[Reader-list] Is National Identity a form of Public Good?

[Taha Mehmood]

Dear all,

Below is a text of a public lecture that I delivered as part of the recently
concluded festival of India called India Express which was held in
Amsterdam. For this lecture I have not only generously used materials but
also propositions, hypothesis and scenarios that I have gathered and
developed for my research with the Information Society Project at Sarai
(2004-2007). I inquire that whether with the proposed introduction of
Multipurpose National identity Card (MNIC) card, is the Indian state
converting Individual Identity into a form of public good?

Regards

Taha

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Is identity a public good? Notes on the emergence of a National Identity
Card in India.

1.Introduction:

In today's paper I would like to speak about the proposed national identity
card scheme in India. I inquire that whether by monopolising a complex
entity like the identity of a person, is the Indian nation state
reformulating the notion of individual identity into a public good?

In order to take this inquiry forward I have arranged my arguments as
follows. First I briefly dwell on the notion of public good and link it with
arguments presented by Rawls, Nozick and Hayek. Following which I present a
broad picture of contemporary political landscape in India in order to
situate the problem of re-distribution of public goods and its relationship
to the socio-economic or ethno-religious identification of persons. In the
next section I give a historical outline of the underlying assumptions for
the need of a State to identify its citizens primarily through numbers and
its critique. Before concluding, I present arguments in favour of the
introduction of National identity card in India and the inherent fault-lines
that this argument produces.

2.1. An instance of a dilemma concerning individual identity in Indian
Mythology: The case of Nala and Damyanti in the epic poem Mahabharata.

Before I compare the key texts related to public good let me begin with a
story from the Indian epic Mahabharata. This is the story of Nala and
Damayanti. Nala was a king and Damyanti a princess. Nala wanted to marry
Damyanti. In ancient times the only way members of a royal family could
marry was through a Sayamwara.
 A  Sayamwara was practice of choosing a life partner, among a list of
suitors by a girl of marriageable age. Hearing about her Sayamwara four gods
descended from heavens who were interested in taking Damyanti's hand. On the
day of the Syamwara, these four gods sat beside Nala and when Damyanti
passed by them, all five of them appeared identical to her. She had to
identify the real King Nala. For a long time she could not make any
distinction. They all appeared same to her. Marriage was the biggest event
in her life and she had to choose the right person. She started praying,
soon she realised that one of the five was staring at the skies and the rest
four were looking at her. Her prayers were answered for she knew who Nala
was. She garlanded Nala and the marriage was over.
For the sake of argument if we replace marriage with an event, Damyanti with
a Nation State, garland with a good, five suitors with recipients and King
Nala's act of looking away, as a sign of legitimate identity-- then we
realize that for a State to allocate and distribute a good in a just fashion
it needs to identify the recipients correctly.
Now lets us see how the idea of public good is theoretically construed.

2.2 So what is a public good? A review of classical debates regarding the
notion of a public good.

2.2.a Rawls Argument-

In his book, A theory of Justice, John Rawls, proposes that, on an
individual scale a good is, 'successful execution of a rational plan of
life' (Rawls.J, 1972, 433). He further suggests that, liberty, opportunity,
income, wealth and self respect are most primary of social goods. On the
scale of a public, Rawls avers that a public good is something that has
'indivisibility and publicness…that there are many individuals, a public so
to speak, who want more or less of this good, but if they are to enjoy it,
all must enjoy the same amount' (Rawls.J, 1972 p266) In this respect,
notions of safety, security or clean air could be regarded as examples of
public good. However for a State to distribute a public good in a just
manner, it must take into account two problems. The first problem is that of
a free rider. A free rider is someone who does not fulfil the obligation
which is expected from him. The second problem is that of externalities,
wherein the production and re-distribution of public good causes, 'benefits
and losses to others which may not be taken into account by those who
arrange for these goods'. Rawls argues that a welfare state must arrange the
allocative and distributive functions of its institutions in such a fashion
that it not only 'advance the good its members' but is also 'regulated by a
public conception of justice'. (Rawls.J, 1972 p453)

2.2.b Refutation by Nozick-

Robert Nozick, refutes Rawls's argument about the allocative and
distributive function of a State by suggesting that, 'patterned principles
of distributive justice focus on criteria for determining who is to receive
holdings…it completely ignores any right a  person might have to give
something to someone' (Nozick, R. 1974. p168). In others words too much
emphasis is given to the recipient of justice while the possibility of
re-distribution is ignored, as people generally exchange and give. If we
take this premise as valid then a re-distribution will not be just.
Furthermore Rawls suggests that a State should be a minimal enterprise
limited to the narrow functions of protection against force, theft, fraud,
enforcement of contracts, and so on. Nozick suggests that if a State takes
responsibility like re-distribution of wealth through taxation then it is
indulging in an immoral act.

2.2.c Refutation by Hayek-

Under a welfare state any redistributive mechanism would be carried out by a
central planning authority. Friedrich Hayek in his classical critique of
planned economies argues that any form of planning will result in tyranny
because few people incapable of processing large information will preside
over the final allocation and re-distribution. He suggests that a society
can ensure a minimum level of sustenance to its fellow members, 'There is no
reason why in a society which has reached the general level of wealth which
ours has attained . . . security against severe physical privation, the
certainty of a given minimum of sustenance . . . should not be guaranteed to
all without endangering general freedom. . . . There can be no doubt that
some minimum of food, shelter and clothing, sufficient to preserve health
and the capacity to work, can be assured to everybody.' (Hayek, F. 1944.
p120) In other words, Hayek proposes that a State should act within a
regulative rather an interventionist framework.

The contemporary socio-political landscape in India is marred by ongoing
struggles over the re-distribution and allocation of various public goods.
These public goods can be divided into two broad categories, food and
security. Agitations regarding demand for opportunities for social mobility,
income and wealth may come under a generic label of 'food'. Contestations
with the Indian state for guarantee of safety against a foreign attack,
natural calamity like floods or tsunami or unnatural calamity like
dislocation because of dam making activities etc. may come under a tag of
'security'.

On the one hand citizens who are involved in these struggles articulate
their concerns through narratives of absence of social and environmental
justice, affirmative action and sense of (in)security. On the other the
Indian nation state seeks to discharge its fiduciary duties on the basis of
bracketing citizens into abstract social, ethnic and economic groupings. At
a bureaucratic level this abstraction of the citizen as a member of a group
help the State in formulating policies related to allocation. At the level
of re-distribution, citizens are identified through documents like identity
cards.

In order to understand the emergence of national identity card India it is
important for us to first get a sense various contests which are happening
at a more local level. Contests related to re-distribution and allocation of
public goods like 'food and security'.

I now present a broad picture regarding the same.

3. The dilemma over re-distribution of 'food and security'.

3.1 'Food'.

First let us look at the spatial re-distribution of contestations regarding
re-distribution of 'food' or public goods related to demand for
opportunities for social mobility, income and wealth. In the last twenty
years we in India have had numerous social groups agitating over un-just
re-distribution of public goods. For instance, in the recent past, violence
have erupted in a western India in the states of Rajasthan, Gujarat and
Maharashtra.
In Rajasthan members of a group called Gujjar who are categorised as
Schedule Tribes and are entitled to 27 percent of reservation in Government
jobs decided to agitate. Their demand was to be categorized to an even lower
social category called Other Backward Castes to increase their share in
affirmative action by 15 percent.

In Gujarat citizens agitated to be included in a temporary category called
Project Affected People or Dam Displaced People. The citizens in this case
want to be justly compensated for the loss of land and livelihood caused by
a large irrigation dam building exercise which is carried out on behalf of
the Govt.

In Maharashtra, the citizens are engaged in a regional dispute over
perceived loss of jobs to 'outsiders'. In other words they want jobs and
other economic benefits to be accorded to Maharashtrians first and then to
citizens belonging to other states.

In addition to these ongoing negotiations by citizens, as of September 2007,
as many as eighteen states out of a total of twenty eight states and seven
union territories of the Indian union were designated as areas affected by
Naxalites. Naxal is an informal name given to groups that were born out of
the Sino-soviet split in the Indian communist party in the 1960's. Naxals
sometimes use violence against State's property as strategy of agitation.
Among other things it is widely believed that the Naxal movement was able to
gain sympathy of a large number of people because the State was perhaps not
able to provide for the basic human needs of food, shelter and livelihood.
This brings us to the other category of contestation, which involves the
re-distribution of 'security'.

3.2 'Security'

In the last twenty years the Indian State has re-distributed public goods,
which may come under our generic category of 'security', under various
pretexts. Security against a foreign attack in Kashmir, security against
what the Indian state believe to be secessionist tendency in Punjab in the
west and in the eastern states of Meghalaya, Manipur, Assam, Tripura,
Mezoram, Arunachal Pradesh and Nagaland. In this respect it is important for
us to acknowledge that all of these states lie at border of India.

In the Government policy circles the management of borders is one of the
important concerns in making decisions regarding allocation of public goods
like security. 'Border Management', for instance,  is a chapter of a highly
influential report on national security entitled 'Reforming the National
Security System-Recommendations of the Group of Ministers'. It reads, 'In
fact, barring Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Delhi and Haryana,
all other States in the country have one or more  international borders or a
coastline and can be regarded as front line States from the point of view of
border management'.

The official narrative for re-distribution of 'security' is articulated
through words like, 'militancy', 'separatism' and now after post 9/11 the
keyword is 'terrorism'. In this respect especially in the domain of popular
culture terrorism or the figure of terrorist has emerged as a key theme. In
the last two years though, there has been a shift in the way 'terrorists'
have been represented in popular culture. I would like to mention two films
to explain this shift.

3.3 The depiction of the figure of terrorist in popular culture: An analysis
with respect to Fanna and A Wednesday.

3.3.a Fanna-

'Fanna' a film, was released in 2006. Fanna is a sufi term for annihilation
of self for the love of someone. The film's plot revolves around determining
the identity of a terrorist and bringing him to the book. However throughout
the story there is much confusion regarding the identity of a terrorist. I
would like to quote a line from the film which summarizes the uncertainty
which a character portraying an anti terrorist expert, experiences in
capturing a person in this category. Agent Tyagi while, speaking about the
terrorist says- 'The present day 'terrorist' is a man who thinks. He is a
planner. No one knows his name or his past. When and where does he come
from? No one knows.
He could be anyone or no one. He could be the one sitting beside you in a
theatre or a local train, or a bank's teller or a cigarette/tobacco vendor.
He is intelligent and dangerous. He has to be found.' The film's plot
juxtaposes members of State with people who are working against the idea of
nation. The terrorist is eventually found and diluted. Fanna's narrative is
in sharp contrast to the story of A Wednesday, which was released in 2008.

3.3.b A Wednesday-

In A Wednesday, a common man who has got tired of random and mindless act of
terrorism takes upon himself to deliver justice by killing four alleged
terrorists. The State's machinery is shown as helpless in identifying this
nameless, faceless individual, whose identity is not revealed at all.
In a sense these films mark a shift in the way in which re-distribution and
allocation of             'security' as a public good is counter weighted
with the imagined figure of 'terrorist' at a popular level. While in case of
Fanna, re-distribution of security as public good is clearly depicted as a
function of the State, in A Wednesday, the moral legitimacy of the State to
allocate security is weakened in the face of a citizen dispensing with
justice. One could argue that in the age of Citizen Journalist and Citizen
Consumer A Wednesday introduces the figure of a Citizen Terrorist, who is as
nameless and faceless as the terrorist who he wants to annihilate. His
identity is indeterminable. A key aspect of these films is to probe the
identity of suspect persons. The identity emerges as an abstract concept
which is difficult to define.

In a fictional world where these stories takes place, in three hours time an
individual can become a suspected terrorist who could become a confirmed
terrorist and who could then be diluted as per the demands of the story.
Identity emerges as bereft of dilemma. Identification a clear process.
Unlike in the real world where a if a State needs  to redistribute public
goods like security or food it needs a notion through which it can clearly
identify its recipients, an idea which can compress complexities of human
form and her persona, ignore paradoxes of her memory and history and create
a distance between the giver and taker. The idea of numbers is one such
concept. In the case of proposed national identity card of India, numbers
play a pivotal role. It is proposed that each citizen will be given a
National Identity number. In order to understand the nature of numbers and
its role in identification let us briefly survey their point of origin.
4. Colonisation and rise of statistical thinking: Instances of –numbers- in
the colonial governmental thought, its uses in contemporary India and its
critique.

4.1 Point of origin of Systematic use of numbers: A case of William Petty
and colonisation of Ireland

Perhaps the first systematic exercise of survey, cartographic mapping and
reliance on numbers for meticulous documentation of a land and its people
was carried out in the 17th Century, when England conquered Ireland.
Colonization of Ireland in this sense was a big event that precipitated a
lot of changes in governmental thought. William Petty who is credited with
coining the term 'political arithmetic' and 'political economy' was sent by
the William of Orange, to map Ireland.  Historian Peter Linebaugh argues
that Petty, 'found that in Ireland people were not willing to work for more
than two hours a day' (Linebaugh, P 2003. p48). Petty reasoned that by
expropriating people from land and forcing those to go to England would be a
far more beneficial policy for generating larger revenue. Petty was of the
opinion that in order to articulate the socio-political conditions of a
conquered land, all arguments related to 'comparative and superlative' words
must be discarded. And only such reasoning be used, which could be expressed
in terms of 'Numbers, weight and measure' (Linebaugh, P 2003. p49).
Linebaugh further elucidates about role of Petty's work in Statistical
thinking,

I quote-
Petty introduced to the analysis of class relations the methods of
quantification and to the understanding of a society the notion of abstract
segregation…Petty's technique of computational abstraction, allowed the mind
to concentrate on instruments of measurement that appeared to posses their
own objectivity, so that social relations among people would appear as
reified relations among things.  (Linebaugh, P 2003. p49)

In 2006 while I was researching documents related to colonial policing in
19th century Bengal, at the National Archives in Delhi, I found echoes of
Petty's thought. In policing rural precincts of Calcutta, the colonial
British administration laid a lot of emphasis on stabilising the identity of
people, farm lands, houses, and the produce of land by registering and
recording it through numbers. Works of historians and anthropologists like
John Torpey, Chandook Sengoopta, Simon Cole, Jane Caplan, John Agar and
Nicholas Dirks is extremely illuminating in this respect. This body of work
covers last six hundred years of governmental thinking and draws connections
between rise in statistical thinking and subsequent rise in practices of
documenting individual identity, between stabilization of the idea of nation
state and quantification of its people and in between institutional forms of
documentation and its resistance through forgeries etc. This is not to
assert that in India prior to coming of British there was no reliance on
numbers but to emphasize that after coming of the British the use of numbers
in policy making became more systematic and bureaucratised. History of last
sixty years of identity documents is a witness to this thinking.

4.2 Use of numbers in Identification documents in contemporary India

Post independence in 1947, the Indian Government has tried on numerous
occasions to introduce a range of identification documents. Most of these
documents were targeted to those who come under the generic category of
poor.

The ration card, the BPL or Below Poverty Line card are a case in point. The
documentation regime crossed class barriers with the introduction of the
driving licence, the Permanent Account Card, and the Voter identity card.
But in every single one of these instances the cards failed to cover the
entire population because of logistical and technical reasons.


Take the case of Aaravani community in south India who fighting for the last
many decades to be registered with the Indian Census. Aarvani community is
composed to transgender people belonging to both Hindus and Muslims. The
census of India does not have a category for transgender people. Around
three hundred thousand Aarvani's are rendered invisible by this categorical
absence.

The National identity card is believed to rectify the miscarriages of
previous experiments in documenting Indians. There is much evidence of
thought on categories as a notion especially with respect to smart cards and
its relationship to numbers in sociological and historical literature.

4.3 Critique of numbers and categories in found in literature of sociology
and history of modernity.

Sociological literature uses modernity as an entry point to investigate the
impact of smart cards. In this respect work of sociologists like David Lyon,
Gary T Marx and others is telling. They have argued that cards are a direct
offshoot of modernity. Smart help make modern life easy and manageable. That
irrespective of arguments about invasion of privacy, cards are here to stay.
While historians of statistical thought like Theodore Porter, Nicholas Rose
and Ian hacking have argued that numbers and its use in making policy is
problematic because 'quantification is essentially a technology of distance'
(Porter, T. 1999 pIX). The language of numbers articulated through the
notion of 'objectivity' renders persons as 'impersonal' and this
'impersonality is conflated with objectivity as truth' (Porter, T. 1999
p74). Numbers in this respect creates a moral distance with a population can
be imagined. The colonisation of Ireland in 17th century and survey to
prostitutes, cholera victims, the insane and unemployed in 20th century
England is evidence to fundamental nature of use of number to map peripheral
populations.

The movement between 20th and 21st century has been the movement from the
periphery to the centre. The national identity card in India proposes to
take finger prints of all Indians, proposes to give a number to all Indians,
and proposes to create a national data base for all the citizens of India.
Let us now look at the brief history of National identity card in India.

5. The National identity card of India: Its emergence, its uses and its
misuses.

Like Damyanti's marriage and the colonisation of Ireland in the case of the
national identity card, the Kargil War in 1998 with Pakistan was the big
event that led to policy proposals for the first systematic digital mapping
of a billion people. The multiple purpose national identity card or MNIC as
it is called emerges out of a report that investigated the causes of Kargil
war.

We have to understand that India shares a total of 12,035 kilometres of
international border. Of which 2,912 kilometre border is with Pakistan,
4,053 kilometre border with Bangladesh, 1,690 kilometre border with Nepal,
and a 3,380 kilometre border with China. There have been border disputes
with Pakistan, China, and Bangladesh. There have been three wars with
Pakistan, and one with China. According to that report one of the reasons
for Kargil war was the incursion of outsiders in the Indian Territory.


The National identity card scheme in India is being mooted simultaneously
with the Unified Identity Document. The UID is also a smart card but it
targeted only at poor people who would be legitimate beneficiaries of state
subsidies with respect to food and minimum wages. In this regard it is
important to note the emergence of supra national identity documents is
again becomes a rationalizing argument to allocate and re-distribute two
fundamental public goods -food and security-. The importance lies in the
argument that by creating a National register of population, National
register of residents, a National register of non-residents, and a National
register of the poor the Government of India will be able to create clear,
precise and stable identities.


MNIC and UID in this regard is a mechanism for differentiating Indians from
non Indians. Herein lays the biggest conceptual obstacle of the MNIC and UID
card.

No one knows who an Indian citizen is. Consider a report by Jyoti Thapa Mani
published in the Business world on March 14 2008. According to this report
the officials of the census bureau failed to verify and accord citizenship
status of forty eight residents of Chamoli district of Uttrakhand, a state
in north of India. These people were categorised as foreigners because they
speak the Nepali language.

One could argue that exercises for the preparation of a national register of
citizens would create a fuzzy logic within which identities will be
negotiated. . According to Lotfi Zadeh, mathematician and co-author of Fuzzy
Logic, Fuzzy Truth is something which represents membership in vaguely
defined "sets", and not a result of an event or condition. Fuzzy Logic
allows for "set membership" to range from -'Slightly' to 'Quite' to 'Very'.
Like the residents of Chamoli around, through the case of 400 Iranian
immigrants to the small town of Murshidabad, in the state of West Bengal,
the logic of Fuzzy Logic becomes apparent. These people settled in
Murshidabad 80 years ago – well before the independent Indian nation-state
was formed. The MNIC survey party failed to accord a single one of them
Indian citizenship status. So what are they: Persian-speaking Indians or
Bengali-speaking Iranians? Are they 'Slightly', 'Quite' or 'Very'Indian?

This regime of compulsory registration and followed by allocation of
distribution of an identity through a National identity card would tend to
convert the notion of an Identity into a public good in itself. If that be
so then National identity card scheme would perhaps lead its own problems of
free riders and externalities. There is of course, nothing wrong in
according a national identity if moral, ethical and legal issues with
respect to a -just- distribution are taken into account. In the Indian
context however, the case seems to be far from a just allocation and
distribution of a national identity.



References
Agar, J. (2001) 'Modern horrors: British identity and identity cards', in J.
Caplan and J.
Torpey (eds). Documenting Individual Identity, Princeton: Princeton
University Press.

Caplan, Jane and Torpey, John 2001. Documenting individual Identity.
Princeton University press.

Cole, S.A (2002) Suspect Identities: A History of Fingerprinting and
Criminal
Identification, Harvard: Harvard University Press.

Hacking, I. (1990) The Taming of Chance (Ideas in Context), Cambridge:
Cambridge
University Press.

Hacking, I. (2001) An Introduction to Probability and Inductive Logic.
Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.

Lyon, D. (1994) The Electronic Eye: The Rise of Surveillance Society,
Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.

Lyon, D. (2001) 'Under my skin: from identification papers to body
surveillance', in J.
Caplan and J. Torpey (eds) Documenting Individual Identity. Princeton:
Princeton
University Press.

Lyon, D. (2002) Surveillance as Social Sorting: Privacy, Risk and Automated
Discrimination, London: Routledge.

Lyon, D. (2003) Surveillance after September 11, Cambridge: Polity Press.

Marx, G. (1989) Protecting Privacy in Surveillance Societies, Chapel Hill:
University of
North Carolina Press.

Marx, G. (2001) 'Identifying anonymity: some conceptual distinctions and
issues for
research', in J. Caplan and J. Torpey (eds) Documenting Individual Identity.
Princeton:
Princeton University Press.

Porter, T.M. (1996) Trust in Numbers, reprint ed. Princeton: Princeton
University Press.

Prevention of Terrorism Act (2002) 'Interception of communication in certain
cases',
Chapter V, Government of India Act No. 15.

Porter, Theodore M. 1996 Trust in Numbers. Princeton University Press;
Reprint edition.

Torpey, John 1999 The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship
and the State
Cambridge University Press.


Taha Mehmood
Graduate Student
Cities Program
London School Of Economics 08