Prehistory of Aadhaar: Body, Law, and Technology as Postcolonial Assemblage

Abstract

This article seeks to go beyond the binary of elite concerns over privacy versus subaltern desires for recognition to understand the huge Indian biometric project, Aadhaar. It offers a prehistory of Aadhaar, framed not in terms of rights and wrongs, important as they are, but as the most recent project in the shaping of modern social and political power through the technologically mediated intersection of the law and the body. Key moments of technopolitical reduction of the physical body—fingerprinting, DNA tests, brain scans, polygraphs, and truth serums—become turning points in a process that have joined personal identity with evidentiary truth to overcome centuries of judicial skepticism. Due to its combined technopolitical and biological foundations, the new national database commands a high degree of social and political confidence as reflected in the unplanned and unforeseen expansion of Aadhaar. In this emergent database society, intersections of law, body, and technoscience engender new human networks: temporary alliances among material forces, inanimate techniques, discourses, norms, and institutions, organized around the technologically mediated body. This article proposes in conclusion that, as a result of these developments, we are likely to see the generation of new and unverifiable conceptions of what we mean by and how we represent the ultimate human network, “society.”

• Aadhaar
• national database
• Supreme Court of India
• Selvi and Others v. Karnataka
• DNA fingerprinting
• brain scans
• polygraph
• truth serum

Acknowledgments

Earlier versions of this article were presented at the Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Kyoto University; at Tembusu College of the National University of Singapore (NUS); as a keynote lecture at the annual meeting of the Australian Sociological Association, Cairns; and as the second Sage-CRG Public Lecture, Presidency College, Kolkata. My thanks to the organizers of these events for their invitations and hospitality, to the digital cultures reading group at the Asia Research Institute, NUS, Lilli Irani, and to Chitra Venkataramani for her interrogations. I received excellent advice and suggestions from two anonymous reviewers, for which I am very grateful. Above all, my sincere thanks go to the keen eyes and immense patience of the organizers of this special issue and the editors of this journal.

Notes

¹ Magistrate’s Court case no. 17 of 1988, petitioner Elaveettil Manoj (minor) and counterpetitioner Alora Veettil Kunhiraman, Tellicherry, Kerala, available at the Pushpa M. Bhargava Foundation, Folder DNA Fingerprinting, Center for Cellular and Molecular Biology, Hyderabad.

² For an early analysis of the dangers of mismatching during DNA testing, see Lewontin 1992.

³ Magistrate’s Court case no. 17 of 1988, 12–13.

⁴ The Aadhaar database is not the first “universal” Indian database: the decennial census long preceded it. The first official census in India was conducted in 1871, although arguably the founding moment could be pushed back even further to 1760 (Cohn 1987: 232). As with all technologies of enumeration, census taking led to the enforcement of novel social norms and standards, such as defining manhood from the age of twelve and the corresponding age of the woman at ten. Scholars have pointed in particular to the effect of the census on the institution of caste, broadly arguing that census taking reinforced caste as a form of social distinction and became a means for its reproduction over time and homogenization across space (Appadurai 1996). The census, Bernard S. Cohn (1987) concludes, played no small part in making Indian culture and society “objective” to themselves. For another discussion of how India came to understand itself, see the work of historian Chris Bayly (2000).

⁵ Discussions of database society typically focus on the loss of personal autonomy. When the state is the progenitor and regulator of the universal database, the political implications are usually framed in terms of the dangers and risks of a world of total surveillance. In the interests of security, the state now has easy access to information long considered private, from phone records to bank accounts. Advances in facial recognition technology and behavior profiling through artificial intelligence seek to predict illegal political actions and to identify their agents before they happen, leading to what was once the domain of science fiction increasingly becoming a real possibility in major global metropolises. The loss of privacy justified by the demands of state security increasingly produces an illiberal political field where personal autonomy and independence have become endangered values. On the economic front, corporations have been quick to see commercial advantage in the effort to monetize enormous databases by collecting all kinds of information about everyday behavior. In an uncanny reversal of the usual modes of data collection that were historically established, the most technologically sophisticated consumers now voluntarily forgo extraordinary amounts of private information for commercial use, from health records and eating patterns to the mapping of desires and pathways of physical movement. Retaining control over personal information is now so challenging that the desire to protect personal sovereignty seems entirely quixotic.

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Itty Abraham

Itty Abraham is head of the Department of Southeast Asian Studies at the National University of Singapore. His research interests include science and technology studies, international relations, and postcolonial theory. His recent book, How India Became Territorial: Foreign Policy, Diaspora, Geopolitics (2014), is soon to be released in paperback.