What Aadhaar apologists don’t get about privacy or welfare
Two pieces, separated by eight months and reading almost exactly alike but for the minor embellishments via personal touches, such as the choice of Aadhaar-less habitat (an islet in the Maldives or abode of the Naga sadhus), echo the same, much-debunked points conflating a concern for privacy and security as mere “elite paranoia”.
While the writers of these two pieces are both senior journalists, at least when his piece was published in April 2017, Manu Joseph hadn’t read the Right To Privacy judgment that the Supreme Court pronounced on August 24, 2017. Unfortunately, for Shekhar Gupta, who dismisses most of the criticism directed at Aadhaar as a “phobia” of the “upper crust, upper class, wine 'n' cheese Netflix-watching social media elite”, even that excuse doesn’t exist.
The landmark Supreme Court judgment tore into precisely these vain, purely ludicrous points that privacy is only a matter for elites, who fear “1984 has arrived”. Privacy, now a fundamental constitutional right guaranteed by the highest court in India, is as much about bodily integrity, the right to be not discriminated on the basis of bodily and sexual proclivities, the right to carve out an individuality impacting everyone human, every citizen, irrespective of class or crust, as it’s about having a healthy civic life.
In fact, privacy as fundamental right is a shield for those harassed by the state the most – LGBTQ, who also happen to be poor. While the “elites” have always had their “safe spaces”, it was the poor who suffered the most ignominy and discrimination, not just legal but also social and cultural, for the want of a real, tangible concept and right to privacy.
It must be noted that both Gupta and Joseph, in addition to unseeing the mountains of criticism piling on Aadhaar since its inception, also jeer at the critics as “the Luddities”, or as frightful as the Gauls who feared the sky would fall on their heads. Words like “hysteria”, “overblown fears”, “phobia”, “sabotage” are thrown around with abandon, and the use of irony is excessive in both the pieces. It’s as if they know theirs is a losing argument, which must nevertheless be garnished with a high dose of pointlessly contrarian Kool-Aid.
This is the classic strategy of not engaging with the criticism at all, while caricaturing the critics as paranoids in search of victimhood. Neither Joseph nor Gupta can claim to have any substantial understanding of how the technology and the technocracy that they have rested their faith in, work, besides the promotional politics behind the state’s need to impose them upon citizens.
This tech-illiteracy is betrayed when Gupta compares the resistance to Aadhaar to the fear of the bubonic plague, or when Joseph claims “giving biometrics to Modi” (by which he probably means the government, but we can’t be sure) is the same as offering up personal information on different platforms such as social media, banks, travel interfaces such as airports and railways, or just while ordering a cab on your smartphone app. What both of them miss is the element of consent in the former versus the aspect of coercion in the latter (the whole government-driven mandatory-voluntary shebang of Aadhaar). What they also miss is resistance to abuse of our informational selves and informational self-determination, an integral part of human existence now and also reiterated by the privacy judgment, is less about being a Luddite and more about trying to be self-aware citizens of a democratic republic.
Let’s look at how utterly selective Gupta and Joseph have been with what they think can be printed as “issues” with Aadhaar. While Joseph mentions one particular case of information leak from Aadhaar database, he urges it’s an individual act of transgression by a banking official, therefore nothing to worry about. What Joseph completely evades are the myriad examples in which government websites were leaking Aadhaar data, how the entire portal was available with commercial entities for a little price, how enrollment centres were selling off Aadhaar data to companies mining for the “new oil”, how the Aadhaar Act, 2016, itself was flouted by the government when it made the UID mandatory despite it being, legally, voluntary.
Similarly, Gupta, despite penning the piece after the gross exposé of the UIDAI allowing admin proliferation, and admins selling admin rights to others for just Rs 500, goes on to claim that somehow this revelation – the latest in a long line of Aadhaar breaches, leaks, hacks, sell-offs talked about in mainstream and social media – has nothing to do with the concerns aired by those he calls “Aadhaarophobics”. The failure to see the connections staring at his face can only mean two things: one, Gupta doesn’t understand how Aadhaar works; or two, he thinks we need to all grow up and learn to love Aadhaar, in spite of its abysmal record.
Which brings us to the point about state surveillance, which both Joseph and Gupta say are natural and inevitable part of not living in a jungle. While Gupta says every state surveils, and the government wasn’t dependent on Aadhaar for doing that, Joseph ridicules the Aadhaar-sceptics, saying anyone with a smartphone or a PAN card, or a bank account, is liable to be spied upon. Gupta says if he wanted to protect a source, he’d use someone else’s phone, not his. He’s mistaken, because Aadhaar wouldn’t leave any room for that "basic journalistic hygiene".
On his part, Joseph says fear of surveillance should have prevented us from opening a social media account, or enjoying any of the modern amenities, for they all leave a footprint, they all leave a trail. Both shower uncharitable comments on Edward Snowden, with Joseph sarcastically thanking Snowden for “revealing” to the world that states do indeed spy, and Gupta branding him as a “nihilist… hiding from judicial scrutiny in [his] own democratic country…”.
It’s plainly evident that both Gupta and Joseph conflate domestic espionage on “inconvenient citizens” with the all-pervasive surveillance technology that Aadhaar happens to be. It’s precisely the centralisation of information about each and every one of Indians that makes Aadhaar such a risky and prone-to-abuse project, with the mandate of turning every questioning citizen into an “inconvenient” one. The opacity with which the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), headed and run by Nandan Nilekani, functions, is conversely proportional to the absolute transparency that the body, and therefore the state, demands from the citizens, giving it a power that’s as unconstitutional as it can get.
It is exactly for this reason that Arvind Datar has called privacy a “right for the future”, which would safeguard the citizen’s interests when faced with the technocratic behemoth devoid of soul and compassion that the state is increasingly becoming, not just in India, but elsewhere too. While countries like United Kingdom have discarded a national identity system citing the immense potential for abuse and racial profiling, in addition to exclusions, both Gupta and Joseph are hanging on to the false prophecy of technocracy as the one-size-fits-all solution for every problem, insisting on being blind to the algorithms for in-built violence, discrimination and criminalisation that such forced identity projects inevitably contain and breed. Refusing to see them, in a way, makes Gupta and Joseph the enablers of that very dystopian, techno-fascist future that the Netflix series Black Mirror so ably portrays, irking Gupta, as he mentions in his piece.
Joseph says Nilekani confesses to have respect for the “rights-of-the-poor” gang, but doesn’t admit that Aadhaar-driven problems in the PDS are not sui generis glitches but congenital problems that will only multiply exponentially with time, allowing a state to exclude the weak and the vulnerable at industrial scales. Gupta says the “poor have moved on”, reiterating official figures on LPG connections and money transfers to bank accounts, without even mentioning the umpteen reported instances of rations being denied to the infirm, the disabled, the old pensioners, those with calloused hands, those with losing eyesight or ophthalmological ailments like cataract.
Gupta and Joseph don’t understand that it’s actually they in turn who devalue the poor, whom Gupta calls “ganwar” and “gullible”, by waxing eloquent about a project with in-built exclusions that will take discrimination at a yet unimagined level. An editor of a right wing portal had written a piece about demonetisation with the headline having the words “cull the weak”. Gupta and Joseph are subtler, but aren’t they saying the same thing differently?
When we add to this fan-club the American name of Thomas Friedman, the group begins to lose its sheen of steamy irony, and becomes an Aegean stable of the delusional. Friedman’s column in The New York Times – hailing Aadhaar as the “only non-US public sector platform to have broken the one-billion user threshold the fastest” – is a piece in awe of the number, one billion, and the pace, without taking into account any of the security breaches and the gross exclusions that Aadhaar has been riddled with since the beginning.
Friedman paints Aadhaar as a digital utopia, exactly what the UIDAI and the government of India would have wanted it to be, but which it’s absolutely not, no matter how you look at it. In fact, Friedman lavishing praise on Aadhaar being “data rich” is a testimony of Aadhaar being a treasure trove, one-stop destination for transnational surveillance and data mining by global companies and powerful governments such as the United States, something the “Aadhaar phobics” have been red-flagging for a long time.
Moreover, Friedman’s claim that Aadhaar was about giving identity to those without one flies in the face of government-driven coercion that many with existing identity proofs had to face, in case they didn’t get Aadhaar. Still, Gupta discusses Aadhaar with Friedman on his Off The Cuff, where Friedman, singing praises for Nandan Nilekani, says “Aadhaar is the best thing to have happened to the world”.
Yes, in terms of normalising wholesale surveillance, putting Indians at the mercy of the data mercenaries, indeed that can be said of Aadhaar. However, when starvation deaths caused by inevitable Aadhaar exclusions are dismissed as mere figments of imagination or the obsession of the slightly wealthier, digitally entitled, it’s a sign of the times.