State Power and Technological Citizenship in India: From the Postcolonial to the Digital Age

Abstract

In this article we seek to nuance our understanding of the technologically mediated relationship of state and citizen, first, by framing these relations in terms of Michel Foucault's ideas about state power and governmentality, and, second, by using case studies drawn from the Indian experience to highlight particular risks associated with digital governance and biopolitics. An overview of state and social technological interventions in India shows multiple intersections of sovereign and disciplinary powers. Together, these intersections give new meanings to biopower while also sketching a familiar story of the attenuated character of technological citizenship, notwithstanding numerous examples of popular resistance. To address biopolitics, however, a novel set of challenges emerges: The first is to outline a genealogy of Indian biopolitics, going back to the colonial period. The second is to acknowledge the tension between biopolitics and geopolitics: the state's need to distinguish between citizens and residents for the provision of welfare. The third is the neoliberal turn in governance, with the state increasingly withdrawing from direct involvement in the public sphere and turning to the private sector to take its place. We find that the digitization of identification and benefit provision produces new costs and barriers for the poor to access the entitlements of citizenship, leaving them in some cases worse off than before. Moreover, the visibility produced by entry into digital governmentality is accompanied by a new set of risks, including the expropriation of benefits and the loss of existing assets.Acknowledgments We would like to thank Kavita Philip and Lilly Irani, in particular, for their help in formulating the conceptual terms of this article. We would also like to thank three anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions and, in particular, the EASTS editors for their patience and support as this article was revised. We acknowledge the support of the Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore for providing the space for the conversations that culminated in this joint article.

Technologies Without Borders? The Digitization of Society in a Postcolonial World

“…It is also now widely acknowledged that game-changing projects can be created and experimented first in non-Western contexts (Breckenridge, 2014), and the expansion of tools such as the mobile phone is transforming developing societies to an extent that needs closer scrutiny (Brinkman & Bruijn, 2018). The fast pace at which ‘mobile money’ (payment via mobile phone) has developed in Kenya is a first example (Park and Donovan, 2016); the current implementation of the national biometric identification in India is another one (Abraham & Rajadhyaksha, 2015; Cohen, 2016; Rao & Nair, 2019). Furthermore, for fields such as entertainment, sport and social media (television and cinema, online entertainment portals, national and international sports leagues and social networking sites for instance), the boundaries between the West and the non-West are porous.…”

“Governtrepreneurism” for good governance: The case of Aadhaar and the India Stack

“…Governmental policy interventions in postcolonial India also intersected with scientific efforts, which led to the country being described as a “postcolonial technological society” (Abraham & Rajadhyaksha, , p. 68). A “technological society,” according to Jacques Ellul (), is the process through which technological science is used to replace the diverse forms of knowledge that inform public policy.…”

“…A “technological society,” according to Jacques Ellul (), is the process through which technological science is used to replace the diverse forms of knowledge that inform public policy. It sees politics as benefiting only elite parochial interests, in contrast to technological expertise that holds no bias to privilege one group over another (Abraham & Rajadhyaksha, , p. 68) . Therefore, the technological society, as it emerged in India, centralised expert knowledge associated with scientific authority, thereby devaluing politics and using techno‐science as a means to resolve political issues (Nandy, ), complementing the neoliberal good governance agenda in its anti‐political ethos.…”

“…Now, it must be an Aadhaar‐enrolled “POS‐able” family member whose biometric authentication works, of which many families have none (Dreze et al., ). There is a liberal presumption that technology is a neutral actor, through which “subjects respond passively to technological change” (Abraham & Rajadhyaksha, , p. 67). However, as Winner () argues, technology is political.…”

From the Commission to the Mission Model: Technology Czars and the Indian Middle Class

“…telecom sector using a novel approach to technology development that would become the first example of the Mission model. Since then, this latter approach has become the template for strategic technology ventures, from earlier efforts to provide clean drinking water in India's villages to the ongoing national digital database "unique identification" or Aadhaar project (Abraham and Rajadhyaksha 2015). 3 By comparing this range of technology sectors, this article interrogates the myth of the omnipotent technology czar by showing first that while individual personalities, access, and networks matter, they guarantee neither success nor failure, whether taken singly or in combination.…”