Reflections on architecture and India's unique identity number scheme.
Published Mar 30, 2017.
Reading the Supreme Court’s tacit approval of a law making Aadhaar linkage mandatory in banking and tax returns, I was reminded of Chand Mahal Ibrahim. In the late 1990s, he was Minister of Civil Aviation in the short-lived Deve Gowda government. The most important proposal before him when he took over was for a joint venture proposed by the Tata group and Singapore airlines.
Twenty years ago, on April 2, 1997, Ibrahim denied permission for the partnership, allegedly to protect Jet Airways. The aviation policy he announced allowed foreign investment up to 40% in Indian airlines, provided it didn’t come from a foreign airline.
In other words, investment was welcome so long as the source understood little about the sector and would do nothing to help Indian systems match international standards. An American realtor or a European electronics firm could invest in Indian aviation but Singapore Airlines was shut out, leaving Tata’s aviation plans in limbo for the next fifteen years.
A similar illogic appears to inform the Supreme Court’s recent comments regarding Aadhaar. As its name suggests, the 12-digit unique identity number linked with biometric data was established primarily to contain leakages in government welfare programmes. In September 2013, the Supreme Court ruled that benefits could not be denied to people who hadn’t got an Aadhaar number and card for themselves.
Logically, one would imagine that if the government is not allowed to force Aadhaar on people who want to receive benefits delivered by the state, it should certainly not be allowed to force it on people who only want to go about their own business without any state subsidies involved. What the Supreme Court has said is the equivalent of permitting the government to make helmets compulsory for car drivers after forbidding it from making them mandatory for motorcycle riders.
The counter-argument is that resistance to Aadhar is mere fear-mongering by a tiny minority. Shekhar Gupta encapsulated this viewpoint in a tweet:
Crores of rural & urban poor see Aadhar as tool of empowerment. They don't even know elite anti-Aadhar echo chambers exist & they don't care
What Gupta failed to understand is that more than one attitude to Aadhaar can be simultaneously valid. For a poor villager, Aadhar offers the possibility that services and subsidies will be delivered more efficiently. The potential benefits of the scheme are so obvious that few in the elite echo chamber Gupta disparages are suggesting it should be done away with altogether. For Indians lucky enough not to require direct aid, however, potential risks to security and privacy outweigh benefits bigly. It’s unreasonable to dismiss these concerns merely because they affect a minority of Indians. Enter “Aadhaar number name filetype:xls” into Google without the inverted commas and you will see how much information that shouldn’t be in the public domain is already out there.
Supporters of making Aadhaar compulsory might now suggest that those worried about privacy have something to hide. Well, the fact is that all of us have plenty to hide even when we aren’t infringing laws.
In the early twentieth century, a number of left-wing thinkers began to consider the idea of privacy reactionary. The German Marxist Walter Benjamin wrote, “To live in a glass house is a revolutionary virtue par excellence. It is also an intoxication, a moral exhibitionism, that we badly need. Discretion concerning one’s own existence, once an aristocratic virtue, has become more and more an affair of petty-bourgeois parvenus.” Between the world wars, utopian architects designed glass buildings that eroded the line between public and private. Toned-down versions of these were built in a number of European cities until the 1970s before falling out of favour.
There was an older tradition of architectural design which also undermined privacy but to very different ends. Its champion was the utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham who, in the late 18th century, designed buildings in which students, workers or prisoners could be surveilled at all times without ever being able to see those watching them. Bentham argued such a structure would save governments and factory owners money because inmates and workers would not know when they were being watched, reducing the number of guards required to run the place. He called his dream structure a Panopticon, and was commissioned to construct a prison based on his ideas, but didn’t receive sufficient funding. No Panopticon was ever built, and over time the idea came to be used as a dystopian metaphor.
The structure that would serve our needs best is neither a constructivist glass house where privacy is voluntarily ceded, nor a utilitarian Panopticon that allows the powerful to pry into our lives, but something that precisely reverses Bentham’s vision, making the working of government and state transparent and visible to all, while strictly protecting the privacy of individual citizens.
Unfortunately, what we have today is a mushrooming of glass houses and Panopticons. Glass houses result from us allowing companies to use microphones, cameras, contacts lists and GPS on the data devices we carry everywhere. Panopticons come from mission creep of programmes like Aadhaar, which is opaque to us but will collect information on an ever-widening range of activities.
What scares me most is the potential merging of glass house and Panopticon. The visual metaphor breaks down at this point, but let me explain what I mean in practical terms. Governments across the world are putting in place harsher laws allowing great powers of surveillance to the state, powers enhanced by technological advances. Late last year, the United Kingdom passed the Investigatory Powers Act, giving security agencies extraordinary latitude in monitoring British citizens. Shocking as the easy passage as the law was, one understood the complacence of the citizenry somewhat because the British system offers some checks and balances, and a modicum of transparency. Furthermore, British companies and foreign firms working in Britain have an interest in privacy protection. They risk damaging their brand irretrievably if they are found to have handed over material to security agencies outside of set protocols.
In countries like India, those protocols exist only on paper, when they exist at all. Which means there’s a good chance that government agencies will enhance Aadhaar-connected data with information gleaned from apps and private service providers and, conversely, that government-collected data will leak into private hands.
If we cannot prevent glass houses and Panopticons from being built, let us at least prevent a mutant combination of the two from emerging in India.
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