 Hello and welcome to NewsClick. I am Paranjoy Gohar Thakurtha and in this episode we are going to discuss the recent Election Laws Amendment Bill which seeks to link the Aadhar card with the electoral photo identity card. And we are going to look at the dangers inherent in this linkage. What it means for surveillance by the state? We already have a surveillance state. What is it going to mean in the future? And to discuss this issue I am very happy to welcome two experts who are here with me in the studio. I am very happy to have Professor Subashish Banerjee. Hello. For 30 years you've been working with the Institute of Technology Delhi. Now you're with the Computer Science Department of Ashoka University and with us here is Pravir Purukastur who is the editor of NewsClick and for the benefit of our viewers has a background in technology engineering science. Let me start with you Subashish. You know your article in the Indian Express which you wrote with your colleague at IIT Delhi Subodh Sharma. The new laws were rammed through but that's part of what the government has been doing. No public consultations, no discussion with the opposition, you just ram it through. But what you're saying is that you have already a set of rules and a set of laws in existence. The registration of electors rules of 1960 which are under the representation of the People Act of 1950. And though yes they were done many years ago long before the digital age what they have done now what the government is seeking to do now by linking voter identity cards with Aadhaar you are going to create a new set of problems. Issues of transparency, issue of privacy, what is public, what is private, publicly and digitally available and where do you, how do you prevent access to profiling and influencing of voters which is going to have a huge impact on the entire, on democracy in India. So if you can summarize your views why do you think this linkage is inherently extremely dangerous? You know fundamentally two reasons. One is the voters list at the time of formation of those acts there that was a paper document that was in register. Now over the last 10 years the voters list has become digitized. So they are available in a digital form. And though they put it up in as an image or as a PDF it is fairly easy to copy it and do digital analytics on it. That has certain dangers with or without linking with Aadhaar. So profiling using that data is not illegal according to current laws. But digital profiling so for example you can map the name and address which is a part of electoral role to say caste, religion and similar other demographic stuff. As has been done in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana. And that is fairly easy to do and that has certain consequences. Now whether you want to run elections that way the parliament and the electorate had to decide. So this required discussion, this required deliberations putting in safeguards if you wanted to prevent it as in my opinion you should. Now none of that was addressed and certainly what you do is that that you link it with Aadhaar which is a government instrument. So UIDI is under government control where the election commission of India which is the primary responsibility of electoral roles is an independent constitutional body. Whereas yes so you are saying one is an independent constitutional body the other is a part of the government the unique identification authority of India true. And now if you you know so Aadhaar enrollment is something on which ECI will have no control. What is the enrollment process who is getting enrolled what is the de-duplication mechanism? Nobody knows the de-duplication mechanism it is not not in public domain it has not been publicly audited. Now if you use that data to de-duplicate the voter's list the question is that what will happen? There are two possibilities. One is if Aadhaar has spurious information spurious enrollments. So you heard that Hanuman also has an Aadhaar card in this country but if there are more such spurious enrollment that spurious effect will come into water ID. So we will create a huge list of spurious voters that is one possibility. The second possibility is that you know if certain voters are inconvenient to certain entities the voter's list can be manipulated and they can be eliminated like you heard in stories in Telangana and and and so on so forth. And these have serious repercussions because yet yet interestingly the government's justification is that it's going to stop fraud or reduce the element of fraud and duplication. You know so you cannot just make a claim you have to show how right and you have to convince people and only way to convince people is to then show if you want to do this that the Aadhaar database has unquestionable integrity right and which is not the case. Which at least there is no public information that is at least right. So there's been no audit there's no audit report that is made available in public so you just don't know what is the quality of that other database. See if you take 1.2 billion people you know who have Aadhaar then if you claim that you have done 1.2 square biometric matches 1.2 billion square there is like 10 to the power 18 biometric matches right. Now that's a communitarian impossibility according to elementary computer science. I don't know of any method by which in 10 years I could have done 10 to the power 18 biometric matches. So any computer scientist will question that you know that that statement in in some way and there are no answers. Okay let me bring Praveen into our discussion what Subhashish has done in his article he's given five reasons why the linking of electoral roles with Aadhaar raises a huge amount of concerns. First he says Aadhaar is meant to be is not meant to be a proof of citizenship but only a digital identity. You know if somebody who's even not a citizen can stay in this country for 182 days she or he is eligible for Aadhaar ID. Then he says that according to several statements that have been made it's meant to be an identity proof not a proof of your address. So effectively it has happened and de facto even boot-level officers are making judgments about the age and the proof of the residence of the particular person. Thirdly as he had already pointed out there's no publicly available audit reports of either the efficacy of the Aadhaar deduplication or authenticity of the database and then he says that maintenance of the voter list is the primary responsibility of the election commission of India and that we are seeing is that there's a potential conflict of interest because Aadhaar is ostensibly meant for distribution of welfare benefits and so on and so forth but if it becomes a method for the government to influence and manipulate voters that is very very dangerous and finally he says Aadhaar is a ubiquitous identity proof that is used for a variety of applications and as he has mentioned it'll link it with profiling and targeting of voters yeah your thoughts. You know I think there are two sets of issues that are rightly focused that the purpose of these two databases so to say were different therefore trying to match both of them having now raising the question as he has that who is the final arbiter of the two databases in one case it's election commission which is an independent authority other case it's an instrument of the government so the purpose of the having an instrument of the government do government welfare measures is understandable for that instrument of the government then to do what a constitutional authority was independently supposed to do is not the same so I think that's a very very fundamental contradiction that exists also let's also look at it the other way that the way it was passed this is what we have been seeing right through that what the Chief Justice in fact said Ramana himself said that when we had to look at the act because it comes to us in case there is a conflict it comes to us for resolution then what do we do we look at the parliamentary debates we look at what is the report of the different committees on this so that we know the intent of the law some of the letter of the law that matters the intent of the law the legislative intent is conveyed this time is not happening at all the legislative intent is conveyed through parliamentary discussions debates and committee reports none of which exist for this purpose and this is your fundamental democratic instrument of change you can change a government through this if that itself is shall we say violated in this way that we don't know what's the purpose of this act why has it been put over there why have the two databases which are not compatible been mixed one was for vote the other is for receiving welfare which even without being a citizen you can avail okay let me ask you what has happened not very long ago in states in southern India notably Telangana Andhra Pradesh and also Puducherry the election commission conducted various so-called pilot programs and they had what they called a national electoral role purification an authentication program and then it was supposed to it was struck down by the supreme court but the point is what is clear today is that the state governments also conducted a state census and they included as we were discussing earlier details of caste religion bank accounts various kinds of personal information what are the implications of this kind of profiling of individuals and voters so what happens is the UID number becomes the instrument of checking who are receiving what welfare measures where do they stay if they receive the welfare where is the bank account all this information is available place of residence if you are buying property same and of course you also have now the voter ID now if you map all of this you are going to say okay this actually this person doesn't stay here he is over here now we can therefore say he should not be a voter here and strike him off and this is what happened in Telangana essentially the stroke of the voters list those who are not migrated but who have a village residence but stay in the city to work so their votes were taken out in fact if I give you a number in the 2018 assembly elections in Telangana there was a deletion of an estimated 2 million 2 million voters 2 million voters so now this is only based on state databases the government state the state government and databases which it had access and they used this coalition now of course with other you have access to many more databases and therefore the ability to bring all of it together to say well you got gas from me no that will stop next month if you don't vote for me okay so you have this very granular detail information when you combine different databases of course you can always say the Indian government is incompetent but you know these databases are available for sale when you are talking about electronic integrity of that yes electronic image being used actually that is not required that data leaks from within and that what you get is really the original PDFs from which the image has been made and therefore it's amenable to far more easy processing than even looking at billions of records so in like image form so all of this means that you have now the power to disenfranchise the power to put spurious voters in and also target what benefits you will give or not give before the election okay in fact this is this is really the point I want you to elaborate on we already saw when Harish Khare was the editor of the Tribune you had a situation where they published they published all the data and then there was a lot of pressure on him we learned but the short point is this data is leaking it's available for sale illegally but available I want you to elaborate a little more on how the linkage between Aadhar and the electoral photo identity card could help political parties I mean by creating voter profiles how how do you influence the voting process this is really what I want you to talk about a little bit you know there are there are two ways one is say suppose suppose you have got a as I mentioned in the article as an example suppose you have got a your kingly fought constituency where you know the margin is sort of sort of two percent so now you know exactly where to put your resources who to influence if you can profile if you can say that these set of voters are unlikely to vote for me and I need to convince them one way or pressurize them profile them on the basis of religion caste their welfare usage pattern their their bank account the kind of things they are doing you have all that information so you know if I was an election strategist I would not look at the person who is surely not going to vote for me I'll definitely not waste my time on the person will surely vote for me but I'll just focus on the closely contested borderline and now I've identified them and I'll try my best to influence them either by you know either keep them out of the elections or or bribe them or casual them or whatever some welfare measures I then target for only them or see they get it and other yes so I think that having a profilable digital data is the first thing for an election now you could do it with voters list as well just with the voters list right so but doing it if the voters list is linked with other it becomes easier in many ways because all the welfare measures who's the recipient then also that information and it is not also equally available to all political parties I think that the other being a government instrument there's more information so the ruling party or the incumbent is likely to have a benefit a benefit and advantage you know this is where I mean my final point on which both of you can elaborate a little bit complete transparency the need for complete transparency or the risks associated and linking that with the issues of individual privacy for me well it is the first important issue in this ultimately our electoral process is the final instrument we have to change the rulers we don't like now if that process is appreciated all other processes will fail and my problem here is the purpose of having an independent constitutional authority which conducts elections to keep it separate completely from other organs of the government and this is the central issue as much as I rightly pointed this out this is the central issue that combining this completely disparate databases with an institution which is supposed to be free of government control but technically it may be true but physically yes of course it has influence but still the process is being kept to separate not the individuals you can influence individuals but if the processes separate then the chances of that happening are much less at least there should be a Chinese wall separating all other databases from the electoral database which is how we change the rulers and unfortunately this combining the two is to give rulers much more power that they don't change that is I think the central problem that I have with what is what okay there is this article that recently appeared in the Hindu by Kiran Chandra Yarlagada and Srinivas Kudali and they said you must stop why the Aadhar voter ID link must be stopped and why it is that the Aadhar is being used to construct databases that have resulted in exclusion and profiling vote and they conclude that if this goes on the profile we introduce not just errors in electoral rules and this will have a huge a vast impact on India's electoral democracy so what are your concluding remarks what now needs to be done and as concerned individuals and you're not just a concerned individual you are an expert you're a computer scientist what now what's the way forward now the government has pushed through this law you know I think that I agree with everything that Raviya said this is this is dangerous and I would personally I would like to see a rollback of this and I agree with Srinivas Kudali and all of them but that apart you know even without Aadhar this issue of making the voters list public now this is a part of the representation of people's act because that was one way to ensure the integrity of the electoral rule so that any addition or deletion can be publicly audited right that's why you make it public that's the transparency but they didn't envisage the the ease of copying and profiling of just the voters list data so even without Aadhar that's a way of influencing voters or way of targeting voters it's not illegal but whether it should be allowed or not is something that the electorate and the parliament should should think of and there may be technologies to prevent that right to have both to have privacy and and integrity and and public accountability public accountability audits yeah so I would suggest that the election commission of India should explore those technologies right should have public debates on on how to keep the electoral rule secure you know it is well understood in computer science that if I want to target our hijacking election I will not target the voting process the electronic voting process I would target the electoral rule and this is a setting duck right so I can do it way before the election five months before critically so securing the electoral rule is a problem that has taken new dimensions in the digital age now that it's digital and I think that the election commission of India should be more serious about and address it one last sentence to complete what he's saying the answer doesn't really lie in computer science in this particular case they can only help but the answer is really political ultimately it's a political parties and the people of this country who have to learn the hard way as we did during emergency that this is going to bring about a change in our democracy and that needs to be fought because it's a loss of democracy that's a crucial point and the weakening of the entire democratic process and all the systems associated with it thank you so much Praveer thank you so much Vashish you just heard and watched two experts talking about the dangers of linking the adhar with the voter IDs or the electoral roles and what this would mean in terms of the future of democracy in the context of the recently enacted law by parliament a law that was pushed through without discussion and debate thank you for being with us keep watching news click subscribe to the channel and and share this program with as many people as you wish to