Becoming digital citizens: covid-19 and urban citizenship regimes in India

ABSTRACT

This article examines how technopolitical response to covid-19 resulted in differentiated urban citizenship regimes in India’s smart cities. Using Isin and Ruppert’s framework, we argue that India’s digital citizens enacted their subjectivities in response to acts of calling, closing and opening in the cyberspace. Acts of calling encouraged citizens to participate and engage with the state online, systematically excluding those who did not have access to digital infrastructures. Acts of closing were implemented through the technologies of the surveillance state diminishing rights of freedom and privacy. In response, digital citizens enacted their political subjectivities through acts of opening by means of online campaigns, petitions and citizen journalism. Although the risk of technocracy remains real, we argue that the interplay of calling, closing and opening digital acts enabled the enactment of digital citizenship in India by raising the old questions of social citizenship rights and new forms of data and digital rights.

KEYWORDS:

• Digital citizenship
• inequality
• smart cities
• covid-19
• India

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. In the wake of the formation of the interim government of Taliban in Afghanistan in September 2021, the arguments for extending refuge for non-Muslim religious minorities fleeing Islamic religious persecution has become vociferous in India.

2. In the Indian Constitution, civil and political rights are provided in the third part as fundamental rights whose violations are justiciable in the court of law by virtue of Article 32 that provides for redress mechanism in the courts of law. In contrast, the socio-economic rights are given in the fourth part as directive principles of state policy that act as guidelines for the state to make policies that enable these rights. The view that social rights are a matter of policy and therefore are within the purview of legislature and negative rights such as those of civil and political rights are enforceable in a court of law have been among the many arguments that led to this dichotomy. For more, refer Jayal (2013).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Deepa Kylasam Iyer

Deepa Kylasam Iyer is a Cambridge Trust-Commonwealth shared scholar at the University of Cambridge. Her research centers on urban citizenship related to work and welfare in the age of data and digitization. She has been previously published in the Journal of Land and Rural Studies, Economic & Political Weekly, South Atlantic Quarterly, The Public Sector, and Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics.

Francis Kuriakose

Francis Kuriakose is an academic and an advisor to Cambridge Development Initiative, United Kingdom. His research examines the changing nature of work in the Anthropocene and the emerging issues of rights and justice from an interdisciplinary perspective. He has published in Economic & Political Weekly, South Atlantic Quarterly, Indian Journal of Labour Economics, and Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics.