State Power and Technological Citizenship in India: From the Postcolonial to the Digital Age

Abstract

In this article we seek to nuance our understanding of the technologically mediated relationship of state and citizen, first, by framing these relations in terms of Michel Foucault's ideas about state power and governmentality, and, second, by using case studies drawn from the Indian experience to highlight particular risks associated with digital governance and biopolitics. An overview of state and social technological interventions in India shows multiple intersections of sovereign and disciplinary powers. Together, these intersections give new meanings to biopower while also sketching a familiar story of the attenuated character of technological citizenship, notwithstanding numerous examples of popular resistance. To address biopolitics, however, a novel set of challenges emerges: The first is to outline a genealogy of Indian biopolitics, going back to the colonial period. The second is to acknowledge the tension between biopolitics and geopolitics: the state's need to distinguish between citizens and residents for the provision of welfare. The third is the neoliberal turn in governance, with the state increasingly withdrawing from direct involvement in the public sphere and turning to the private sector to take its place. We find that the digitization of identification and benefit provision produces new costs and barriers for the poor to access the entitlements of citizenship, leaving them in some cases worse off than before. Moreover, the visibility produced by entry into digital governmentality is accompanied by a new set of risks, including the expropriation of benefits and the loss of existing assets.

Keywords:

• Citizenship
• technological society
• India
• biopolitics
• Aadhaar digital governance

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Kavita Philip and Lilly Irani, in particular, for their help in formulating the conceptual terms of this article. We would also like to thank three anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions and, in particular, the EASTS editors for their patience and support as this article was revised. We acknowledge the support of the Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore for providing the space for the conversations that culminated in this joint article.

Notes

1 The Civil Liability for Nuclear Damage Act, 2010. For an analysis of the act, including the full text see http://www.prsindia.org/billtrack/the-civil-liability-for-nuclear-damage-bill-2010-1042/ (accessed 27 October 2014).

2 It is worth mentioning that Aadhaar (lit. “support,” India's unique identity project), which relies on the latest in digital database technologies and biometrics, reflects a now well-established technological practice of “leapfrogging” what were once assumed to be fixed stages of development through the application of the latest technologies on a mass scale (Singh 1999). The starting points for a leapfrogging strategy in India were the atomic energy project (1948), the space program (1961), and the Electronics Commission (1963). The pioneering space scientist Vikram Sarabhai explicitly spelled out the underlying logic of this approach when he argued in a policy document published in 1970 that India should build its own satellites for development and communication (Atomic Energy Commission 1970). The early manufacture of cheap, portable transistors in state-owned factories was followed by terrestrial transponders in the form of the SITE project, which inaugurated the televisual revolution. These projects would in turn be reinforced by the steady upgrading of satellite capacities through the INSAT series of satellites. The exemplary moment of leapfrogging was in the telecom sector. Public call booths and low-cost wired networks using technologies adapted by Sam Pitroda and his C-DOT team were soon followed by cell phones and various wireless technologies deployed on a mass scale, well before such access was commonplace in more developed countries (Pitroda and Pitke 2011).

3 See http://uidai.gov.in/ (accessed 29 October 2014).

4 Case studies are drawn from a multisited national project directed by Ashish Rajadhyaksha at the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society (CSCS), Bangalore, entitled The Identity Project: An Inquiry into the Unique Identity Initiative (Rajadhyaksha 2013). The results of this project were published as an e-book, In the Wake of Aadhaar: The Digital Ecosystem of Governance in India (CSCS: Bangalore, 2013). Interviews were conducted by Ashish Rajadhyaksha, Nafis Hasan, S. Ananth, Bhuvaneshwari Raman, and Zainab Bawa. Funds for the Identity Project were provided by the Ford Foundation, Delhi.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Itty Abraham

Itty Abraham's research interests include nuclear power, the politics of the new digital technologies, and histories of biopolitics. His most recent book is How India Became Territorial: Foreign Policy, Diaspora, Geopolitics (2014).

Ashish Rajadhyaksha

Ashish Rajadhyaksha was principal investigator of the Identity Project conducted by the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, Bangalore, on the Government of India's Aadhaar project between 2009 and 2012. Among his other writings, he is the author of the book Indian Cinema in the Time of Celluloid: From Bollywood to the Emergency (2009).