'Today, the State looks at everyone with suspicion.'
'The protection of secrecy and anonymity gets lost with this linking.'
'Maybe the State wants to be watching people all the time. But when they are watching, others too may be watching!' 'The State is becoming more and more secretive while throwing people to the wolves.'
'Why does a State that sees a national security issue at every turn not recognise the seriousness of the data from sensitive databases being breached?'
'By taking fingerprints, iris scans and other details of citizens, the State is becoming the custodian of its people.' 'The State can use this data according to its whims and fancies, which is not good in a democracy.' 'When the State looks at all the activities of its citizens, it becomes a police State.'
Duvvuri Subbarao recounts how his tensions with P Chidambaram and Pranab Mukherjee, then finance ministers, over monetary policy spilled over into other issues in the central bank in this excerpt from Who Moved My Interest Rate?, his memoir of his term as Reserve Bank of India governor.
'The government that is talking all the time about national security and national interests should be concerned.' 'When national interests are jeopardised by their own project, they should pause and listen.' 'Whether it is the BJP or the Congress, they all want control over the people.' 'They don't give a damn if anything happens to the people of the country; they are only interested in what they can get out of the data.'
Admittedly, EVMs too have a UID number and any convergence of data can make the secret ballot system a party of history, warns Dr Gopal Krishna in the 5th part of his series against Aadhaar.
Chidambaram has been magnanimous in endorsing my book, says the former RBI Governor D Subbarao.
