The fundamental right to privacy has been developed by the courts in this manner for over 60 years. It all began when the attorney general of India, while defending the Aadhaar project, argued that the Constitution does not include within it a fundamental right to privacy. But since these were eight- and six-judge benches of the Supreme Court, every subsequent court had to deal with this confusion as best they could. Once Gobind hacked a pathway through this thicket, many smaller benches followed suit, building on these principles to articulate a fundamental right to privacy in the context of medical privacy, matrimonial privacy, reputational privacy, privacy of sexual orientation and many more. They did so emphatically—overruling both MP Singh and Kharak Singh to the extent that they had held that there was no fundamental right to privacy.

Source: Mint August 25, 2017 19:30 UTC