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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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