Frontline Magazine: New Delhi: Thursday, 22 January 2026.
The Delhi High Court
recently said something that should have triggered alarm across a country that
once celebrated the Right to Information Act as a democratic milestone. The
court orally remarked that the PM-CARES Fund, even if it is a State, even if it
is a government entity, does not lose its “right to privacy” merely because it
is managed and controlled by the government.
The PM-CARES Fund (Prime Minister’s Citizen Assistance and Relief in Emergency Situations Fund) is a public charitable trust established in 2020 for responding to emergencies like the COVID-19 pandemic. It is chaired by the Prime Minister, with other Ministers acting as trustees.
The remark of the bench, consisting of Chief Justice Devendra Kumar Upadhyaya and Justice Tejas Karia, is not the final verdict. But in a constitutional democracy like India, remarks are not harmless. They are often rehearsal speeches for the judgment that follows. More importantly, they reveal what an institution is beginning to feel in its bones.
By making this remark, the two judges collapse three distinct concepts into one. Privacy, which exists as a right of the individual against the State. Confidentiality, which may apply in limited contexts but only after satisfying strict statutory and public-interest tests. And secrecy, which is an exception to democratic governance, not its norm, and certainly not a constitutional right. By treating these as interchangeable, the judges’ remark effectively elevates secrecy into a constitutional value. Yet the right to privacy was recognised to protect personal choices, intimate decisions, and personal data that form part of an individual’s identity—not to shield public power from scrutiny.
This remark arrives in a familiar landscape. The Delhi High Court, in August 2025, held that Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s educational qualifications—including his degree and marks—are “personal information” protected from disclosure under Section 8(1)(j) of the RTI Act. This section exempts personal information from disclosure, unless there is a greater public interest in its disclosure.
On one side, privacy for those in high power. On the other hand, as unfolding events detailed below show, transparency and invasion for the people.
In 2025, the proposed Income Tax Bill, which will come into effect from April this year, gave us the chilling phrase: “virtual digital space” and the legal power for tax authorities to override access codes to enter it. E-mails, servers, cloud storage, social media, digital wallets, and more are all defined as such a space. The intent is not subtle. If an officer suspects tax evasion, the Bill authorises breaking into a person’s “virtual digital space”.
While the government argues that such powers existed even earlier, that it merely “recognises” it now, it still raises questions of safeguards, overreach, and constitutionality. But beyond these questions, people have also started asking about this State that wants your passwords, while refusing to answer how publicly collected donations were used by it.
The State’s new hunger
It is easy to sell the new Income Tax provision as a weapon against the ultra-rich. But law is never a story about intentions alone. It is a story about design and drift. Once a power exists, it seeks use, which becomes a habit, and then seeks expansion.
If the past 11-year history has taught us anything—or for that matter, what the ED did in West Bengal against the Trinamool Congress, where it raided the party strategist’s office in a six-year-old cold-storaged case, allegedly to “steal” the party’s strategy before the crucial State election—is that such powers are seldom used to meet good ends.
The fact that such sweeping powers without any safeguards and a tardy justice system will be “recognised” in law now is reason enough to suspect it.
Thanks to social media, the public’s response, especially among salaried Indians drowning in income tax, TDS, GST, VAT, cess, and a daily experience of collapsing civic services, has been rage and bitter humour. The tone is familiar: taxed like a first-world country, serviced like a failed one.
Surveillance does not
arrive alone. It arrives alongside systems like NATGRID—India’s integrated
data-sharing platform for the police and investigating agencies to access
government and private databases in real-time, which is now expanding in scale
and usage. A recent report notes that NATGRID is processing around 45,000
requests a month, and its access is being widened beyond central agencies to
every police station. The National Population Register, which has the
family-wise details of 119 crore residents in India, has been linked to NATGRID
too.
These are not abstract developments. They are a choice about what kind of republic we are becoming. Many asked, “If you can look into our phones, can we look into yours?”
In this context, this author filed a simple set of RTIs. If the State can legally break into the citizen’s “virtual digital space” messages, e-mails, social media on suspicion of evasion, then Ministers who govern the taxpayer and under whom so many irregularities continue to occur, ought to answer a basic question: what records exist of their official communications on private messaging platforms? WhatsApp. Signal. Other apps.
Will they be willing to
share their data too, for people who “suspect” their work to break in and
probe?
The RTI application, filed with the offices of the Prime Minister, the Home Minister, and the Finance Minister (the one who brought in the Bill) stated: “Kindly furnish the chat records (of WhatsApp, Signal, and any other messaging applications as used) of the phone used by… [each of them] for giving official orders to their officers. The record of the past 1 year may kindly be furnished in any format as available”.
The redaction of messages related to national security was proactively sought for. The purpose of this RTI was narrow: will these public representatives subject themselves to the same scrutiny that they impose on the people?
The replies were revealing. The Prime Minister’s Office dismissed the query as “speculative and roving in nature,” and asserted that it does not constitute “information” under Section 2(f) of the RTI Act. The Home Ministry’s reply, sent in Hindi, said that the information sought falls within a protected category under the RTI Act, Section 8(1)(j), and is “personal information” of a “third-party” and hence, exempt from disclosure. Regarding the Finance Minister, the Ministry of Electronics and IT (Cyber Law division) responded, in effect, that no such information is available in its records.
These responses raise a question that should unsettle any democratic mind: how does a government govern without maintaining records of the communications by which it governs? And even otherwise, why not the same level of transparency when it comes to decision-makers?
The court’s gift to power and its own opacity
This is where the Delhi High Court’s PM-CARES Fund remark becomes more than a passing curiosity. The High Court’s remark on privacy once imagined as a shield for the vulnerable individual means that privacy has begun to travel upward, attaching itself to the State’s own creations.
In that sense, despite the PM-CARES Fund being run by the highest constitutional functionaries, performing quintessentially public functions using public donations, and being granted 100 per cent tax exemption at the cost of the public exchequer, the Delhi High Court’s remark is simply power laundering itself through constitutional language.
This cannot be seen in isolation since a republic does not collapse in one grand blow. It collapses after a thousand cuts of various intensities. One such blow is when the citizen is asked to be transparent while the State is permitted to be private.
This inversion is not confined to the executive but has been practised grotesquely by the judiciary for the longest period. In this author’s case before the Delhi High Court challenging the Supreme Court Registry’s refusal to share even basic information about misconduct complaints against former Acting Chief Justice of Madras High Court, T. Raja, the Supreme Court’s counsel repeatedly avoided answering a “yes or no” question: were any complaints received at all?
Instead, the counsel fell back on an astonishing claim: “such information is not maintained.” The hearing has been adjourned, with written submissions sought, and the matter listed again.
This remark, also on the Supreme Court Registry’s affidavit, should be looked at as an institutional confession. If the Supreme Court, which runs the collegium system, which oversees the in-house mechanism, which is the apex custodian of judicial integrity, claims it does not maintain even the existence of complaints—then what is the accountability mechanism, really? A ritual? A private exchange of letters? A whisper network among the powerful? He-said-she-said is all that there is.
Here too, opacity becomes a mode of governance. And if that is the institutional posture, on what moral or constitutional authority can a judge born of the same system crack the whip and compel transparency from bodies like the PM-CARES Fund, as the law itself demands?
An institution that routinely instructs citizens to respect the rule of law appears strikingly comfortable functioning without the most elementary documentary trail that makes accountability possible.
Audits that scream
The point here is that people might finally be seeing through this duplicity of the State and its institutions. Social media is flooded with posts urging Indians to “travel abroad to realise what a scam India is”, usually in reference to the country’s crumbling infrastructure and poor public amenities.
It is not as though people are unwilling to be transparent or not pay taxes. They are simply failing to see the benefit. What happens to the taxpayer’s money?
A case in point is what happened recently with the Pradhan Mantri Kaushal Vikas Yojana (PMKVY), which was launched in 2015. The government’s auditor, CAG, exposed a catalogue of systemic irregularities in this skill development initiative scheme of the Government of India.
The government released
Rs.10,194 crore to the implementing agencies and provided skill certification
to 1.10 crore beneficiaries officially. The performance audit revealed that the
scheme’s databases allowed phantom entries, invalid bank details, duplicated
accounts, and serious foundational failures of integrity.
Bank account details for 94.5 per cent of beneficiary records were invalid or blank. Even among the remaining entries, the same 12,122 account numbers were reused for 52,381 different names, suggesting large-scale ghost or proxy beneficiaries.
Auditors found absurd entries like “11111111111” or “123456” entered as account numbers, or random text and special characters in place of account information. The scathing CAG report bluntly stated that the scheme’s database “did not provide adequate assurance about the identity of participants”.
The CAG noted with concern that the implementing Union ministry provided no information on efforts to trace or pay these “candidates”, raising suspicion that many never existed or could not be reached due to bogus records.
Although most media outlets missed calling a spade a spade, the opposition called it a “massive scam” and demanded an investigation. Instead of jumping into action, the government has remained mum. This reflects a broader trend of impunity, where financial opacity persists because those responsible are rarely held accountable.
The Leader of Opposition, Rahul Gandhi, highlighting another tragic death of a young man due to civic failure, tweeted today: “India’s urban collapse isn’t about lack of money, technology, or solutions. It’s about lack of accountability. TINA: There Is No Accountability.” Indeed, heads ought to have rolled by now.
It is for these reasons alone why tax-paying citizens feel mocked, and agitated, when asked to surrender passwords to a tax officer who would go through every intimate part of their private lives to ensure they have honestly paid their “due”.
The demand is not merely
invasive. It is actually morally offensive because the State does not show the
same ferocity towards its own leakages, towards corruption, irregularities, and
fraud. The Lokpal was sold as the republic’s anti-corruption conscience but its
record, and the opacity around it, tells a diametrically opposite story.
Now, rights for the State
Then came something even more philosophically revealing: the Supreme Court’s decision to entertain the Enforcement Directorate’s (ED) Article 32 petition in its clash with the West Bengal government and Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee.
Article 32 is the Constitution’s most sacred promise to citizens: the right to approach the Supreme Court for enforcement of fundamental rights. Yet here, a coercive arm of the State, the ED, invoked it. Despite objections that a State agency could not file an Article 32 petition as it is only available to a citizen, the Supreme Court spoke of “lawlessness” if it did not intervene and went ahead to issue a notice.
So, the State’s agency arrives at the Court not merely as an investigator, but almost as a rights-bearing entity, seeking constitutional protection, seeking the court’s extraordinary jurisdiction. It is simply bizarre.
Fundamental rights were meant to restrain the State. When State agencies begin to occupy the posture of the rights-holder, the Constitution’s geometry changes. The citizen is no longer the centre of gravity. Now read this in the context of courts increasingly willing to frame privacy as a shield for powerful institutions, whether it is a leader’s academic record, or a government-linked corpus.
The one-way republic
What should a constitutional democracy do instead? A democracy does not collapse because the State wants to fight tax evasion. It collapses when it fights evasion by treating the citizen as inherently suspect while treating itself as inherently exempt from the same norms.
If the State wants deeper access to citizens’ private digital lives, it must accept deeper public scrutiny of its own communications, records, and accountability structures.
Ministers issuing official orders on private messaging platforms must maintain records and disclose what can be disclosed. Courts must resist the temptation to gift privacy as a cloak to entities created by power. The judiciary must not operate accountability mechanisms as black boxes and then demand public trust after forgetting that trust is earned, not ordered.
Right now, the direction of travel is clear: privacy and secrecy are rising upwards, towards power, and transparency and exposure are flowing downwards, towards the people. A republic cannot survive this for long.
(Saurav Das is an investigative journalist writing on law, judiciary, crime, and policy.)
 |
| The Delhi High Court recently remarked that the PM-CARES Fund, even if it is a State, even if it is a government entity, does not lose its “right to privacy” merely because it is managed and controlled by the government. In the picture, commuters at Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus, Mumbai, on February 3, 2021. | Photo Credit: VIVEK BENDRE |
The PM-CARES Fund (Prime Minister’s Citizen Assistance and Relief in Emergency Situations Fund) is a public charitable trust established in 2020 for responding to emergencies like the COVID-19 pandemic. It is chaired by the Prime Minister, with other Ministers acting as trustees.
The remark of the bench, consisting of Chief Justice Devendra Kumar Upadhyaya and Justice Tejas Karia, is not the final verdict. But in a constitutional democracy like India, remarks are not harmless. They are often rehearsal speeches for the judgment that follows. More importantly, they reveal what an institution is beginning to feel in its bones.
By making this remark, the two judges collapse three distinct concepts into one. Privacy, which exists as a right of the individual against the State. Confidentiality, which may apply in limited contexts but only after satisfying strict statutory and public-interest tests. And secrecy, which is an exception to democratic governance, not its norm, and certainly not a constitutional right. By treating these as interchangeable, the judges’ remark effectively elevates secrecy into a constitutional value. Yet the right to privacy was recognised to protect personal choices, intimate decisions, and personal data that form part of an individual’s identity—not to shield public power from scrutiny.
This remark arrives in a familiar landscape. The Delhi High Court, in August 2025, held that Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s educational qualifications—including his degree and marks—are “personal information” protected from disclosure under Section 8(1)(j) of the RTI Act. This section exempts personal information from disclosure, unless there is a greater public interest in its disclosure.
On one side, privacy for those in high power. On the other hand, as unfolding events detailed below show, transparency and invasion for the people.
In 2025, the proposed Income Tax Bill, which will come into effect from April this year, gave us the chilling phrase: “virtual digital space” and the legal power for tax authorities to override access codes to enter it. E-mails, servers, cloud storage, social media, digital wallets, and more are all defined as such a space. The intent is not subtle. If an officer suspects tax evasion, the Bill authorises breaking into a person’s “virtual digital space”.
While the government argues that such powers existed even earlier, that it merely “recognises” it now, it still raises questions of safeguards, overreach, and constitutionality. But beyond these questions, people have also started asking about this State that wants your passwords, while refusing to answer how publicly collected donations were used by it.
The State’s new hunger
It is easy to sell the new Income Tax provision as a weapon against the ultra-rich. But law is never a story about intentions alone. It is a story about design and drift. Once a power exists, it seeks use, which becomes a habit, and then seeks expansion.
If the past 11-year history has taught us anything—or for that matter, what the ED did in West Bengal against the Trinamool Congress, where it raided the party strategist’s office in a six-year-old cold-storaged case, allegedly to “steal” the party’s strategy before the crucial State election—is that such powers are seldom used to meet good ends.
The fact that such sweeping powers without any safeguards and a tardy justice system will be “recognised” in law now is reason enough to suspect it.
Thanks to social media, the public’s response, especially among salaried Indians drowning in income tax, TDS, GST, VAT, cess, and a daily experience of collapsing civic services, has been rage and bitter humour. The tone is familiar: taxed like a first-world country, serviced like a failed one.
 |
| The purpose of this RTI was narrow: will these public representatives subject themselves to the same scrutiny that they impose on the people? The replies were revealing. | Photo Credit: Saurav Das |
These are not abstract developments. They are a choice about what kind of republic we are becoming. Many asked, “If you can look into our phones, can we look into yours?”
In this context, this author filed a simple set of RTIs. If the State can legally break into the citizen’s “virtual digital space” messages, e-mails, social media on suspicion of evasion, then Ministers who govern the taxpayer and under whom so many irregularities continue to occur, ought to answer a basic question: what records exist of their official communications on private messaging platforms? WhatsApp. Signal. Other apps.
The RTI application, filed with the offices of the Prime Minister, the Home Minister, and the Finance Minister (the one who brought in the Bill) stated: “Kindly furnish the chat records (of WhatsApp, Signal, and any other messaging applications as used) of the phone used by… [each of them] for giving official orders to their officers. The record of the past 1 year may kindly be furnished in any format as available”.
The redaction of messages related to national security was proactively sought for. The purpose of this RTI was narrow: will these public representatives subject themselves to the same scrutiny that they impose on the people?
The replies were revealing. The Prime Minister’s Office dismissed the query as “speculative and roving in nature,” and asserted that it does not constitute “information” under Section 2(f) of the RTI Act. The Home Ministry’s reply, sent in Hindi, said that the information sought falls within a protected category under the RTI Act, Section 8(1)(j), and is “personal information” of a “third-party” and hence, exempt from disclosure. Regarding the Finance Minister, the Ministry of Electronics and IT (Cyber Law division) responded, in effect, that no such information is available in its records.
These responses raise a question that should unsettle any democratic mind: how does a government govern without maintaining records of the communications by which it governs? And even otherwise, why not the same level of transparency when it comes to decision-makers?
The court’s gift to power and its own opacity
This is where the Delhi High Court’s PM-CARES Fund remark becomes more than a passing curiosity. The High Court’s remark on privacy once imagined as a shield for the vulnerable individual means that privacy has begun to travel upward, attaching itself to the State’s own creations.
In that sense, despite the PM-CARES Fund being run by the highest constitutional functionaries, performing quintessentially public functions using public donations, and being granted 100 per cent tax exemption at the cost of the public exchequer, the Delhi High Court’s remark is simply power laundering itself through constitutional language.
This cannot be seen in isolation since a republic does not collapse in one grand blow. It collapses after a thousand cuts of various intensities. One such blow is when the citizen is asked to be transparent while the State is permitted to be private.
This inversion is not confined to the executive but has been practised grotesquely by the judiciary for the longest period. In this author’s case before the Delhi High Court challenging the Supreme Court Registry’s refusal to share even basic information about misconduct complaints against former Acting Chief Justice of Madras High Court, T. Raja, the Supreme Court’s counsel repeatedly avoided answering a “yes or no” question: were any complaints received at all?
Instead, the counsel fell back on an astonishing claim: “such information is not maintained.” The hearing has been adjourned, with written submissions sought, and the matter listed again.
This remark, also on the Supreme Court Registry’s affidavit, should be looked at as an institutional confession. If the Supreme Court, which runs the collegium system, which oversees the in-house mechanism, which is the apex custodian of judicial integrity, claims it does not maintain even the existence of complaints—then what is the accountability mechanism, really? A ritual? A private exchange of letters? A whisper network among the powerful? He-said-she-said is all that there is.
Here too, opacity becomes a mode of governance. And if that is the institutional posture, on what moral or constitutional authority can a judge born of the same system crack the whip and compel transparency from bodies like the PM-CARES Fund, as the law itself demands?
An institution that routinely instructs citizens to respect the rule of law appears strikingly comfortable functioning without the most elementary documentary trail that makes accountability possible.
Audits that scream
The point here is that people might finally be seeing through this duplicity of the State and its institutions. Social media is flooded with posts urging Indians to “travel abroad to realise what a scam India is”, usually in reference to the country’s crumbling infrastructure and poor public amenities.
It is not as though people are unwilling to be transparent or not pay taxes. They are simply failing to see the benefit. What happens to the taxpayer’s money?
A case in point is what happened recently with the Pradhan Mantri Kaushal Vikas Yojana (PMKVY), which was launched in 2015. The government’s auditor, CAG, exposed a catalogue of systemic irregularities in this skill development initiative scheme of the Government of India.
 |
| These responses raise a question that should unsettle any democratic mind: how does a government govern without maintaining records of the communications by which it governs? | Photo Credit: Saurav Das |
Bank account details for 94.5 per cent of beneficiary records were invalid or blank. Even among the remaining entries, the same 12,122 account numbers were reused for 52,381 different names, suggesting large-scale ghost or proxy beneficiaries.
Auditors found absurd entries like “11111111111” or “123456” entered as account numbers, or random text and special characters in place of account information. The scathing CAG report bluntly stated that the scheme’s database “did not provide adequate assurance about the identity of participants”.
The CAG noted with concern that the implementing Union ministry provided no information on efforts to trace or pay these “candidates”, raising suspicion that many never existed or could not be reached due to bogus records.
Although most media outlets missed calling a spade a spade, the opposition called it a “massive scam” and demanded an investigation. Instead of jumping into action, the government has remained mum. This reflects a broader trend of impunity, where financial opacity persists because those responsible are rarely held accountable.
The Leader of Opposition, Rahul Gandhi, highlighting another tragic death of a young man due to civic failure, tweeted today: “India’s urban collapse isn’t about lack of money, technology, or solutions. It’s about lack of accountability. TINA: There Is No Accountability.” Indeed, heads ought to have rolled by now.
It is for these reasons alone why tax-paying citizens feel mocked, and agitated, when asked to surrender passwords to a tax officer who would go through every intimate part of their private lives to ensure they have honestly paid their “due”.
 |
| Social media is flooded with posts urging Indians to “travel abroad to realise what a scam India is”, usually in reference to the country’s crumbling infrastructure and poor public amenities. In the picture, a road near ITO Chowk in New Delhi, on September 15, 2025. | Photo Credit: SUSHIL KUMAR VERMA |
Now, rights for the State
Then came something even more philosophically revealing: the Supreme Court’s decision to entertain the Enforcement Directorate’s (ED) Article 32 petition in its clash with the West Bengal government and Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee.
Article 32 is the Constitution’s most sacred promise to citizens: the right to approach the Supreme Court for enforcement of fundamental rights. Yet here, a coercive arm of the State, the ED, invoked it. Despite objections that a State agency could not file an Article 32 petition as it is only available to a citizen, the Supreme Court spoke of “lawlessness” if it did not intervene and went ahead to issue a notice.
So, the State’s agency arrives at the Court not merely as an investigator, but almost as a rights-bearing entity, seeking constitutional protection, seeking the court’s extraordinary jurisdiction. It is simply bizarre.
Fundamental rights were meant to restrain the State. When State agencies begin to occupy the posture of the rights-holder, the Constitution’s geometry changes. The citizen is no longer the centre of gravity. Now read this in the context of courts increasingly willing to frame privacy as a shield for powerful institutions, whether it is a leader’s academic record, or a government-linked corpus.
The one-way republic
What should a constitutional democracy do instead? A democracy does not collapse because the State wants to fight tax evasion. It collapses when it fights evasion by treating the citizen as inherently suspect while treating itself as inherently exempt from the same norms.
If the State wants deeper access to citizens’ private digital lives, it must accept deeper public scrutiny of its own communications, records, and accountability structures.
Ministers issuing official orders on private messaging platforms must maintain records and disclose what can be disclosed. Courts must resist the temptation to gift privacy as a cloak to entities created by power. The judiciary must not operate accountability mechanisms as black boxes and then demand public trust after forgetting that trust is earned, not ordered.
Right now, the direction of travel is clear: privacy and secrecy are rising upwards, towards power, and transparency and exposure are flowing downwards, towards the people. A republic cannot survive this for long.
(Saurav Das is an investigative journalist writing on law, judiciary, crime, and policy.)
.JPG)
.JPG)
