Aadhaar matters

Frederick Noronha

One late morning, WhatsApp told me that I had been subscribed to a new group. WhatsNew? There are so many groups, started by so many people, often ending up directionless, which only waste everyone’s time by mostly sending out good-morning messages. Except that this group already had 83 or some such number of messages already queued up that morning. Even more strangely, it was called the Hogwarts Reunion Party!

What? Some kind of a joke? Anyone indulging in such a prank should know that people of my age are too old for that!

But, in a little while, I actually ended up smiling.

Someone, bless his soul (unlikely to be her, for reasons you’ll soon understand), had added me on to a group that was meant to discuss the Aadhaar issue. It soon became clear that the group had been started by techies, some of whom were known names. They were actually friends from another era, when one wrote more actively on that subject.

Soon I was caught up with tracking some of those messages. The magic of ‘Hogwarts’ had me spellbound.

In the past week, the Supreme Court came out with its long-awaited judgment on the Aadhaar case. Nobody really expected the apex court to jolt the government policy on Aadhaar. There were some sops for those protesting the official approach. But the court didn’t quite upturn the 12-digit identity number that has been sought to be made near mandatory — for just about anything — that tracks residents of India, based on their biometric and demographic data.

One day before the judgment, Rohin Dharmakumar of TheKenWeb commented on social media: “So, what’s your gut/take/guess on what the Supreme Court will pronounce on Aadhaar tomorrow? Me: (a) Won’t strike down Aadhaar (too late/big for that), (b) Will offer “strong words” on privacy etc., (c) Some orders on not coercing/making mandatory, which will be disregarded.”

Not far off!

Needless to say, the government has quickly gone ahead to claim victory — and even certification — from the Supreme Court judgment. My own feeling is that we haven’t heard the last about the Aadhaar. Yet. For some reason — entirely understandable, that is — the way this “identity” was sought to be implemented has raked up a whole lot of suspicions and concerns about how it could be misused.

To make matters worse, because a small but significant section of the urban intelligentsia is so severely upset with it, networks have been created to question its long-term impact. Supreme court advocate Usha Ramanathan has spent the past few years of her life campaigning over the Aadhaar issue. One only has to spend a short while listening to her, to realise that the issues being raised there are far from baseless.

For that matter, Goa’s Anupam Saraph (a well-known figure in tech circles in the State) has also come out strongly and consistently against the Aadhaar. Saraph was himself an advisor to the government of Manohar Parrikar in better times.

To argue that the Aadhaar saves oodles of government money, or gives the poor a badly-needed identity (as some activists also accept), is being simplistic. Such claims deserved to be questioned more deeply. Nobody makes an issue of the need for citizens (residents, in the case of Aadhaar) to have an identity document. But when that very document gets linked to all our activities, it becomes kind of scary.

Suddenly, in the 21st century, we begin to realise how Facebook might not be such an innocent social media tool, or Cambridge Analytica can influence elections across the globe in unnoticed ways. No wonder, one Indian official hurriedly denied ever having spoken about the governmental right to ‘profile’ its citizens. Just google hurriedly for the meaning of ‘profiling’ and the implications immediately become clear.

For the first time, it seems, techies across India (never mind that they cynically call themselves the ‘Hogwarts Reunion Party’) have woken up to raise issues about the politics of technology. For long, I’ve known the Indian techie to be amongst the most apolitical animal one could ever encounter. They took the approach on the lines that ‘our job is to do the job and nothing else’.

But, increasingly, the impact of technology on our lives is being felt all over the globe. You don’t have to be a 21st century Luddite to recognise that technology can, indeed, be misused. Sitting in France (or so it is believed), an anonymous ethical hacker has been waking up Indian authorities to the casual way in which personal information is handed by officialdom here. Careless is one thing; the potential for misuse is quite another.

The techies understand this issue even more deeply than the rest of us. When they wake up, it seems they mean business. After all, “it does not do well to dwell on dreams and forget to live,” as Albus Dumbledore of Hogwarts once said in quite another context.