Last week, when the story of the centralisation of electoral rolls in India and the arbitrary deletion of voters broke, the name of Dr Seema Khanna was propelled into the limelight. Today, as Director General of Information Technology at the Election Commission of India, she oversees ECINet, which journalist Ritika Chopra revealed centralises voter rolls and bypasses decentralised statutory officers.

Her name is not unknown to those who covered the union government's response to the Covid crisis. She oversaw the rapid development and deployment of Aarogya Setu. Deployed by executive decree without statutory safeguards, the tool harvested sensitive health records and mapped citizens' private social networks. Critics warned that vacuuming up medical history and social interactions without privacy laws normalised permanent state surveillance under the cover of a public health crisis.

Of course, you can argue that this speaks to her competence. But as I keep reminding you, competence only compounds the severity of an offence. She cannot plead ignorance to rationalise locking out on-ground Electoral Registration Officers, preventing them from executing statutory duties.

I know, I know, the harvesting of health records and social context is an even graver issue. Consider the warning of UK judge Sir Nicolas Browne-Wilkinson in the 1992 Marcel case: "If the information obtained by the police, the Inland Revenue, the social security offices, the health service and other agencies were to be gathered together in one file, the freedom of the individual would be gravely at risk. The dossier of private information is the badge of the totalitarian state."

The dossier of private........

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