Analysis
Peeking out of your pocket
India’s national ID scheme is
‘on schedule’
by | Aman Sethi
Simulated National ID Card of Shri Rahul Gandhi |
In a quiet office off of Mansingh Road in New
Delhi, a small team is working on a secret project. If successful,
this plan will transform India from a ‘soft state’,
open to all sorts of Subcontinental contamination, into a
hard, impenetrable fortress – safe, sure and secure.
The mild-mannered men seated behind large, untidy tables at
the Office of the Registrar General of India patiently explain
that the project is not exactly secret – it’s
just that only the Home Secretary is authorised to speak on
the subject, and he rarely does. They can only confirm what
is already in the public domain: the Multipurpose National
Identity Card (MNIC) project is on schedule; the pilot project
has been initiated; and the first cards are to be issued by
April 2006. The entire system is state-of-the-art –
a symbol of India’s prowess in information technology
and the perfect weapon to battle corruption, inefficiency,
infiltration, terrorism, treason and sedition.
The first time anyone spoke about a national
identification system was in 1992, when the right-wing Sangh
Parivar and its allied organisations staged protests against
the influx of Bangladeshi immigrants into the states of Assam,
Bengal, Delhi and Maharashtra. Arguing that the migration
of the primarily Muslim Bangladeshis was altering the demographic
profile of the country as a whole, they took every opportunity
to air their xenophobic slogan, Infiltrators, Quit India.
In response, the Central Government launched Operation Pushback,
with the expressed purpose of deporting Bangladeshi immigrants
from the capital region. At the time, a major practical problem
was the identification and enumeration of the immigrants.
A meeting was called between the chief ministers of the states
on India’s eastern frontier, which passed a resolution
to issue identity cards to all citizens in border districts.
The government, however, failed to execute the proposal.
In 1998, when the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP)
came to power, with Atal Bihari Vajpayee as prime minister
and L K Advani in charge of the Ministry of Home Affairs,
the party had not forgotten its obsession with ‘aliens’
and ‘anti-nationals’. A report titled “Reforming
the National Security System” observed that illegal
migration had assumed serious proportions. ”There
should be compulsory registration of citizens and non-citizens
living in India,” was its stark recommendation.
To quote Home Minister Advani, the MNIC project
was setup to assist in “checking illegal immigration
and infiltration and in tracing of criminals and subversives,
especially in the border areas of the country.” These
cards were also to be used for the issuing of passports, driving
licenses and ration cards; as well as to receive health care,
admission in educational institutions, employment in both
the public and private sectors; to access life and general
insurance; and to maintain land and property records. The
ministry envisaged a massive information superstructure that
would maintain records on every Indian resident. The task
of carrying out a feasibility study for the project was awarded
to Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), and the MNIC was on its
way.
Category anxieties
A modern nation state consists of a clearly demarcated physical
boundary, as well as a clearly defined body of citizens. The
compulsive needs to demarcate physical space and to identify
people as ‘citizens’ are essential for the processes
of state creation and maintenance. The MNIC project is interesting,
among other things, because it gives us an insight into the
anxieties and insecurities of modern-day India as a nation
state.
The well-regarded sociologist Rogers Brubaker
defines citizenship as “a powerful instrument of social
closure” that establishes “a conceptual, legal
and ideological boundary between citizens and foreigners.”
But how is such a boundary created in the case of an avowedly
multicultural and secular state like India? Attempting
to balance a strong and centralising state on the one hand,
with the demands of a federal, multicultural, secular Constitution
on the other, creates severe category anxieties. What does
it mean to be Indian? How is it different from what it means
to be Pakistani, Nepali or Sri Lankan?
Given that the bulk of the Subcontinent has
gone from being one administrative entity (undivided India)
in 1946 to three separate, sovereign states (India, Pakistan
and Bangladesh) in 1971, this identity crisis is understandable.
We therefore see in India an almost paranoid urge to conclusively
identify the outsider and the infiltrator, simply to make
the category of citizen more meaningful. Currently, if the
government and the stateist media are to be believed, the
nation of India is under threat from Pakistani terrorists,
Bangladeshi Muslim immigrants, Nepali criminals and LTTE rebels.
What makes these ‘infiltrators’ so particularly
dangerous is that they look like ‘us’, talk like
‘us’, and think like ‘us’; in fact,
they are ‘us’.
The process of categorising populations helps
to create the conceptual boundaries between citizen and foreigner
of which Brubaker speaks. Gradually, differences begin to
emerge that reinforce these boundaries. Reams of paper, ration
cards, licenses, passports, voter ID cards – all of
these give us a uniquely ‘Indian’ identity with
respect to state and public institutions; indeed, they are
the glue that holds the nation together. The identity card
is simply the newest way to differentiate between a mass of
people who look the same, speak the same language, and used
to have ancestral properties ‘across the border’.
The outsider is now easily identified as the one without the
national identity card and can subsequently be dealt with
as seen fit.
Theft of identity
While the identification of a ‘normal’ citizen
may prove useful for a state engaged in nation building, the
process of arriving at that recognition is fraught with complexity.
By definition, the process of ‘counting in’ implies
a parallel process of ‘leaving out’. Indeed, the
biggest danger of the MNIC project is that it could create
a vast body of individuals that exist outside of the national
socio-legal framework. Critics of a national identification
system usually make two points. First, that the system will
cause more harm than good if it works. Second, that it won’t
work. MNIC supporters, on the other hand, take it as a given
that the card will be foolproof and secure. Their assumptions
collapse, however, the moment that we begin to study the process
of issuance of the ID cards themselves.
Unlike the United States and other developed
countries, where most citizens have a social security number
and, thus, a fair amount of authentic information in government
databases, the MNIC project aims to start the verification
process from scratch. The government will first carry out
a census-type survey to create a National Population Register,
based on which the cards will be issued. But how will identity
be verified or authenticated? What sort of proof will be required
to obtain a card?
Issuance will obviously require verifiable
documents such as ration cards, voter identity cards, proof
of residence documents, and so on. Given that, in the eyes
of the authorities, the present system of identification is
insufficient, how will the MNIC work when it relies on these
same suspect documents? The problem could actually be accentuated
by the introduction of such a card, because the MNIC will
now bear a legitimacy that the other documents lack. It can
also work the other way. While a misspelling on a ration card
would have simply been an error, it could now imply that the
cardholder is a dangerous subversive using a falsified identity
card.
The larger problem the census authorities
will face is the absence of documentation, particularly in
the hands of the landless poor. This category constitutes
a large percentage of population in the rural areas, who have
no real means of identification and have never needed any.
The same will hold true for a large number of the urban poor,
who will lack property, fixed residence, and birth and death
records. In many cases, the rural and urban poor will also
be without ration cards. The poorest and most vulnerable would
thus run the risk of being labelled aliens, harassed by police,
and stripped of the few rights and assets that they possess.
A similar hysteria can be seen in the current case of Bangladeshi
immigrants in India.
The MNIC project is supposed to be valuable
in the fight against terrorism. Supposedly, keeping a massive
citizenry register would allow security agencies to maintain
tabs on ‘potential terrorists’ and to catch them
well before they strike. A report by the Office of the Privacy
Commissioner of Canada, however, makes the obvious point that
“there is no database containing the names of each and
every ‘bad guy.’” First-time or unknown
terrorists using legitimate identification documents will
not be in law enforcement databanks. It is difficult to see,
therefore, how a national identity system, now matter how
sophisticated, could compensate for such shortcomings. An
obvious, recent example was the March 2004 bombings in Madrid,
which killed at least 190 people. That terror could not be
prevented, even though it is mandatory for all Spanish citizens
to carry identity cards.
While its supporters claim that the MNIC project
will eliminate identity theft, the concentration of large
amounts of sensitive information in one databank, and the
emphasis on making the MNIC the gold standard for all identification
purposes, would only make identity theft more lucrative. The
first signs of growing identity theft are visible in countries
that already rely on personal information stored in databanks.
According to the US Federal Trade Commission, identity
theft has been the top consumer complaint in the US for the
five years in a row.
Programming pogroms
Any system that ensures the rights of individuals based on
whether or not papers are in the right order puts too much
power into the hands of authorities. An examination of the
track record of supposedly secure databanks in Western countries
reveals a history of abuse. In 1994, Business Week magazine
revealed that the US state of Ohio had sold its driver’s
license and car registration lists to a private company for
USD 375,000. In early 1995, more than 500 US Internal Revenue
Service agents were caught prying into the tax records of
American citizens.
Some of the most horrifying instances of the
misuse of census information were observed during the Holocaust
– which was, after all, based on an elaborate system
that required all German Jews to carry identification papers
by the end of 1938. The authorities of the Reich hired IBM’s
German subsidiary, Dehomag, to track entire populations of
Jews across the German empire using unique 5-digit numbers
assigned to each individual. The infamous Auschwitz tattoo
is said to have begun as one of these numbers – a system
of identification that was made possible with a machine less
sophisticated than a modern-day programmable calculator.
It does not take a great leap of imagination
to see how governments controlled by fundamentalist forces
could misuse the demographics information so easily available
in the MNIC database. Indeed, it is important to consider
two factors: whether an identification system is desirable
just because it is technically feasible; and whether the many
instances of prejudiced action against defined communities
by state and central governments in India’s modern history
should not make us a little more wary of the MNIC project.
The communal riots in Gujarat in 2002 and the wholesale targeting
of Muslims in the state by a complicit BJP-run Ahmedabad government
are enough of a reminder of how supposedly ‘classified’
information can be misused. The ruling party members –
who were systematically drawing up the demographic compositions
of residential neighbourhoods months before the 2004 riots
– managed to supplement their information with the records
of the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation.
MNIC proponents like to point out that most
of the information that will be collected for the cards is
already in the public domain. A collation of the information
on ration cards, voter identification cards, insurance schemes
and passports would furnish much of the information that would
eventually find its way onto the MNIC, they claim. What this
argument fails to address is the fact that, in all of the
other schemes referred to, the citizen provides information
on a voluntary basis. Should an individual so choose, he can
refrain from signing up for any of these schemes, thereby
retaining complete control over his privacy and personal information.
On the contrary, the government has made changes to the Indian
Constitution that would make it mandatory for every citizen
to subscribe to the MNIC project.
Human intelligence
Richard Sobel, a Harvard political scientist specialising
in privacy issues, believes that a national identification
system runs contrary to the principle of ‘fair information’
– that information required for one purpose should not
be used for another. For example, personal medical information
should not be accessible to potential employers, if one is
to protect people from workplace discrimination. By putting
all of the information about an individual onto a single card,
the MNIC severely compromises privacy, making the individual
vulnerable to potential discrimination, social targeting and
humiliation.
Identity cards are not simply the ‘proof’
of our identities. They represent an elaborate series of institutions
and processes put in place by both the society and the state.
They also help the state to establish itself as the sole agent
of social control. While state interventions in society are
not inherently negative, moves to map, categorise and monitor
citizens prove problematic for the rights of members of a
free society. After the events of 11 September 2001, the Western
world is gripped by an anxiety that seeks to gather as much
‘human intelligence’ as possible. States are sacrificing
citizens’ rights of freedom and privacy for reasons
of national security. With the MNIC project, spearheaded by
the previous BJP government, Indian authorities are now rushing
headlong into extremely problematic terrain. It is anyone’s
guess how, when and where citizens’ rights could
be trampled on a massive scale when the MNIC database
becomes available to prejudiced authorities.
The MNIC push is part of a proclivity that
seeks technological fixes to deal with vast and complex socio-political
and economic realities and challenges. A solution to terrorism,
crime and corruption would require a comprehensive reshuffling
of existing hierarchies of power. On the other hand, surveillance
and enforcement simply ensure that the status quo can continue.
The Multipurpose National Identity Card is a project
that could create extensive upheavals in an unprepared
society. India is not ready for it. No country is.
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