CAT 2017 Reading Comprehension — Previous Year Question

Read the following passage and answer the questions that follow:

The first thing to know when talking about privacy in India is that a majority of the population does not always understand what it means. It is at times confused with shame. It's also confused with the emotion we feel when we do something that does not meet our standards or our sense of what is right. Modern Indian languages do not seem to have an exact word which captures the meaning of privacy; they are usually some variation of the words for isolation, intimacy or secret, once again hinting at a conceptual confusion. This explains the reactions of many who wonder what's the big deal about privacy because they have nothing to hide from the government anyway.

Privacy, however, is not only about hiding something or keeping it secret. It is, at its core, the right to be left alone. It does not mean that one is withdrawing from society. It is an expectation that society will not interfere in the choices made by the person so long as they do not cause harm to others. It means that one's right to eat whatever one chooses, the right to drink what one chooses, the right to love and marry whom one chooses, to wear what one chooses, among others, are rights which the state cannot interfere with.

In a society, where adults do not necessarily exercise most of these choices of their own free will (either because of family, caste or societal pressures), it is natural that the very concept of privacy seems incomprehensible. If you have grown up in a society where everything is dictated by someone else and the cost of disobedience is high, to have the freedom to choose what you will, in such important matters, sounds like fantasy. But it is also a common misconception that the non-well-off in India do not know or care about privacy. Millions of men and women push back daily against the oppressive hold of their families and communities and fight for the freedom to make their own choices. They may not have the right word for it, but they are creating space for themselves to exercise the right to privacy.

It is in this context that one must understand the hearings in the Supreme Court on the right to privacy. Although the nine-judge bench has been constituted to decide whether there is a fundamental right to privacy protected under the Constitution in the specific context of the Aadhar case, privacy has many more dimensions than just data protection or surveillance by the state. A Fundamental Right to privacy, enshrined and protected in the Constitution, would mean that all persons have the right to be left alone by the state, unless such intrusion is necessitated by a just, reasonable and fair law.

[...] At their core, such rights can be said to be the lines drawn by the Constitution delineating boundaries for the government's actions.