“We’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.”
∼ Cheshire Cat, Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
On February 23, 2020, parts of Delhi began to mysteriously burn. From where I was living at that time in the city, I couldn’t see any smoke billowing or hear people screaming or running. Life continued as usual. It was from students and activists on Twitter (now X), that I began to hear about the beginnings of the Delhi pogrom that lasted, unbroken and unhindered, for five days, while entire neighbourhoods burned. Delhi was already reeling from violence that had been unleashed on protestors and particularly student activists rallying against the Citizenship Amendment Act which sought to discriminate against people on the basis of religion. This was followed by incendiary campaign speeches and the deliberate construction and fanning of communal sentiments, particularly by Kapil Mishra, recorded live and replayed later at the Delhi high court, even as five years later, the evidence had curiously disappeared from police records.
On February 23, 2025, on the eve of the India-Pakistan cricket match in Dubai for the Champions Trophy, a 15-year-old boy was ‘overheard’ praising the Pakistani cricket team. Later that day, the Malvan Municipal Corporation in Maharashtra, in clear violation of a Supreme Court order from last year, demolished his home. This was after Hindutva and right-wing factions in the area stormed into his house, and destroyed his father’s scrap dealing business, while the police arrested the entire family. The Delhi Police cheekily tweeted, “We heard two loud noises. One is “Indiaaa..India!”, and another is probably of broken televisions. Can you please confirm?” In a country with a (growing) penchant for religious fanaticism, State violence, and a deeply entrenched obsession and parasocial relationship with cricketers, all of these events are part of a motley of ‘madness’. This form of madness is not so much a result of an unmaking of reason and sanity, but one that is a fundamental, essentialised life condition, a pulsating reverberation born out of decades of communal violence, and violence baked into State politics and history. Everyone I know in the Indian subcontinent today has a glazed look, profoundly and perennially held hostage to some form of this madness. It is inescapable, and it is everywhere.
Perhaps the most evocative etchings of this madness, or maddening characteristic of life in India in recent times has been in Rahul Bhatia’s acclaimed book The New India: The Unmaking of the World’s Largest Democracy, published in 2024. The book, while exploring the historical and socio-political origins of the world’s largest identification programme – ‘Aadhaar’, nevertheless I think, is better described as a treatise on madness, opening with the almost folkloric lines – “A decade or so ago, people I loved began to go mad.”
Bhatia opens the book with a peek into the horrifying Delhi pogrom of 2020 and the various shades of madness that marked it. The madness of entire, primarily poor, Muslim neighbourhoods in North east Delhi burning for days without State intervention, burning as a consequence of explicit Hindu right wing targeted action and a complete abrogation of law and humanity; the madness of Hindu neighbours who were ready to kill their Muslim co-inhabitants, of the absolute certainty in those moments that anything could happen at any time, where nothing made sense. In another form of madness, the pogrom never came to my doorstep, to another neighbourhood in Delhi populated by affluent, primarily upper caste Hindu Bengalis. The only hint of the pogrom that floated in was in an entirely perverse paranoia fuelled by Islamophobia. Overnight, people resorted to paying for additional ‘night guards’, essentially privatised security who would guard the gates of the rich and the elite, the vanguards of sanity, liberalism, and reason against the Muslim rioters they believed were sure to storm their neighbourhoods. The Islamophobia disguised as paranoia was heightened because we were bearing witness to “dangerous hours” as the book recounts from an interview with a victim – “times when the rules of life and man were suddenly lifted.”
Before the law
In Franz Kafka’s 1915 short story titled, ‘Before the Law’, the story begins with the words – “Before the law stands a doorkeeper.” The story chronicles the persistent, somewhat strange desire of a man waiting all his life, quite literally onto death, to be given entry into the ‘Law’. On the verge of death, when the man asks the mysterious doorkeeper his final question about why there was never anyone else, he could see that was just as persistent as him to gain admission, he is told that this gateway was made exclusively for him, before the doorkeeper shuts the gate on his dying face. The ‘Law’ has no identity in the story, except for being an obstacle, and a fevered dream, having no mercy for age or earnestness. Justice is not a character in the story.
In a fatalistic reading of this parable, man has no hope to begin with. There is a singular gateway to the ‘Law’ designed specifically for him – it’s one man’s futility against a system designed singularly to deny him his entitlements. You are vanquished before and in full public view of the Law. In Bhatia’s book, one of his interviewees – Nisar, who was subjected to horrific violence during the Delhi pogrom – could very well be the protagonist of Kafka’s story, with the rest of us bystanders – the quiet and consenting public, the criminal justice system, the media, the courts and the police, all becoming the doorkeeper.
To those of us who have a foot in the gateway of Law, and act as doorkeepers, as well as interpreters of the Law’s desire, this puts us in a peculiar position. This is precisely because we know, at least in some parts, that the Law is an integral part of this madness. Nisar has insisted on following court orders, making regular trips to the local courts where the recording of witness testimony takes years, if at all, and witnesses frequently die, buried in paperwork and administrative nightmares. The madness is the slow “killing of time” as the book recalls, where Nisar is finally allowed to record his testimony before the court, 887 days after his escape from the Hindu fanatic murdering crowd during the pogrom and the police takes over two years to submit video footage to the court. Even so, Nisar is his own brand of ‘mad’, continuing despite everything, with the support of Islamic scholars and friends and sheer persistence and faith.
But the one question that animates the book is this – “where is the poison coming from?” What is the root of this madness? Bhatia undertakes this mammoth task of excavating history and connecting it to contemporary acts of ‘madness’ and finding tentacular connections to ‘Aadhaar’ – the largest biometric technology fuelled digital identity program in the world. Bhatia finds, the resonant beats of violence and securitisation, spread across a century of familiar beats in the subcontinent, all visible in the deployment of Aadhaar in India today. As Aadhaar’s tentacular growth spreads from welfare and banking, law and governance, speech and privacy, to citizenship and border control, Bhatia’s piercing gaze on violence and madness is difficult to dismiss.
It is this massive technological advancement, within the architect of a maddening underlying architecture of violence, that makes India a land of many kinds of madness, of madness disguised in common parlance as ‘contradictions’, and beyond the occasional moments of shock, frequently turns into a laughable paradox that is symptomatic of life in this part of the world. To survive here must mean ignoring paradoxes and continuing with life and the act of living. Life is hard, and moments of madness must be dismissed, to ensure the living. Except the living is very different for different kinds of people. And the script of living is now digitised, and essentialised.
Consider the phenomenal impact on 810 million people in the country who have had to comply with the new e-KYC mandate of the government to avail food rations, not counting the 130 million more who would be added to the list if the government had conducted the census by now. The rationale for e-KYC is simple – the beneficiaries need only provide an Aadhaar card and be verified biometrically. But as several on ground reports have pointed out, the process is riddled with both technological and analogue snags. Ration cards, introduced in an analogue era with different policy priorities must be matched perfectly with the technologically and biometrically fortified Aadhaar database. Where this is not possible, one must update their Aadhaar card, which then creates new mismatches with a plethora of other lists and databases it connects to – employment records, pension lists, banking information, scholarship and health records; a deck of cards that sits ready to fall apart or be dismantled at any stage. The Guidelines, adopted by every state in India, painstakingly detail all the conditions for delinking, locking, deduplication, directed at unearthing fraudulent accounts.
Perhaps madness is in making people beholden to systems that demand your labour and proof of life, and accuracy to datasets instead of automatic provisioning of food, which in India, is a fundamental right and also enshrined in the National Food Security Act 2013. Bhatia demonstrates this obsessive penchant for systems efficiency and processes in the way the Bharatiya Janta Party (BJP)-Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) sees itself, as a ‘nice neural network’, an infrastructure designed for mass deployment of ideas and tactics, proud of its methodical and almost corporatised functioning. While the BJP-RSS is not a monolith, it has been clear for a while that their utopian dream of a Hindu nation is tied, inextricably with technological and administrative competence, explicit in their insistence on Aadhaar, not just for welfare, but also for and during pogroms, for population mapping and border control.
Violence can be perpetrated, rarified, sorted, and deployed strategically with technology, and in this context, Aadhaar becomes an artefact of tremendous power and possibility in the hands of the State. It becomes a constitutive element in the construct of India as a Hindu fortified nation with medieval pride and modern technological State power, a perverse abstraction of a postcolonial ‘Global South’ nation that is ready to take on the world. So, when Nandan Nilekani, the architect of Aadhaar says, “India’s digital transformation began with Aadhaar”, he is not wrong. It is a particular form of digital transformation that is birthed with the introduction of Aadhaar.
Nilekani now wants to take the ‘digital public infrastructure’ (DPI) story to the world, ambitiously targeting 50 countries in the next five years. He proudly uses the numbers in India to leverage the DPI story – 1.3 billion people with Aadhaar cards, who are using it “80 billion times a day”, because they had “all the pieces to participate in an economy: identity, bank account and mobile connectivity.” The living for the 1.3 billion, if not most ostensibly for the 810 million who are dependent on State welfare, is contingent on the 80 billion times use case – for food rations, scholarships, hospitals and every other way that the State can, and does mediate the living. The use cases that denote success for Nilekani, are, therefore, also evidence of the enforced program of welfare and living.
After the law
There is another version of Kafka’s story that is possible. What if in his original story, the man is allowed to enter the doorway of Law. What would await him on the other side of the doorway – another doorkeeper insistent on some obscure administrative rule, proof of life even if he was dead, or a Law that while being allowed to him, was nevertheless designed to not serve him?
In the last few months, as I spent my time travelling through the country and interviewing various experts – policy professionals, consultants, academics, and government officials for my doctoral project on Aadhaar and citizenship, this architecture of violence and technologised mad living became even more visible, because no one I spoke to denied it. I walked into rooms expecting to be rebuffed, ridiculed, even scolded for adopting an unrealistic ‘anti-India Western’ gaze, except, everyone I spoke to with any modicum of power and agency in the system, agreed, that Aadhaar is a mammoth techno-administrative exercise of Statecraft, and therefore, bound to be entangled in questions of citizenship and violence.
When I raised the question of the role of law, counter-intuitively, the people who benefitted the most in the trade of Aadhaar – its associated technologies and applications, while accepting the ‘madness of our times’ with a sad shake of their heads, expressed the most fervent desire for the ‘Law’. The madness of the violence and the State to them was almost as a happenstance removed from them. The madness was always elsewhere – within corrupt government departments, policing and data management practices, the poor and ignorant masses that chose violence, but were otherwise perfect as a consumer base, as a market ready for mass deployment of artificial intelligence. The solution, therefore, also was removed from them, helpfully found in the Law. Their trade in the business of digital identity, in India, and now increasingly across the globe depends most ostensibly on the application of the Law – a law that is modern and universal, global in its terminology, and concomitant of economic libertarianism and market-based passive public policy.
If the Law was freshly enacted and new, it held more possibilities for them to tackle this new age madness – so something like the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023, with its yet to be notified Rules, and yet to be set up Data Protection Board of India, and frameworks that erode transparency by watering down Constitutional rights such as the right to information becomes the perfect panacea to the violence we see. It is only when I met seasoned activists and Bhatia himself, that I began to see the ghosts of the non-modern, the constitutive elements of violence, not as removed from us, but very much reposed in us and the world we constitute. The Law in their vision becomes then a strategic tool to be used in an unfair game, to whatever little purposes it can yield, knowing that the game is rigged and there are always doorkeepers before and after the Law.
One activist-lawyer I interviewed in Delhi told me “The law is about visibility”, it is to “compel the State to make overt statements.” When I ask her if the law ever works, she tells me that the law never works – “If the law works, then why does poverty exist?” Yet, people like her regularly use the law. When I ask her why, she says some of them always knew what has now come to pass, but when they used the law, particularly in courts, it was to make things more evident, “to show in court, to make people understand.” Law, even if coded in violence, could be used as a chronicler of its times, as a reluctant biographer, despite itself.
Perhaps the most enduring lesson I learnt from Bhatia’s book was a lesson on transgressiveness. Nisar persists not because, but despite the Law. The activists I spoke to use the Law to extract what they can from it, as an act of disobedience. If we live in a mad world, we must all be mad, as the Cheshire Cat reminds us in Alice in Wonderland, and we can all deploy it in ways that matter to us. Madness is also never static. It is transmutable. It is a social construct of a particular time, of a particular society and its norms. It is completely possible, as Foucault reminds us, that in some other time, we will begin to notice it’s strangeness – in the case of India, the strangeness of the kinship between this madness and State violence, when this particular form of madness will no longer be acceptable. In India, despite violence and history leaving an indelible mark on people and their madness, also witnesses transgressive moments every day in its courts and its streets, an unspoken kind of madness we have relegated to activists and people like Nisar. Perhaps it is yet another kind of unnamed madness which persists despite the Law.
Shohini Sengupta is a Teaching Fellow and a Ph.D. candidate at the Faculty of Law & Justice, UNSW, Sydney, and an Associate Professor at the Jindal School of Banking & Finance, India. Her doctoral research is on Aadhaar and the consequences of financial citizenship in India. She tweets here.
