What is Aadhaar? An identity card, a digital identity project? Its architects called it a foundation, but foundation to what – a digitised India?
The genealogy of the Unique Identity (UID) project is a much more complex history of mathematics, control systems, geopolitics and security state. To conclude authoritatively what Aadhaar is and what is its purpose – it is a cybernetic system of control that has been implemented on democratic systems in India to control people and various economic, governance and social systems at large.
The recent developments with several individuals’ Aadhaar being de-activated has created a flurry of concerned activity among the political class in India about the dangers of this system. The UID project allows the institutions in India to control various aspects of an individual’s life by using their information to make decisions for them. These decisions can range from access to welfare to filing taxes to even being allowed to vote or being controlled throughout their lifetime using electronic governance systems.
Now, losing Aadhaar is considered an electronic death of an individual with no way to access the state services in a digital society. This control of the individual is being carried out by the state through a cybernetic apparatus that has been built over the last decade with falsified claims and unconstitutional mechanisms. It is important to understand what exactly this system is before one pushes for changes to it.
The application of cybernetics
Cybernetics is a science of feedback and communication part of systems theory with several intersections with mathematics, control systems, biology, psychology and social systems. It was proposed by celebrated mathematician Norbert Wiener in his book Cybernetics: or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine published in 1948.
Wiener proposed this new theory after completing work on using control systems to help the US Navy with automatic aiming and firing of anti-aircraft guns during the World War II. He later questioned the use of cybernetics on humans in the society pondering the social questions of automation through his book The Human Use of Human Beings published in 1950.
An important application of this science was carried out in China as part of their population control One-Child Policy. Chinese Cybernetics was directly influenced by Wiener’s works, which generated interest among Qian Xuesen, the famed Chinese aerospace engineer and cyberneticist who is considered as the father of the Chinese missile programme.
Chinese policymakers applied cybernetics to optimally compute its ideal population and enforce their One Child Policy. This resulted in a chaos of un-registered “black children” across rural China, with many unable to register with the state to access schools, medical and participation in the Chinese society mediated through the State.
Cybernetics transformed the scientific community and made several scientists apply these principles in their own field. Cybernetics pushed a new wave of thought resulting in many advances in scientific instruments and pushed for its greatest problem, the creation of a cybernetic brain, what we now call Artificial Intelligence. It also propeled new ideas and thought experiments on what a cyborg would be, a cybernetic organism (human or animal) augmented and controlled with machines.
Cybernetics not only generated interest among the scientific community but also within sci-fiction communities generating the genre of cyber-punk and its futuristic cybernetic imaginations of control.
Wiener’s India visit and his influence
For seven months in 1955, Wiener was at Indian Statistical Institute (ISI) at the invitation of Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis, India’s famed statistician and scientist. For Mahalanobis, who led India’s push for usage of computers in planning, statistics was not just a field of mathematics, but a technology in itself.
Wiener gave about 60 lectures on his work, leading to Indians working on Systems Engineering and its application, which helped India in census and centralised planning part of the Planning Commission. The mathematician’s presence in India pushed for a flurry of interest in cybernetics among Indian academics at the ISI, University of Delhi and Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) in the 1960s.
At CSIR, India’s research and development organisation that was tasked to promote scientific research, a cybernetic group emerged under the leadership of Amitava Ghosal, looking into problems of operations research that could be used in economic planning and development. This group was directly influenced by Stafford Beer, who took cybernetics to the field of management through his book Cybernetics and Management. Beer later took his ideas and worked on the famous “Project CyberSyn” in Allende’s Chile.
These ideas of cybernetics and management were adopted within the Indian software industry, under the leadership of F.C. Kohli at the Tata Consulting Services (TCS). He helped set up the Systems Engineering & Cybernetics Centre (SECC) in TCS at Hyderabad under the leadership of P.N. Murthy, a professor in Aeronautics. Kohli was a student of Wiener and was familiar with his work at MIT.
Cybernetics and the Soviet Union
The Indian cybernetics programme was part of the apparatus created for centralised planning under the Planning Commission with usage of computers for economic development, ideas that were borrowed from the Soviet Union.
Cybernetics was initially considered a capitalist pseudoscience under Stalin and was ignored due to its American roots. This changed after the death of Stalin and there was a push within the scientific and military apparatus of the Soviet Union on the applications of cybernetics. The Soviet Union quickly pushed for a Council of Cybernetics which lead initiatives in cybernetics while competing with their American counterparts, which continuously kept tabs on what was happening behind the iron curtain.
Cybernetics quickly started fading from the society post 1980s, with the evolution of informatics and personal computing across the world. In the aftermath of the split of the USSR, multiple arms of the World Bank and western multilateral institutes started working on economic development of Eastern European countries that were part of the USSR.
How Estonia became a ‘Digital Republic’
The Institute of Cybernetics that was setup in Estonia in the 1960s became an important site for the digital age in 2000. In 1997, an Estonian company Cybernetica was established by the people who were part of the Institute of Cybernetics focusing on delivering integrated systems, maritime communications and surveillance, as well as continuing research into cryptography and protocols.
Cybernetica developed technologies of digital identities, digital signatures and platform governance solutions (X-Road) for Estonia. X- Road became the backbone of digital governance in Estonia offering e-governance solutions to the citizens of Estonia.
The company also built solutions for electronic customs, tax surveillance and electronic voting systems that were used in Estonian elections. Estonia became a site of digital experiments which materialised cybernetic ideas for modern information society. These ideas that evolved quickly lead to Estonia being recognised across the world as a “Digital Republic”.
Also read: ‘Not Proof of Citizenship or Date of Birth’: New Aadhaar Cards Carry More Prominent Disclaimers
The Andhra Pradesh experiment and UID project
The Estonian cybernetic dreams did not just remain in Estonia but travelled across the global capital networks of the World Bank. In 2000, Hyderabad emerged as another important site of e-governance experiments, helping create a global supply chain of Information Technology.
The Estonian experiments quickly became part of Andhra Pradesh’s information technology strategy under former IT secretary J Satyanarayana. The idea of electronic identity programme became a part of the national task force on IT and Software Development setup in 1998, post-Kargil War review committee’s recommendation of an electronic smart card.
Later, the concept of a smart card took the shape of Andhra Pradesh Smart Card Project in 2006. As a part of of this project, biometrics in payments was being experimented in the southern state.
Notably, these ideas of digital identity, payments and creation of a digital economy was being lobbied heavily by India’s domestic IT sector and were given a concrete shape for governance purpose through the National E-Governance Plan, advocated by Satyanarayana and Nandan Nilekani’s E-Government Foundation to the 2nd Administrative Reforms Commission.
The UID project, while promising economic development through the centralised planning part of the Planning Commission, also gave control over individuals to the state.
Post the 26/11 Mumbai attacks, the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) wanted to identify and control every individual in India. Aadhaar offered this power to the security state with surveillance systems that were being built as part of the policing systems around it like NATGRID, CCTNS, GSTN and other surveillance infrastructures.
Also read: Security Bug in MCA Portal Leaked Aadhaar-Based KYC Details of India’s Top Industrialists
Right to Privacy
The tussle between the Planning Commission and MHA on who gets to implement Aadhaar resulted in a split of how the UID project can be implemented in India.
The MHA was allowed to collect biometrics in border states, while the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) was allowed to issue Aadhaar within mainland states in India. These differences between economic arms and the security state have come to an end post the Supreme Court of India’s verdict on Aadhaar, with increased cooperation among the UIDAI and the MHA. This is visible with the recent de-activation of Aadhaar numbers of people in Assam and across India being carried out by UIDAI at the request of various policing departments and foreign tribunals.
The increased co-operation between capital and state apparatus is helping provide more control over individuals using applications of cybernetics (control systems). The forced implementation of Aadhaar was opposed by Indian activists in the court as they questioned that the project was against the fundamental right to privacy. But these rights have not been embedded into the control systems, which continue to remain the same way with no changes in its design due to the interests of economic actors who opposed privacy on the grounds of recent evolutions in surveillance capitalism.
The Aadhaar project thus became an instrument of control that can be used by the government to control individuals. The continuous push by the state to update details by standing in queues, gives the state more control over its citizens. Shonini Sengupta, calls this process the creation of an “Ideal Cyborg” by the Indian state, where the state has complete control over the cyborgs (Indians in this case).
In the case of Project CybernSyn, Stafford Beer was thinking about how to design cybernetics systems with freedoms in mind. In the case of Indian cybernetic systems, they have been designed with the need to control the populations.
As long as the design does not change, these systems will promote control over us to whoever has the switch to turn them off. Nilekani and the Kormangala Boys who retain the power to design these systems along with the bureaucratic apparatus that promotes them, continue to hold the switches presently. There is a need to reverse this relationship to take control back by citizens over their digital lives that are being driven by broken codes written by unaccountable individuals.
Srinivas Kodali is a researcher on digitisation and a hacktivist.
