Supreme Court of India(SCI) Right to Privacy Verdict - This 91-year-old judge is the face behind legal history

The case will now be called Justice K S Puttaswamy (Retd) vs Union of India. It will go down in Indian legal history — the landmark judgment of the Supreme Court establishing privacy as a fundamental right. However, for Justice Puttaswamy, it is not so so dramatic. “Correct and beneficial,” is his verdict

While speaking to the paper at his residence in Bengaluru, the 91-year old ex-judge of Karnataka high court said, “I was expecting a fair-minded judgment when the arguments were on, particularly because attorney general K K Venugopal first argued that the right to privacy was not a fundamental right but then came around to the point that it was. The possibility of the court accepting the right to privacy as a fundamental right was very bright after this.”

Puttaswami, who was born in 1926, in a village close to Bengaluru, was a lawyer in the old Mysore high court.  He was also a senior government advocate later on. Puttswami went on to become a judge of the high court in the 1980s and was part of the Andhra Pradesh Backward Classes Commission, the report said.

He was one of the early petitioners in 2012 against the move by then UPA government to introduce Aadhaar for access to government schemes. “During discussions with some of my friends, I realised that the Aadhaar scheme was going to be implemented without the law being discussed in Parliament. As a former judge, I felt the executive action was not right. I filed the petition because I felt that my right was affected,’’ he told the paper.

“Many eminent lawyers like Gopal Subramanium argued on my behalf. I was not communicating with them, they went ahead with arguments on their own. I don’t want to venture too much on this subject because it is still pending in the Supreme Court,’’ Indian Express quoted him as saying.

As per Puttaswamy’s son B P Srinavas, a number of discussions with Rama Jois, the former governor of Jharkhand and Bihar, and former Punjab and Haryana High Court chief justice, helped his father decide to contest Aadhaar

“Justice Rama Jois is a friend of my father and a colleague. It was during discussions with him that my father arrived at the decision to file the writ,” Srinivas added