The following is an excerpt from The Identity Project: The Unmaking of Democracy by Rahul Bhatia, published by Context, an imprint of Westland Books.
Nilekani had come prepared for the civil society groups, social scientists and activists in the meeting room, and knew what they would say to him. From its inception, people had worried about what the identification programme would become, and wondered what its limits would be. They had written editorials about the identity project, calling it a Trojan horse for a capitalist takeover of welfare, and accused him of not understanding his country. ‘Some have argued that ID cards can be used to profile citizens in a country and initiate a process of racial/ethnic cleansing, as during the Rwanda genocide of 1995,’ Professor R. Ramakumar wrote.
Rahul Bhatia’s,
The Identity Project: The Unmaking of Democracy,
Published by Context (2024).
An agricultural economist at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences in Mumbai, Ramakumar noticed that officials discussed the project in generalities, as if they were describing a building but not sharing its floor plan. He had read the claims and that it would improve attendance, its health benefits, how welfare corruption would stop, how the identity number could become a mobile number. The project made him uncomfortable, and a while later he articulated four reasons why. It was a threat to privacy, the technology it was based on was fallible, the costs were too high, and, lastly, ‘this might be a neoliberal ploy to undermine’ India’s welfare system. A month after Nilekani’s appointment, Ramakumar published an article in Frontline, a magazine he wrote for frequently, and found that it ‘got a lot of traction among people who were sceptical’. The critique had attracted Nilekani’s attention, and he invited Ramakumar to Shimla for the discussion. Nilekani had a memory for critics and their criticisms, people who worked with him told me. But that day and the next were to give reassurance and make friends for the programme.
In a meeting room within the institute, sitting around a long oval table, his doubters awaited him. Then the room’s doors closed, and Peter DeSouza, the institute’s director, welcomed him and the retinue of bureaucrats and researchers from the Unique Identification Authority of India, the new government body Nilekani was in charge of. The identity project would almost certainly change India in some way, the director said to the social scientists and the Authority’s officials, but he couldn’t say how that change would manifest. ‘I don’t know if you’ve had other conversations with social scientists in a formal setting, but if this is the first such conversation, it’s fitting that it happens here. This place is for people who want to ask the larger questions.’ The institute, housed in a red-brick colonial structure, was born of a desire for pure learning at a perilous time—the years after Nehru’s death, when the country could have lost its way, the director explained. He saw the institute’s existence as evidence that India had survived ‘the dangerous decade’.
Nilekani listened quietly. He had grown up in the thrall of India’s first prime minister, and remembered standing in a crowd when he was four, a crowd captivated by Nehru as he went by in a car. ‘His greatest strength was that even as the rest of India doubted its own capacity as a nation, Nehru never did,’ Nilekani wrote in his first book. ‘These romantic notions of his were backed up by an iron will and a remarkable ability to bridge disagreements.’ He came to appreciate, in particular, ‘the great gift of his charisma: he could talk persuasively and build towering visions’.
The social scientists gathered there that morning hoped that Nilekani would properly explain the towering visions he had built around the identity project. They had read the newspaper stories about it, and were familiar with the interviews he gave on television, but its shape and scope eluded them. How would it change the way money and food were delivered to people whose lives depended on the regular appearance of sustenance? What of the inevitable unintended consequences of the programme? What about the technology to support the identities of a billion people? And would the project allow different classes of people to be sorted more easily, and facilitate discrimination? Dreams and all were fine, but they wanted specifics.
‘As a political scientist, it’s clear that we’re on the threshold of something revolutionary,’ the director said. But he wondered if there were unresolved tensions. ‘Is this a new state in the making?’ It was an academic’s way of confounding a simple question: would the project change the balance of power between citizens and the state? ‘Civil liberties are not straightforward,’ he said.
Nilekani began peaceably, stating the most fundamental truth about his programme. ‘It’s about giving a number to every individual, a database which has one record for every Indian resident,’ he said. ‘There’s really no desire to keep profiling a person.’ He assured them repeatedly that the programme was a government project, which is to say it had the weight of public opinion behind it. He did not address their fears as much as glance by them, saying that the project’s architects would ‘consult a lot of people to make sure we do it properly’.
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He appealed to their humanity, telling them about how millions of Indians could not open a bank account and receive their share of food because their papers were untrustworthy. Meanwhile, cheats and imposters roamed through the country’s welfare delivery systems, pretending to be someone they were not, pillaging food and money that wasn’t theirs to take. ‘Unless we get our hands around this, we won’t be able to do social welfare,’ Nilekani explained. He did not specify then what kind of social welfare he envisaged. Nilekani explained that the cards and passbooks people carried with them were ineffective and bore an expense for society. He walked them through the large numbers India misplaced on each of its many welfare programmes, and gave them a big number and a simple message: the bill probably came in at over a few billion dollars. He wasn’t entirely sure, and couldn’t recall any official studies on the subject. ‘I mean, who wants to admit there’s a problem, right?’ he joked. It was a strange way to create public policy—to act on a premise without evidence.
Nilekani explained the coming era of devices that would capture ‘fingerprints, retina, and even DNA’ and end the scourge of ‘ghosts’ in the system, those nameless men and women who stole rice and dal and gas cylinders. The scholars patiently listened to him talk about a process called ‘de-duplication’, a procedure of elimination so complicated that Nilekani simply said, ‘It’s a massively complex technology. I won’t spend time on that.’ It was a struggle, he said, but ‘once we create the database, we have a powerful tool to make sure welfare reaches the right people. I think we all can agree that if we can be more efficient, it’s a public good.’
Even as he showed them how the project would rescue welfare, he revealed to them its other uses as an aside. The number ‘would make it easy for people to move around the country’. And as the number’s use spread, ‘it will be that much more difficult for someone who has bad intentions to be doing these things because they will have a number, and therefore they can be identified’. Realising what he had just said, he added, ‘We have to do this carefully because we want to make sure we don’t create the surveillance thing . . .’
He assured them, again, that the system would not spin wildly out of control. It would be completely voluntary. If it was useful, people would demand better governance. Meanwhile, democratic processes would keep its uses in check. A soft-spoken sceptic rose, introducing himself as a student of ‘social reality’. Sanjay Palshikar, a professor of political science at the University of Hyderabad, had read enough about identity projects to have serious concerns. He said the number was similar to the practice of branding criminals. ‘Because of tech, the past is again indelible. Governing authorities can go through your past. With technological breakthroughs, it’s possible to have a dynamic view of your life, where governing authorities cannot just look at your past, but also the future—the kind of illnesses you are genetically prone to, et cetera.’
The professor’s voice was toneless; his sentences digressed like footnotes, and his apprehensions came bullet-pointed. The identification project officials caught each other’s attention and exchanged winks, smiling at the wildness of these speculative fears. Ramakumar remembered the look on their faces. ‘They gave you the feeling that he was speaking about something completely irrelevant. The typical scorn that bureaucrats have for academics. Like, the fears being raised were completely baseless. It might have happened in some country, but to think of it happening in India? Complete nonsense,’ he said. The academics were surprised that the possibility of misuse was not a factor in the Authority’s calculations.
More scholars spoke up. One said there had been no proper debate before the project began. Another wondered if the discrimination rampant in India would be given new legs by identification technology. Mukund Padmanabhan, a newspaper editor, declared, ‘This is dressed up in terms of volunteerism, but nothing prevents the state from making this mandatory.’ Yet another registered that citizens would be punished for providing incorrect information, but the government could use private information however it wanted.
One of the professors said, ‘How are you going to ask people for their date of birth when even they have no idea?’
‘Who doesn’t know when they were born?’ an official from the Authority asked, genuinely confounded by this information.
‘Much of India,’ said Ramakumar, the agricultural economist. He explained that dates were of so little use to most rural Indians that they marked time by larger events—the month a prime minister died, the year after a great flood. The room burst into terrible disagreement.
The resistance took Nilekani by surprise, and he spoke rapidly and forcefully. ‘All these civil liberty people have not been asking about why voter data is online, why tax information is online? How come nobody asked these questions before and suddenly they wake up with civil liberties?’ His questions did not take into account the main worry: that the number and everything connected to it put citizens at the mercy of the government. It would make the processes of governance more efficient, but what if the processes themselves were oppressive? Would a tool meant for efficiency deliver oppression more efficiently? He reasoned with them loudly, agitatedly, presenting the clearest distinction between his vision and theirs. ‘I think the question is: are the unintended consequences of this programme sufficient not to do this? If there’s a social benefit we can give three or four hundred million Indians on the margins, if that means we potentially build a system that potentially can be subverted, and therefore it’s a reason for not doing it? That’s not a clear argument. A mobile phone can be much more oppressive than this. I know exactly where you are sitting right now by using a tower. So then should we not have mobile phones?’
The exchange left the scholars uneasy. They had thought Nilekani had come to Shimla to take their apprehensions into account, but it became clear that the identity programme’s course had already been decided. When they left the mountainside town, a hardening of positions had occurred. And mistrust only grew when the Authority published a version of events that mentioned the disagreement in passing, but captured none of its fire.
