HC quashes Aadhaar impersonation case, rules Act’s provisions not retrospective

Kolkata: The Calcutta High Court has quashed criminal proceedings against a man accused of Aadhaar-related impersonation, firmly ruling that the penal provisions of the Aadhaar Act, 2016, cannot be applied retrospectively.

The court observed that in criminal law, it is the date of commission of the act—not its detection—that determines the applicability of penal statutes, reinforcing the Constitutional safeguard under Article 20(1).

The judgment was delivered by Justice Uday Kumar in a criminal case involving petitioner Dulal Kumbhakar, who had been accused of allowing his fingerprints to be used in 2014 to generate an Aadhaar number in the name of his brother.

An FIR was lodged in 2018 by a UIDAI official, invoking charges under the IPC, the Aadhaar Act and the Information Technology Act.

Kumbhakar argued that the fingerprint mix-up was accidental and occurred while he was assisting his disabled brother at a crowded Aadhaar enrollment centre.

He had since made consistent efforts to rectify the error, including repeated enrollment attempts and a writ petition in 2018. His correct Aadhaar was finally issued in 2019, after the cancellation of the erroneous one.

The court noted that the Aadhaar Act came into effect only in 2016, two years after the alleged incident (2014). It held that applying the Act retroactively would violate Article 20(1) of the Constitution. The state’s argument that the offence was “detected” in 2016 was rejected as

legally untenable. Further, the court found that essential ingredients of cheating, forgery, or identity theft—particularly criminal intent (mens rea)—were absent.

It termed the continuation of the criminal case a “manifest abuse of the

process of law.” Despite objections over a prior discharge application, the court accepted the petitioner’s explanation of COVID-related delays and quashed the FIR and all related proceedings.