One year ago, nine judges of the Supreme Court of India delivered their judgments in the matter of Justice KS Puttaswamy and Anr v Union of India and Ors. The case decisively moved the discussion forward on privacy as a value in the Indian polity. The nine judges were unanimous that privacy is a constitutionally protected right in India, and even cast it as a pre-requisite for the exercise of many other fundamental rights. At various points in the judgments, privacy was described as a primordial, basic, inherent, inalienable and natural right. Puttaswamy therefore raised hopes and quelled fears for many who worried that citizens’ rights to have control over their own bodies, decisions and preferences were being questioned. By staking the ground on the right to privacy for all Indians irrespective of income or status, the court placed the guarantee of individuals’ autonomy and liberty at the centre of the Constitutional scheme for the Indian State. It seemed that in August 2017, the Supreme Court had definitively defeated arguments that “Indians don’t care about having privacy” or that “poor people don’t need privacy”.
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