Coded citizenship. Biometrics, identity and de-socializing technologies in South Asia

Panel 39 Coded citizenship. Biometrics, identity and de-socializing technologies in South Asia Pier Giorgio Solinas, (University of Siena Italy) Convenor Uniqueness, ubiquity, authenticity; the expanding demosfphere of egos Notes for discussion The Aadhaar program is now complete. The whole adult population of India has been registered in the megarchive , the central database that folds for each individual his identity digital code, some basic demographic details , photo, fingerprints, iris scan. It took almost ten years to realize this gigantic data repository, the largest in the world, the largest identity mega database hyper-connected in real time through an electronic system of data sharing , matching control, and remote authentication (from the centre to the periphery, from every single office, bank, shop selling subsided goods to the national data centre). A great invisible machine that ensures, or should assure the truth, the true identity of each cardholder, of every applicant who brings his UID and demands any service to agency, office, bank : borrowed money, basic necessities, a job, a grant, a pension a driving license, a reserved quota… According to the inspiring idea of ​​the project, the principle that was to guide this historic enterprise had a precise label: inclusion. Navigating in an ocean of diversity by means of an equal key for each carrier: this is the challenge. The Indian society was, and is still largely, made up of a number of classes, groups, ethnic clusters, religions, languages, castes (jatis). Each had and has its own regime of recognition , customs, ant cultural style . In a sense, each of these aggregates replicates a sort of society, a society within the larger community of the nation. The nation embodies a polymorphic crowd of identities; as a great living body, Indian society in its wholeness lives as a complex organism, a body-nation encompassing many internal secondary bodies, more or less vast, but each cohesive and endowed with its own ethos. The dialectic between unity and multiplicity, between totality and particularity, so classical in the history of the country, continuously induces difference, hierarchy, exclusion. The negative had (and has) the power to produce its effects: aside the Hindu, the non-Hindu, aside the twice-born, the un-twice-born, the non-veg, the not-pure… etc. The "not" particle marks lines, gaps, boundaries, socially and culturally. By that dynamics distinct Identities emerge within the confines of "us": different clusters of “sub-us” to say so, that recognize themselves as born from the same substance, substance and essence that precedes and feed the life of individuals. The new Hi Tech approach try to manage such a contradictory realm of singularity-cum multiplicity. We can find several implications that derive from the computerized census and from the individual biometric record of all the residents in the territory of the Indian Union. On the one hand, a kind of gestalt recording, a compact grip on the demographic body as a whole taken together in simultaneity: as if all were present in the same instant within a compact and inclusive space, virtually emptied of distances and timeless; each part of the whole simultaneously visible in the most minute details and in its global scale. It is the ideal of instantaneous numerical connection, synchronic, total and centralized: an invisible eye that sees, an eye that sees without being seen. On the other hand, let's say from the bottom, at the microscale of the atomic component, the first implication can be expressed as a trivial tautology: the single finally becomes, and really is legitimated, as a single: it's just "one", one and no anybody else. The data that accompany the demographic file, father, mother, etc, are used both to connect the subject to his relationships as well as to distinguish him from neighbouring related records , also endowed of their authentic and singular identity. The identity is not shared, it is an exclusive and non-transferable personal property. These two perspectives, from above and from below, from totality and singularity, highlight the anthropological dynamic that the UIDAI program has set in motion in the current phase of modernization of the subcontinent. The slogan «Anytime, anywhere, anyhow» authentication Itay Noy, State and society reimagined: India's novel Unique Identification Scheme as a State hi-tech fantasy, The southasianist, vol 3, n. 1 pp 102-109 clarifies the impetuous program that the inclusion strategy proposes in the social and symbolic space. Authenticate and include; no possibility to escape the thoughtful embrace of public recognition in every corner of the territory, both the physical territory of living, and the immaterial territory of time (today, tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, always and however you will be included and recognized), where the series of social figures will unfold along the life cycle : the unique will keep his uniqueness through the ages, the places, the social environments. This is the magic that digital monitoring projects into a hyper-modern dimension of simultaneous totality, a general map of the population in which everyone is observable without changing the glass: telescopic and microscopic at the same time. At the opposite extreme, taking as its starting point the minimum unit of reference, the individual record, the digital archive assigns and establishes the personal identity quotas that the infinite reserve of the database can distribute in real time. With this it transforms, or hopes to transform, a generic identity, blurred and very often incorporated into the mass of a community (of gotra, of caste, of kula ...) in the closed individual identity, owner of herself, bare of every channel of flow with others Compared to the old forms of classification, especially the colonial ones, the aadhhar method, biometric and digital, represents a radical change. UIDAI does not classify: it does not go through this rudimentary form of inventory. Rather, it produces and reproduces recognition in a neutral setting of indifference. What did the old anthropometric classification practices do, with the corporeal index measurements (cephalic index, nose, skin color gradation, etc.)? They drew large distribution cases, ethnic and racial figures, typological patterns : the values ​​conforming to the standard measure, or statistically converging with the standard measure, identified a class of subjects, and on the basis of these statistical contiguities assigned to each individual his classified membership. The identity was linked to the category in which the values ​​measured in the field were included. So they identified the types, the criminal type, the prostitute, the homosexual, the idiot (and conversely, the nobleman, the respectable man, etc) We Italians have been among the most brilliant inventors of these techniques, with Cesare Lombroso, who lived more than a century ago, and is still remembered for its typologies Today, the physiognomy (photography) the fingerprints, the iris scan in no way affect groups or sets of individuals, and less than less inherited characters common to entire groups of descendants. The machine of biometric identity only admits one place, only one subject at a time. His product is expressed in an exhaustive concept: uniqueness. his product is expressed in an exhaustive concept: uniqueness. The subject that is legitimated and authenticated in the interface between the machine and the user is in fact not only singular, but unique. Not just an individual, but an individual who is not interchangeable I believe that this unprecedented, extraordinary passage from multiple identity and participated in non-interchangeable uniqueness marks a radical threshold in Indian culture, and beyond. Let’s take the religious dimension of the person, in the culture of Hinduism. We know well that in this symbolic and ethical world, each person participates in many different networks of identities. The figures of deities continually change in form, or, better, they enjoy extended, variable, multiple identities, the very notion of "I", of the self, is subject to incessant metamorphoses. In the most radical conception the ego and the cosmos interpenetrate each other and the soul is identified with the cosmic and transcendent totality. With the passage to the dimension of uniqueness, of "inclusion", of ubiquity, a secularized dimension and indifferent to time, the classic cosmology along with its immemorial theology will be radically reverted. However, there are those who argue that through UIDAI and, especially through Deity, the acronym of the state agency for informatics (Department of Electronics and Information Technology) is looking at the horizon a new theology, a hi-tech theology that roots on computer power and infolds the whole nation as a collective in its sphere of data. A secular and divine pride at the same time, impersonal, superhuman, but eventually imaginary.   «Digital India illustrated the emerging promise and debatable hubris of a newtechnocracy claiming self-consciously superhuman, panopticpowers. The infotech pantheon was henotheistic» Lawrence Cohen Duplicate, Leak, Deity https://limn.it/articles/duplicate-leak-deity/ Imaginary, indeed: the powerful system of recognition and authentication produces an image of the country that reflects on itself: Imagining India in fact sounds the title of the celebrated volume written by Nandan Nilekani, inventor and ideologist of the program. It is a funny coincidence that the title of his book echoes exactly the title of a crucial critical monograph, author Ronald Inden, one of the most remarkable Indianist anthropologists that was published almost thirty years ago, precisely with the title Imagining India Ronald Inden Imagining India Blackwell, Oxford 1990. That book represented, and still represents, a sort of manifesto of anticolonial criticism that western anthropology and beyond, against herself, pronounced in front of the international audience of scholars and intellectuals, primarily Indians. The colonial imagery was laid bare with its metamorphoses in the twentieth century social sciences. In the symbols above all, but even more profoundly, he denounced, even as self-criticism, the great historical removal: the silence on the principle of agency and the reduction of subjects to figures without active capacity. Power produced its image of the subjects and made it reality. .Irony of history, the hyper-tech society, projecting itself into the myth Aadhaar asks all its members a tribute of imagination. Stripped (or released?) from any restriction of intrinsic link (blood, language, status) they are expected to reshape themselves as pure subjects within a spaceless and timeless living archive, where they , as incarnate digital records, perform the incessant play of the market: credit and debt actors , rights carriers, politic subjects, social actors into the new prestige arena, and players of the matrimonial market . The basic question "who am I?" will be answered by consulting the database; it is not me who can authenticate my unique, inalienable identity: the invisible computer system will be the one that will give me the truth, A promised land opens up to the initiates through the rite of passage of the new identity with zero constraints; no more usurers and debts that reproduce debts, no more obligations of dowry, no more patronage, no more babu, no more guru, no more hierarchy of status. Inclusion! Those who were detained out of the normal citizenship, who were confused in the informal mass of the “withouts” (without rights, without dignity without power ...) will suddenly enjoy his own disadvantage: the poorest will be recognized immediately as holders of a debt right, debt officially enshrined in the bank's registers. From debtors to black they will become recognizable and charity debtors (and usurious interest rates will melt like snow in the sun). We must take seriously this gigantic production of the symbolic myth of a new society freed from the chains of oppression thanks to digital technology: once the impartial justice of numbers and computer codes replace the errors and the abuses of the humans, corruption will be increasingly marginalized , the equality between citizens will become reality, the power of status by birth will bi replaced by merit, by the competition among equals ... All this, we must recognize, excites hope, promises redemption, announces marvels. But materializing the hope is a different business. Even the same proponents, the same government authorities [remember, Aadhaar and UIDAI arose on the techno-progressivism area and run imperturbably the political arc to the right, from the Congress Party of Sonia Gandhi, in 2009, to the BJP of Modi, today] the same authorities that manage the program declare that the hi-tech palingenesis must be inoculated into a magmatic society , an immense population of "different" in which rules and codes of conduct does not follow the logic of digital consistency. And this is where the first crucial problems must be addressed. First of all, citizenship: does aadhaar confer, or recognize, the prerogative of citizen? Otherwise does it indirectly bypass the citizenship cross point and inaugurate a new regime of social inclusion? On this point, the debate, animated and often stormy, ended up coming to a negative result: not of citizens, but of residents the authority recognizes (and controls) the authenticity. That would seem a weak version of the identity, but it is not so: even before being a citizen, I am myself, due the fact that I am, so to speak, present. No social and caste marker should obfuscate the neutrality of digital authentication; the computer knows no barriers of status, it has neither varna nor jati ; no ashramavarnadarma, none of the 12 digits that make up the UID refers to a status source, neither high nor low. Only the surname or the title of the birth gotra can convey the encrypted echo of a membership of this type (Tanti, Kumar, Sohis Muchi , or, on the opposite pole of the status hierarchy, Choudhury, Banerjee…) as an implicit imprint that only the verbal connotation of personal identity reveals. The biometric traits remain completely immune to it. The ultimate essence, the vital substance of the holder of the digital card, presents itself with the connotations of unclassifiable uniqueness: eyes, hands, face; not even my closest family members, not even my fathers or my children can be reunited in the same biometric set (what could happen if the data included genetic traits It should not be forgotten, however, that there are important bio-genetic reconnaissance programs in India, in particular the Consortium for the study of genomic variety, on a sample basis, on the scale of the entire population of the country, for a "genetic map". (see The Indian Genome Variation Consortium The Indian Genome Variation database) The rather surreal effect is that the formerly excluded, or rather, those who were once formally excluded, now deprived of their former stigma of classified as “scheduled”, to claim recognition just as victim of inferiority, and to obtain the public label as caste members, the caste certificate which entitles to subsidies, reserved seats, assistance, must have the AADHAAR card. In other words, you need to show a non-caste title to be recognized as a caste person. How much pertains to social and economic assertion and how much to the communal pride of identity, to the feelings of jati, by those who want to be treated as equal and at the same time as "inferior" no matter how contradictory such an attitude could be? Ambiguity occurs again in the different fields of ordinary or "normal" life, for example with regard to residence and mobility, as far as the notion of local determined and determinable space is concerned, versus the space indefinitely open to movement. Having abandoned the principle of citizenship, as we have already said, UIDAI has assumed that of residence: there are residents, not citizens. But residence implies stability, adhesion to a certain place, to "reside" in a point of the territory. Now, anyone who has visited any large Indian city knows that a large number of "residents" flow from villages, from rural areas, from abroad every day, and knows that every group that moves from their home village, looking for a job, or a new space of freedom entertains a precarious, changeable relationship with space. So, how can be registered as a resident who has no residence anywhere ? How enrol as resident who lives wandering, traveling, homeless and without address)? Ursula Rao offers very eloquent examples in this regard Ursula Rao Biometric Marginality. UID and the Shaping of Homeless Identities in the City “Economic & Political Weekly” EPW march 30, 2013 REVIEW OF URBAN AFFAIRS In Indian megalopolis, actually, the spatial collocation of people is anything but definable on the basis of stable housing criteria. For the homeless the only criterion that can be adopted is that of the coordinates in GPS: the point in which a person spends the nights, or the night is the only available space. But, leaving aside the case of the homeless, what about the huge slums that occupy entire neighbourhoods of urban space in Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata? The dislocated inclusion and universality here finds resistance in the very dimension of the "illegality" of housing. The slums by definition represent the anti-city, the irrepressible negation of urban civilization, secluded and suspect ghettos, immense spaces of nobody overcrowded by people without legally sanctioned residence. Here, however, at least if you read the essays that Arjun Appadurai has dedicated to the ghost habitat (spectral housing) in contemporary Mumbai Arjun Appadurai Spectral housing and Urban Cleansing: Notes on millennial Mumbai in ID The Future as a Cultural Fact. Essays on the Global Condition, VERSO, London - New York 2013, the residential areas, a clandestine space where a floating population moves and “resides”, between risk and hope, here the initiative belongs to the local communities that they themselves manufacture outside of the normal, civilized inclusion. Here appears the horizon of a transnational cosmopolitanism (according to Appadurai), a sort of globalized citizenship that the poor, the homeless, the new damned of the earth (I would say by the words of Franz Fanon) activate beyond the codified boundaries of national affiliations. Appadurai’s evocation looks like an utopic landscape, perhaps; nonetheless, that utopia demonstrates how the principle of "residence" fluctuates between different levels, as well in space terms as in rights terms. And that the fluctuating space, and the denied space, claim unprecedented acts of justice. Just a year ago, the Delhi High Court had to note that in the slums of the residents they could not access the ration shops because they did not have the Card, and because the registration posts did not work (http: //www.dnaindia. com / india / report-hc-comes-to-aid-of-slum-dwellers-having-no-Aadhaar-cards-2450874). Hits and malfunctions of this kind have been continuously repeated for years; but in addition to showing the difficulties of the system in its minute application, they bring to light a basic problem, so to say structural, that is, the mandatory requisite of authentication card for access to the most diverse services: jobs, pensions, telephone, bank account, etc. The judges of the Supreme Court have repeatedly ruled against this obligation: registration must remain voluntary, and no service agency, whether financial, assistance or economic benefits (especially for those living below the poverty line) can demand users possession of the card to access the service. In fact, however, this obligation is affirming with the logic of the accomplished fact against the legal principle. In fact, in fact because it is the system itself that makes the entire network of offices and services, credit, tax, mobile phones, driving licenses, urban services, subsidies etc. it can work as a network. The information, the recognition flows not only through the UIDAI’s eye and its deposit of big-data records, but also, at the same time, through the traffic of information that flows in the communication channels between one agency and another. The bank will use the identification number of the card to open an account, the shop that will distribute the subsidized rice and wheat rations will do so on the basis of the card, and maybe the same bank will pay the amount of money corresponding to the shop. At the same time the mobile phone number will be requested to communicate with an SMS to the holder of the benefit how much and when he can collect the goods ... In this way, the last paradox (in my shortlist) is revealed: voluntary and obligatory at the same time, absolutely free and not attesting any legal prerogative (not as a title of citizenship, not for the right to vote, not as a passport ... all documents, these, which gradually become conditioned by the Card), it’s imposed as increasingly necessary , indispensable for existing in civil space and participating in the normal order of social relations, indeed, of the condition of humanity. There would be many other paradoxical, incongruent, features if not schizophrenic to comment; the AADHAAR platform, with its growing network of sub-networks, can not maintain its purported purity, its impersonal absolute indifference. Inevitably, it must adapt to the secular reality of hierarchies, of old and new powers, including those that it generates in the process of "universal" attribution of the codes of uniqueness. But these are not the traits that now, in conclusion, I would like to underline. Rather, I would like to return to the anthropological relevance of this process. I am interested in wondering if, through the systematic work of identity screening, through the capillary distribution of the chrism of singularity, the whole "Society" is submitting itself to a sort of molecular reconversion of its own body, if it is not an attempt to transform itself from a society of classes, of ranks, of communities into "society of individuals" (Norbert Elias). I'm certainly not the first to ask these questions. The papers presented in this panel cross the same problems in many places, and give very rich answers, either directly or indirectly. But I think it is necessary to add something else, something that, in its synthetic form, seems paradoxical in turn, a question (somewhat rhetorical) that adds so to the (supposed) functional imperfections, a structural, intimately structural paradox. I propose it here in a weak and interrogative form: rather than accidents or operating anomalies, what I have summarized are not physiologic consequences, due to the intrinsic tensions of the process as such? They are not even intimately necessary deformations, a kind of reflective violence that the recognition system takes on by transforming its members, the subjects, into persons, persons in the modern neo-liberal sense, of the term, person-market actors, person-egos (and ego-centric), people who administer their personhood as an exclusive and precisely auto-entic domain? This AADHAAR rite of passage capture the physiognomy icon, the bodily marks, but at the same time, freezing and exhibiting them in the endless gallery of figures that exposes to the electronic eye inspection, in so doing, it puts the individual in being, prepares him to assume the qualities of the globalized person: no singularity can be realized as such except in plurality. One is such if it is in the series of many. But, finally, to what extent this dream, this impersonal utopia can truly be realized? So far we are at the first step. A gigantic step, indeed , looking to the scale of data collection and to the universal connectedness that the computer power allows to reach. But still on this side of the threshold: the rite of passage is only started . Let's remind the Van Gennep scheme: phase one: separation, phase two, liminal transit, phase three, re-aggregation. To become persons, the millions of BPL, the internal migrants , the marginals should not only reproduce themselves in an electronic board, in a microchip readable from any point in the database space. They will have to lose themselves, they will have to give up their sharing of common identity that generated them and continue to make them live in their condition of inferiority: they will have to follow the liminal emptiness that separates them from what they were and from what they will be, or that they hope to become. Well, I do not think much that the general design of those who invented the platform and inspired its implementation, a competitive efficiency design of hi-tech rational entrepreneurship, can control the process up to the results it proposes. The process, the dynamics of the system, go on for one's own account, and they feed on the antinomies that they themselves create in functioning. The rationality of the system is proposed more as an ideal than a proven method. The myth that tries to spread is that of a man (and woman, perhaps) installed in the control room of his own self. An actor who touches the thousand keys of his control panels: finance, professional relationships, benefits, mobility ... In reality AADHAAR does not inaugurate the realm of reason; rather, he experiments with the ration techniques, Nothing is more significant of the present state of hybrid conjunction between reason and ration than the entrenching of the UID Card to the ration card. Who raises the problem of evolving Indian society (especially masses of the disadvantaged, but it is precisely that part that represents the symbolic, ethical and civil focus of desired evolution) from the regime of scarcity to that of well-being for all, perhaps he trusts on a limpid ideal of rationality above all. The pedagogy of the bank account confides in the ability to choose responsibly, to calculate, to invest, to emancipation from the patronage, to consume without submitting to the dogma of limited goods. But those who for a long lesson of generations, know that the need can not be capitalized, if not in the form of debt and dependence, the rationality they can use is that which is offered to them by the entrepreneurs of the negative, of the indigence and stigmas. 1