Delete Aadhaar data collected before 2021, Yechury urges Election Commission

CPI(M) general secretary raises concerns of security, privacy and voter deletions in process of linking Aadhaar with voter identity card

CPI(M) general secretary Sitaram Yechury has written a letter to Chief Election Commissioner Rajiv Kumar raising concerns of security, privacy and voter deletions in the process of linking Aadhaar with voter identity cards.

As the Election Commission re-started the process of linking Aadhaar with voter ID, he reminded Mr. Kumar that the Supreme Court had stopped the National Electoral Rolls Purification - Authentication Programme in 2015. He said in the letter that as part of this exercise several Chief Electoral Officers across the country have obtained the Aadhaar data of voters from several other databases such as NPR, PDS and State Resident Data Hubs (SRDH). “These electoral officers linked Aadhaar with voter ID of 31 crore voters without informing the individual voters and instead using algorithms to automatically link them based on already existing data,” Mr. Yechury said and added that process had resulted in voter deletions in Telangana during the 2018 Assembly elections. “Further there have been data breaches of voter IDs linked to Aadhaar in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana,” Mr. Yechury said.

He said the country does not have a data protection or privacy law and neither does the Election Commission of India have a privacy policy with regards to maintenance of Aadhaar data of voters. “The stated purpose of the Aadhaar voter ID linking is primarily to remove duplicate voters, but with concerns of duplicate Aadhaar raised by CAG in its report on UIDAI, this is a hasty exercise. The lack of all due procedures from the Election Commission and a hasty process to link Aadhaar of every voter will lead to incidents that have previously occurred like the deletion of genuine voters,” he added.

He said the process violates the Representation of the People Act. “The Election Commission must delete all the Aadhaar data collected before the amendments to the Representation of the People Act in 2021 allowing this linking procedure. As the officials have carried the previous linking without due information to the voters, we demand that every voter whose Aadhaar was already linked with voter ID be notified. As this entire linking exercise is voluntary, the voters should be allowed to exercise their right to de-link their Aadhaar,” he said in the letter.