Citizenship in India: Parsing the Complexity of Digital Identity Systems

The biometric identity project in India called Aadhaar was established with the purported intent of giving every resident of India a unique ID to ensure that social security measures and other welfare mechanisms would reach the last mile. The collection of biometrics (fingerprints, eye scans and photographs), it was emphasised, was to ensure that no duplicates were created and each ID would be unique, and thus was built the world’s largest data management project. However, since then, there have been several problems of duplication, implementation issues, failure of infrastructure, security breaches and privacy issues. Buttressing the digital identity project have been several moves to push digitalisation in other spheres as well. The article intends to study this digitalisation of individual identity in India and posit that there are several pockets of resistance that challenge this framing of the digitalised citizen as a data subject and the reduction of individual identity into biometrics alone. There are two people’s movements that show how this digital turn towards a technological understanding of citizenship is being challenged: the widespread peaceful protests of 2019–2020 against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), and the 2015–2016 Save the Internet campaign for net neutrality. This author hopes to show that both online and offline, the ideas of what it means to be a citizen of India remain in flux, challenging the notion of a passive data subject and positing a political, rights-bearing citizen in opposition to it.