A government on the people.

Thankfully, after an excruciating delay, a 9-judge bench of the Supreme Court ruled that privacy is a fundamental right of all Indian citizens. A lot of us strongly believe that privacy is not just a fundamental right, it is a basic human right because animals do not have any sense of privacy and one cannot be human without privacy. After all, we have been wearing clothes for over 20,000 years, and our close relatives, the Neanderthals could have been covering themselves 100,000 years ago. After repeatedly arguing that we have no right to privacy and, most horrifying, that we have no right to our own bodies, ministers are now lauding the judgement. We know that lawyers can speak from both sides of their mouths, but surely there should be some dignity. This case was important not just for India but for the entire world, because it sets the standard for personal freedom, wrote Prof Eben Moglen and lawyer, Mishi Chowdhary. "The importance of a fundamental right in our system is that it can only be enforced against the state. 'Platform' social media companies receive voluntary disclosures of personal information in immense quantities every minute, but they are not subject to constitutional controls. Moreover, though these corporates are indeed ubiquitous in our lives, they are not obligatory. In dealing with them we still have choices. Only the power of the state can, in fact, compel us to expose ourselves more fully than we choose to do," they wrote. We can choose not to be on social media and many people lie about themselves. We will be arrested if we lie to the government and biometric information cannot be fudged. The state has a monopoly of violence against citizens, against which we have no defence, but the law of self defence, sections 96 and 97 of the Indian Penal Code, protects us if we take up arms against criminals, terrorists or other attackers. Besides social media is free, but we pay heavy taxes to the government to serve our interests, and not to impose its will on us. Hounding on social media has become intolerable, wrote Megan Mcardle, and once something is published it is there permanently. "Whenever a new form of power arises, we need to think about how to safeguard individual liberty against it." Europe and Argentina have laws that guarantee 'a right to be forgotten' but our government is not arguing for that. It wants these companies to base their servers in India, no doubt to snoop on us. We do not have a government of the people, by the people, for the people, we have a government on the people. Only absolute privacy can protect us.