Justice Puttaswamy Lead Petitioner In ‘Right To Privacy Case’ Dies At 98

Former Karnataka High Court judge Justice K S Puttaswamy passed away on Monday at the age of 98. He was lead petitioner in the seminal ‘right to privacy case’.

Justice Puttaswamy was born in 1926 and studied law at the Government Law College in Bengaluru. He practised at the Karnataka High Court. Later he became Additional Government Advocate before being appointed as a judge of the Karnataka High Court on November 28, 1977.

Following his retirement in 1986, he was appointed as the first Vice-Chairman of the Bengaluru bench of the Central Administrative Tribunal. He also served as the chairperson of the Andhra Pradesh backward Classes Commission.

At the age of 86 in 2012, Justice Puttaswamy was one of the first litigants to challenge the Aadhaar scheme. Following this, it was in 2015, the Supreme Court decided it must look at whether citizens have a fundamental right to privacy under the Constitution of India. This led to a historic decision in August 2017 where a nine-judge bench unanimously recognised the fundamental right to privacy in the case of Justice K S Puttaswamy (Retd.) v. Union of India.

Following the verdict, as per IE report, Justice Puttaswamy at his home in South Bengaluru, had said that the verdict was “correct and beneficial”.

On the hearings, he had said “I was expecting a fair-minded judgment when the arguments were on, particularly because attorney general K K Venugopal first argued that the right to privacy was not a fundamental right but then came around to the point that it was. The possibility of the court accepting the right to privacy as a fundamental right was very bright after this.”

“During discussions with some of my friends, I realised that the Aadhaar scheme was going to be implemented without the law being discussed in Parliament. As a former judge, I felt the executive action was not right. I filed the petition because I felt that my right was affected,” he had told IE at the time.