By Vijayanka Nair
An Indian villager looks at a web camera attached to a laptop as she is photographed during the data collecting process for a pilot project of The Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) in the village of Chellur, some 145kms north-west of Bangalore on April 22, 2010. The Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) has been created as an attached office under the Planning Commission. Its role is to develop and implement the necessary institutional, technical and legal infrastructure to issue Unique Identity (UID) numbers to Indian residents.The scheme which will be equivalent of the social security number in the US is designed to leverage intensive usage of the UID for multiple purposes to provide an efficient and convenient mechanism to update information. Photographs and biometric data will be added progressively to make the identification foolproof. Easy registration and information change procedures are envisaged for the benefit of the people. DIBYANGSHU SARKAR/AFP via Getty Images.
Inaugurated in 2009, India’s hotly debated national biometric identification program, Aadhaar, survived staunch opposition—not to mention the second longest Supreme Court hearing in India’s postcolonial history—to become a fixture of everyday life in the country. Indeed, India’s Supreme Court observed that the dictionary meaning of aadhaar (foundation) has been relegated to a position of “secondary significance;” over the past decade the word has become all but synonymous with India’s biometric ID. People have come to expect that they will be asked to furnish an Aadhaar ID when seeking government or private services, and comply they do. Hardly anyone flinches or complains.
As I followed the events unfolding around India’s Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and National Register of Citizens (NRC) via online news outlets, one article, in particular, gave me pause. It reported that “awareness” about these projects in India’s “tribal belt” was uneven, at best. Many “tribes people” had not even heard of these controversial initiatives sparking conflagrations across the rest of the country. In Chattisgarh, an interviewee named Marvi Mukka responded to reporters’ questions about the CAA and NRC with an informed guess. “Is it something like Aadhaar?” he ventured. His conjecture suggests that Aadhaar has lodged itself so securely in lexicons across the country that it has become, in some ways, the standard measure of contemporary state recognition.
Yet Aadhaar is a peculiar form of recognition. This biometric ID “guarantees” identity, but does not promise rights, benefits, or entitlements. Aadhaar concerns itself with an identity deriving from the uniqueness of the body, and professes indifference to “caste, religion, income, health and geography.” Further, with respect to citizenship, the Unique Identification Authority of India declares that “the Aadhaar number or the authentication thereof shall not, by itself, confer any right of, or be proof of, citizenship or domicile.”
As communal riots tore parts of Delhi asunder in February 2020, I was reminded of a public lecture delivered by the Chairman of the Unique Identification Authority of India in the same city several years ago. During the question and answer session, I asked Nilekani what was meant by a “strong identity,” something Aadhaar’s Strategy Overview promised but did not clearly define. He answered indirectly but emphatically, underlining that he was not concerned with the religious, political or social identity of Amar, Akbar, or Anthony. All he wanted to do was to prove that Amar was Amar, Akbar was Akbar and Anthony was Anthony. Amar, Akbar, Anthony was a hit 1977 Hindi film about three brothers separated at birth and brought up under different faiths—Hinduism, Islam and Christianity. Given its ubiquity, Marvi Mukka’s use of Aadhaar as a yardstick to comprehend other enumerative projects was warranted. But what are the implications of Aadhaar—presented as a circumscribed, innocuous form of recognition—serving as an interpretative frame for the CAA and NRC?
We might also ask whether people in fact neatly isolate “strong” biometric identity from other markers and lineaments of identity and belonging. In Delhi, where I observed Aadhaar enrollment between 2013-2018 as part of my ongoing research on biometric identification, the question of citizenship, nationality and religion hung in the enrollment center air. And this air was easily disturbed. I remember vividly an occasion on which, when firmly asked to come back to an enrollment center with requisite registration documents, an irate man shot back at an Aadhaar operator: “Bangladeshion ka to banaa dete ho, Indians ka (Aadhaar) nahin banaate!” (You generate Aadhaars for Bangladeshis but refuse to make them for Indians). This reproach implied that it was easier for a (Muslim) foreigner to get an Aadhaar than it was for bona fide Indian citizen to procure one. Talk of citizenship often morphed into explicit talk of illegal immigration in conversations between the Aadhaar operators and enrollees. And when the topic of illegal immigration was broached, the woolly notion of the Muslim “terrorist” was never far behind. One operator gleefully suggested that all “illegal immigrants” should be given Aadhaars because that would potentially allow the government to know who and where potential “terrorists” might be.
At present, the Indian government is continuing to build and extend a number of enumeration projects nationally. The National Register of Citizens (NRC), the National Population Register (NPR), and the Central Identities Data Repository (CIDR) are figured as distinct enterprises, but crucially, each of them sets their sights on the entire country. The first is envisioned as a comprehensive list of citizens, the second functions as a roster of “usual residents,” and the last serves as a means of real-time biometric identity verification. Home Minister Amit Shah asserted in a TV interview that “Aadhaar ka purpose alag hai” (Aadhaar’s purpose is different [from that of proving citizenship]). Yet, as the state turbocharges its efforts to create lists and registers and repositories of data on its subjects, we might to do well to follow the ways in which the material and moral logics of these projects intersect and diverge. For example, the lowest saturation of Aadhaar is in the states of Assam and Meghalaya (under 30 percent). Assam is also the forerunner of India’s plan to create a nationwide register of citizens.
“We’re the good guys,” a Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) official said to me. I have no reason to quibble with this self-diagnosis. Many officials at the UIDAI were indeed devoted to a one-point agenda: to arm under-served populations with robust proof of individual identity. Instead, I would like to hold up this first statement against another one he made. He likened Aadhaar to “nuclear technology,” saying that Aadhaar’s data could be put to good use or bad. While the Supreme Court struck down some sections of the Aadhaar Act (2016), the bulk of its provisions remained intact, or were notionally refurbished, and guide Aadhaar’s present use. Pertinent to the conversation we’re having on exclusionary politics is the fact that the amended Section 33 of the Aadhaar Act allows for “disclosure of information” in the interest of national security. The process of extricating information from the UIDAI is complicated, but not prohibitively so. “Unique identities, endless possibilities,” an Aadhaar poster I encountered in the early years of the project read. While this message was addressed to the Aadhaar holder, no doubt it applies to the state as well.
If and when the NRC, NPR and Aadhaar come to full fruition, forming a labyrinthine state system that the “common man” must navigate, it will be important for researchers to study the ways in which these projects work as interpretive frames for one another, and the ways in which they might subtly legitimate and support each other in discourse and practice, both official and unofficial. At stake appears to be the idea of India itself. The literal consigning of India to multiple registers makes it possible to understand and speak of India in multiple conflicting, complementary, and perhaps confounding registers. While enumerative projects like Aadhaar, NPR, and NRC are generating multiple discrete registers of belonging (literally and figuratively), we might ask whether together they could, in the future, grievously splinter the arena of rights in India.
Vijayanka Nair is a sociocultural anthropologist. Her current book project focuses on biometric identification technologies and the state in South Asia. Prior to joining SDSU, Nair was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at UW-Madison, and a Fellow at The New School’s India-China Institute. She holds a Ph.D. in anthropology from New York University and an MPhil in social anthropological analysis from the University of Cambridge. Nair received an M.A. in sociology and a B.A. in philosophy from Delhi University. Her research has been supported by the National Science Foundation and the Social Science Research Council, among others.