - rampant sycophancy to the PM, increased social intolerance, conflict escalation in/with Kashmir/Pakistan, arbitrary decisions like demonetization, moving the financial year to Jan-Dec.
For a supposedly non-corrupt government, the sly introduction of clause to remove cap on corporate donations
to political parties in the Finance bill is blatant hypocrisy to say the least.
For anyone who thinks demonetization was good, just review the government narrative on why it was needed.
First it was black money, then terrorist funding/fake notes, then digitization. The very people who lost their
businesses/livelihood due to demonetization support the PM and think it was good. When asked why, no idea. Ignorance is strength.
Almost all modern governments are guilty to some extent, but this government has totally embraced the INGSOC principles and has mastered the art of doublethink.
And the scary thing is, they have succeeded at it. People just dismiss the privacy and surveillance implications of Aadhar as hypothetical scenarios.
Anybody who criticizes the government is unpatriotic and a traitor.
39 comments
[ 0.26 ms ] story [ 83.8 ms ] threadThe jury is still out on this one. Any hard proof or statistics that say otherwise ? Wish there was more transparency.
Pray tell what exactly was achieved by demonitisation?
The case is on whether this democratic law is constitutional. They're backing a social security number with biometrics, and for that to be implemented, people will need to consent.
It never reflected modern systems of government (neither those that come close to respect for individual liberties nor those that do not) and its adjective form democratic really only refers to the processes of appointing leadership. A better word for the sort of thing happening here in America and (it would seem) in India might be anti-liberal, but then that word has political baggage of its own in the United States, and a similarly distorted meaning. Perhaps 'illiberal-democracy,' as a liberal democracy implies a republic with at least semi-democratic election to leadership underpinned by a lowest common denominator of shared values: peace as an ideal, individual liberty, some property rights, and an amount of cultural openness or tolerance.
In the United States, we've seen Trump rise in the wake of two waves of Republican success in the low turnout midterms of 2010 and 2014 and after even earlier stratagems to control State governments and thereby all the redistricting following the 2010 census (to jam a proverbial foot in the door of every valuable Congressional election until 2020). All very Late-Roman-Republic maneuvering and none of it 'democratic.'
Of course, if we had a more directly democratic system things would likely have been even uglier, independent of who came out on top. When 51% of people get their hands on the power tap, they like how it feels, and not in a good way for the other 49%. Though, I suspect from your comment you might agree. Feel free to snark at me if I'm wrong.
> This is what democracy looks like - the enforcement of the will of the majority.
Change 'will' to 'whims' and we're on pretty much the same page. Though what's happening in India sounds more like the gradual march of bureaucracy and its exploitation by interested parties rather than a will or even whim of the majority of voters.
Not only. Democratic also (but not only) refers to the rule of law, separation of powers, branches of government, bicameral legislative branch, independent judiciary, and associated checks and balances.
> what's happening in India sounds more like the gradual march of bureaucracy and its exploitation by interested parties rather than a will or even whim of the majority of voters.
Voters are a) whimsical because of and b) manipulable thru appeals to blind emotions (e.g. fear and hope). The antidote is a thoughtful electorate. This requires an educated society but more importantly a highly ethical society.
And so I believe what's happening in India is a program based on the realization that you can't have individual liberty and collective democracy without personal responsibility and civic accountability. There is and will be resentment - so until it becomes a way of life some broad coercive measures are being used to enforce policy. You can call this illiberal or authoritarian - or you can call it pragmatic. The key for it to be perceived as pragmatic is for the central government to swiftly take down any internal corruption. It will reinforce the integrity of such coercive measures and amplify the ethos of "accountability".
p.s. an ideal/utopian liberal democracy might be a fiction but so are all of our aspirations
The Central government in India is weak, Modi is trying to accumulate power and steps like these concentrate more power to Center than States. Mostly to kick in economic reforms among other things, and with great confidence I can tell, it will fail.
Having said, that an imperfect democracy is acceptable over some idealistic vapor-cracy. There is room for improvement, heck yeah, but delivering Democracy to 1.2 billion people even in its crude form is not a small feat.
The current government does not represent all the different people in the country. For example the current ruling party has never won even the smallest of representation in any election in the history of my state and for good reason Both BJP and Congress have Delhi centric view points and in the case BJP strong communal tones as well. If the state powers are not strong then who will represent people like me?
Yeah democracy is not easy to deliver to a country like ours, but we already had it in good measure and now we are loosing it piece by piece .
If we did have an absolute right, then suicides and late stage abortions would be legal.
So the question isn't whether citizens have an absolute right. Because that's already been decided. The question is where do you draw the line.
Personally, I do think we should have an absolute right (therefore I'm in favor of late stage abortions and suicide). But clearly others, and the law, think differently.
But of course, by a strict interpretation of "absolute right", any infraction could count.
I wonder if anyone has even tried that trick in practice? (Ie when the intention is not to produce profitable pornography, but just to make 'normal' prostitution legal.)
The reason pornography is legal in the US, is the First Amendment, because the US Supreme Court has always and probably always will be very lax with the requirements for the "speech" part of "free speech" and very strict in imposing the "free" part of the bargain on the government. As such pornography is legal because it is an expression, and it is almost impossible for the government to ban these.
Had the founders of the US, when they wrote the Constitution, included the right to free trade I am sure prostitution, and many other things among it, would have enjoyed similar protection. As things stand, they didn't, and they don't.
They legalized prostitution a while ago in Germany (where I originally come from). There were some---probably predictable---consequences and I can see why a democracy might not want to do that. I might disagree with that perhaps pragmatic stance of the voters in most countries, but I wouldn't call them weird for it. Laws don't always have to be ideologically pure.
About the US constitution: it doesn't care about free trade, just the opposite. Wasn't the federal government mostly financed by obstructions to free trade like tariffs in the beginning? In any case, the whole country is founded on a disregard for lawful government and an insurrection against it anyway.
> "Rohatgi contended that the right over one's body was not absolute as the law prohibited people from committing suicide and women were barred from terminating their pregnancy at an advanced stage. Had there been absolute right then people would have been free to do whatever they wanted to do with their body, but the law did not recognise the absolute right of people over their bodies, he contended."
There is zero transparency on the security of the system. Even if there was transparency, I would not trust the people running the system to store my private biometric data safely. Unlike a password which gets leaked i cannot change fingerprint or retina at will can I ? Using it authentication is just stupid . There is no real need for collecting forcibly collecting bio-metric data,
This is a question of fundamental right to privacy , despite whatever the court and government may have you believe . Just like the government does not have the right to capture nude pictures of you , it does not any inherent right to your biometric information .
As another poster below summed it better than me, the framing is conflating forced bio-metric collection without any real use , security or benefit with some very real and needed restrictions on your rights over your body
$government_initiative
also, asinine
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aadhaar
This program was originally described as voluntary, but over time it has been required for many more purposes.
The title of this report taken at face value sounds shocking, but the arguments raised are perfect here. You do not have the right to suicide or commit infanticide after a certain stage, nor can you take drugs. The point raised was, if we had 100% right over our bodies, we would have been allowed those things. Since we aren't, it is used as a means to explain why Finger prints and eye scans are irrefutable when getting the Adhaar card.
For one, it is hard to enforce; those who choose to end their own lives may not show any signs until the attempt. If they succeed, they cannot be punished. If they fail, what is a "just" punishment? How do you effectively punish someone who wants to die so that after their punishment, they want to live?
I guess, philosophically, we do have absolute control of our bodies in practice. Making laws that defy the reality of what humans are is a path to tyranny. If people dont have absolute rights, does the state? There is talk of balancing individual rights against the state, which shallowly encouraging, but to me any system where the individual is not free to not make choices about their body will always be able to justify actions that trade more rights for "security".
- Aaadhar is brought in as a national identification system, originally for benefit distribution
- The Supreme Court in a judgement on October 2015 notes that there is no legal framework for aadhar and restricts it to only 3 schemes. It notes that aadhaar cannot be made mandatory for any scheme
- The current government rushes the aadhaar act as a money bill (the constitutional validity of which is also being challenged) on 11 mar 2016
- Several government departments start issuing gazette notifications making aadhaar mandatory for various schemes (including benefits for AIDS patients, bhopal gas victims, college entrance examinations, birth certificates among others).
- The Finance Bill of 2016 passes several amendments to make linking your aadhaar mandatory with your PAN card. Historically, a PAN card was the entity on which you filed your taxes, and with this in place, you cannot file taxes as your PAN card becomes invalid if you don't link it.
The case being argued today is one that challenges the amendments making aadhaar mandatory. If you are interested in the court proceedings and the arguments laid by both sides, here is a long summary (today was day 5 of the proceedings): https://indconlawphil.wordpress.com/2017/05/03/the-constitut...
Aadhar is expensive, intrusive and ultimately futile for the stated objectives. More than $1.5B have been spent on it with more being allocated every budget. For context Mangalyan's budget was $74M. I haven't been able to find how much it has helped save. There is no cost/benefit analysis.
It was started as a way to ensure proper delivery of subsidised services to the poor, it has since enhanced its scope to encompass all government services. One needs it for 1) getting a sim card, 2) filing tax returns 3) train journey(for seniors but won't be surprised if it soon becomes mandatory for everyone) 4) school admissions - really kids cannot be enrolled in school without Aadhar
with proposals to use the biometrics for 5) domestic air travel 6) biometric enabled POS 7) replace debit/credit cards
Somehow this will magically solve all our problems and make us a developed nation by virtue of using a biometric enabled digital tracking service.
For a nation of bilion people, even a faboulous error rate of 0.01% will affect 10M people. People responsible for it claim it is secure and hackproof. I am having a hard time trying to decipher if this is ignorance, incompetence or malice or all three mixed in.
The current goverment is drunk on power. Obvious comparisons with previous dictatorial regimes gets laughed at. But the signs are there to see - rampant sycophancy to the PM, increased social intolerance, conflict escalation in/with Kashmir/Pakistan, arbitrary decisions like demonetization, moving the financial year to Jan-Dec.
For a supposedly non-corrupt government, the sly introduction of clause to remove cap on corporate donations to political parties in the Finance bill is blatant hypocrisy to say the least.
For anyone who thinks demonetization was good, just review the government narrative on why it was needed. First it was black money, then terrorist funding/fake notes, then digitization. The very people who lost their businesses/livelihood due to demonetization support the PM and think it was good. When asked why, no idea. Ignorance is strength.
Almost all modern governments are guilty to some extent, but this government has totally embraced the INGSOC principles and has mastered the art of doublethink. And the scary thing is, they have succeeded at it. People just dismiss the privacy and surveillance implications of Aadhar as hypothetical scenarios.
Anybody who criticizes the government is unpatriotic and a traitor.