Supreme Court: The 5-judge bench of J.S. Khehar, CJ and J Chelameswar, SA Bobde, DY Chandrachud & Abdul Nazeer, JJ referred the issue involving violation of right to privacy due to Aadhaar-PAN linkage to a 9-judge constitution bench. The larger bench will hear the matter tomorrow. The 5-judge bench passed this order as the 8-judge and 6-judge benches in M.P. Sharma v. Satish Chandra and Kharak Singh v. State of U.P., have earlier held that Right to Privacy is not a fundamental right. The Court said that the issue relating to the correctness of the aforementioned judgments needs to be decided first as it is necessary to determine whether right to privacy is a fundamental right or not, before deciding the validity of the Aadhaar Scheme.
It is important to note that on 09.06.2017, the bench of Dr. A.K. Sikri and Ashok Bhushan, JJ had in Binoy Viswam v. Union of India, 2017 SCC OnLine SC 647, upheld the validity of Section 139AA of Income Tax Act, 1961 that makes the linking of Aadhaar Card to the Permanent Account Number (PAN) mandatory and said that the provision is neither discriminatory nor it offends equality clause enshrined in Article 14 of the Constitution. As per the order of the Court, those who have already enrolled themselves under Aadhaar scheme would comply with the requirement of sub-section (2) of Section 139AA of the Act. Those who still want to enrol are free to do so. However, those assessees who are not Aadhaar card holders and do not comply with the provision of Section 139(2), their PAN cards be not treated as invalid for the time being.
