Links between technology and authoritarians

People are no longer important: instead our government goes on to sell our data to a panoply of companies. The links between technology and authoritarians are not new — in 2012, documents exposed IBM’s pivotal role in six phases of the Holocaust: identification, expulsion from society, confiscation, ghettoization, deportation, and even extermination.

Although Aadhaar is not a proof of citizenship (per Section 9 of the Aadhaar Act), the biometrics of those not included in the National Register of Citizens in Assam will apparently be stored in order to prevent them from enrolling for Aadhaar elsewhere in India: a move troublingly reminiscent of golden stars sewed onto blazers.

Despite the function creep of Aadhaar across public and private subsidies, programmes, and services, the distance traversed by the public movement against Aadhaar is important: starting from 2010-11, when the pioneers of the resistance had to convince people of the dangers of sharing data sans protection and why we should worry about a private company wanting to store our fingerprints for posterity (and profit), we are now in a world where surveillance has become as ubiquitous as problem as the climate crisis (if not as intractable).

One year from the Supreme Court's Aadhaar judgment, we have to be careful we don’t miss the woods — the nuances of the fight against Aadhaar — for the proverbial trees. The fight is not (just) against Aadhaar — it is about power and agency, and retaining the full complexity of your humanness at a time when politics is focused on reducing you to a single category, an anonymous data point, a completely transparent subject.

The danger with deploying big data is that, by knowing too much about you, it reduces you to too little.

While a data protection law — particularly one rooted in the rhetoric of “furthering the data economy” — cannot redeem the Aadhaar project’s failings, its passage is important. What we are seeing with the progress of data protection legislation mirrors the scrutiny of Aadhaar in the courts — too little moving too slow and delivered too late, hindered at every step by vested (not to say corporate) interests. The government has amended the Aadhaar Act, talked about a policy for community data and non-personal data, even sold off vehicle registration data — all without even a basic framework to protect our data.

Surely anyone watching the Supreme Court today can’t help but yearn for the relatively heady days of 2017 and 2018, with the highlight being the affirmation of the right to privacy in all its facets including the right to sexual expression.

Today we are witnessing a Supreme Court in ignominy, expediting the NRC, closing its eyes to egregious human rights abuses in Kashmir, and most recently directing the question of whether social media accounts should be linked to Aadhaar back to the government. What would it take for the court to reiterate its own judgment, to stand for the most basic and radical standards in the Constitution?

We need to realize that Aadhaar was never only about empowering people but instead about reducing nuance to utter illegibility while pushing inexorably towards extreme legibility, and towards consolidation of power.

Even as an upcoming DNA bill envisages creating a central database for DNA data, and as Delhi government begins installing CCTV cameras all over the city including schools, citizens must mount a constant, unrelenting vigilance.

Scott Skinner-Thompson introduces the idea of a performative expressive privacy against an ever surveilling society. We’re seeing instances of it in India — last week, Adivasi residents of Pathalgarhi villages in Jharkhand took a leaf out of this book when they publicly rejected Aadhaar, on apprehensions that it eases exploitation of Adivasis and their resources by outsiders.

The unique identification system equates Adivasis with the ‘aam aadmi’ (common man), they said. We too need to remind those managing the Aadhaar project that we who are common aren't so commonplace as to be reduced to a statistic.

(Ria Singh Sawhney is an advocate while Godavar is a writer-activist. They are both members of the Rethink Aadhaar campaign which is seeking to expand the conversation around the Aadhaar project. Ria also worked on the challenge to the Aadhaar Amendments Act and is currently appearing for the Internet Freedom Foundation in the WhatsApp traceability case)