Union minister Ravi Shankar Prasad on Sunday said he is personally not in favour of linking Aadhaar numbers with electoral photo identity cards of voters, PTI reported. Prasad said the voter ID has more details, which the Aadhaar card lacks.

“Both cards operate in different fields,” the information and technology minister said at an event in Bengaluru. “You go to cast your vote... If you show your Aadhaar card, you will not be allowed to cast your vote unless you show your voter ID card.”

Prasad said the government did not want to be accused of spying on citizens. “The larger issue is that if everything is linked to Aadhaar, then the great supporters of anti-Aadhaar will say that the Narendra Modi government is snooping on everything, boarding, what you are eating, which cinema you are going. I don’t want that,” he said, according to PTI.

The government has faced criticism for proposing to compulsorily link Aadhaar with welfare schemes, PAN cards, and mobile numbers. On March 13, the Supreme Court had indefinitely extended the March 31 deadline to link Aadhaar with bank accounts and mobile numbers. A five-judge Constitution bench headed by Chief Justice Dipak Misra had said there will be no deadline for mandatory linking of Aadhaar until the court pronounces its judgement on a batch of petitions that challenged the constitutional validity of the biometric identification programme and its enabling law.