The Latest: Top stories of the day
1. I am not an absconder: Mallya denies fleeing India.
2. Rajya Sabha passes the Real Estate Bill, which is aimed at boosting transparency in the sector.
3. The Indian government will consider Pakistan’s plea on examining the 26/11 Mumbai terror attack witnesses.
4. If a woman is educated and over 18 years, she can’t allege rape after agreeing to a consensual sexual relationship, rules the Bombay High Court.
5. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh is contemplating moving to trousers dumping its khaki shorts inspired by the Italian Fascists of the 1930s.

The Big Story: Mai-baap sarkar

Indians are almost instinctive supporters of a mai-baap sarkar, a paternalistic government. This is why Indians rush to the government for each and every problem. Almost every time, the proposed solution is to pass a new law – a law that is neither implemented nor absorbed by society. Yet the belief remains.

But what about Aadhar? What does a citizenry do when its mai-baap sarkar asks for a citizen's most personal information? Biometric information such as finger prints or iris scans could be used in the most instrusive ways. Moreover, India does not have a privacy law, which means that the data that citizens provide to the state is open to massive misuse.

If that wasn’t bad enough, the government’s duplicity is implementing Aadhaar should set of alarm bills. The project started off as a voluntary one but is now slowly encircling Indian citizens as a must-have service. To circumvent the objections, the Bharatiya Janata Party government wants to classify the Aadhar bill as a money bill in order to rush it though Parliament. Money bills only have to be passed in the Lok Sabha, allowing the government to avoid the logjam of the Rajya Sabha, where the Opposition has a majority.

A money bill relates to taxation and the borrowing and spending of monies by the government. Finance Minister Arun Jaitley wants to classify this as a money bill since Aadhaar will draw its expenditure from the Consolidated Fund of India. But as many quarters point out, many bills earlier, also drawn from the Consolidated Fund of India, have not been termed as money bills.

The Aadhar is a daunting legislation that will deeply impact the life of Indians. The fact that the government is scared of legislative scrutiny makes the whole project even murkier.

The Big Scroll

Anumeha Yadav explains why the Aadhaar is not good news. And also points out a glaring loophole: a joint secretary can decide to share your Aadhaar data in "the interest of national security", a term that remains undefined.

Politicking and policying
1. In a meeting with Uttar Pradesh state Congress leaders, Prashant Kishor said that the “main target was the BJP” and he was here to help the Congress form the next government.
2. At 92, opposition leader and former chief minister Communist Party of India (Marxist) veteran V S Achuthanandan is still going at it in the Kerala polls.
3. Ishrat Jahan Encounter: Inspector General of Gujarat Police Satish Verma moves court seeking a copy of the second chargesheet against four Intelligence Bureau officers which hasn’t been made public yet.
4. Hardline Islamist groups in Bangladesh have threatened large-scale protests as Bangladesh mulls scrapping Islam as state religion.

Punditry
1. With a transfer of eight F-16s to Pakistan, the US continues to stumble in the region says an editorial in the Mint.
2. Swapan Dasgupta, writing in the Telegraph, attempts to understand the rise of Donald Trump.
3. The Vishnu Sahai Commission serves its political purpose, pinning the blame for the Muzaffarnagar riots on a district officer and exonerating the political leadership writes Mohammad Ali in the Hindu.
4. In the Indian Express, the Bharatiya Janata Party’s Sanjay Paswan hits out against the notion of a Dalit-Muslim political alliance.

Don’t Miss

Ipshita Chakravarty explains how Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party gets along with regional chauvinist Asom Gana Parishad.

The AGP was born out of the Assam movement, which swept across the state from 1979 to 1985, floating the slogan, “Assam for Assamese”. The movement drew its energies from the idea of an Asomiya homeland, containing only the true, the original inhabitants of the region. It was attended by language chauvinism and an anxiety that the political future of Assam would not belong to the Assamese anymore, as outsiders crept into electoral roles and contested elections.

The AGP swept to power in 1985, soon after the Assam Accord, which aimed to solve the “problem of foreigners” in the state. While the appeal of such a politics has shrunk since then, the party has stuck to the old orthodoxies. “We are not power hungry,” an AGP leader told Scroll.in in January, “we’ll keep our own regionalism.” This strident regionalism has ranged the AGP against the party from Delhi on several key issues.