[Reader-list] Census, Sex aur Dhoka

[Taha Mehmood]

Dear All,

As a rejoinder to Sanjay's mail. I would like to share with you my article
which was recently published in countercurrents journal. It seems that GOI
is perhaps not entirely capable of conducting a mere exercise of meeting all
the citizens of india and compiling their identification marks on pieces of
paper forget about digitizing and organizing mammoth databases. Must we, the
citizens of India, not take this as an opportunity to think earnestly and
seriously think, talk and agitate about an apparent wastage of public money
in the name of biometric collection? Must we not talk about these few
plutocrats within the GOI who seem to be hell bent on redistributing public
money in a seemingly irresponsible manner?

Warm regards

Taha


http://www.countercurrents.org/mehmood070410.htm

Census, Sex aur Dhoka

Census is the official enumeration of people. Sex is an act of penetration.
Dhoka is deception.

It seems with the launch of the 15th Census by the Office of the Registrar
General of India on April the 1st 2010, the Indian State is poised to make
its most audacious attempt to penetrate its body politic. It remains to be
seen how this exercise will turn out. Will the union of personal identities
of a billion plus individuals with the State be an enduring marriage? Or
will it be a short lived love affair. Will it be a dhoka, a trick, when
dandies dole out a promise of marriage, for a quick in-out job and have fun.
Just like so many previous attempts to give all legible Indians a legible
mark of identification in the name of a voter card, a PAN card, a ration
card, a driving license, a passport and a birth certificate have failed.

Central to this year's Census is the idea of attaching the biometric aspects
of one’s personal identity with a unique number.

At present, the discourse on personal identity in India seems to be
ambiguous. Various groups of people are projecting their point of view to
either demonstrate the inherent advantages of using technologies of
identification or to point out its inherent flaws.

Those that are advocating a mass commercial use of such a technology, seems
to point towards the utility of this technology to contain or solve a crime.
The underlying assumption appears to suggest that any technology of personal
identification will help record deviant behaviour such as, an act of moral
turpitude or a violation of one's life or property. Thus a ready made
surveillance apparatus could easily assist an owner to ascertain the
identity of a person who has done wrong. Crime could be linked to a
fingerprint, fingerprint to a database and database to a verifiable set of
spatio-social co-ordinates.

But could we determine the time or place where a crime would be committed?
Or for that matter could we apprehend every person in an act of committing a
crime? Yes, of course we may, but perhaps only in the imagination of
somebody like Steven Spielberg. In his film the Minority Report, Spielberg,
demonstrates a fantastic way in which pre-cognition software could be put to
good use by apprehending those who are in an act of committing a crime. It’s
a different story altogether that pre-crime unit is depicted as a failure
towards the end of the film.

As of now technology of identification cannot sort out the good guys from
the bad guys. Therefore it turns everybody into a suspect. This is deeply
troubling for privacy lobby folks. However some commentators suggest even
the notion of privacy is difficult to define in the Indian context. But
things are different from an economic perspective.

These are good times for identification industry. Big moolah is just
beginning to enter the market. A smart card which is also a technology of
identification is the real money spinner. With the introduction of seemingly
irrefutable ideas like Unique Identity, the government of India is all set
to emerge as a serious player in the identification game. All Private
vendors, private chip manufacturing, private market research and private
database management firms who are aligning with the Government are going in
for a biggest kill that the market has seen in recent years.

Compared to just the cost of national identity card which is estimated at 1,
50,000 crore rupees, a 1,800 crore market of so called surveillance and
security architecture with its state of the art cameras, motion sensors,
razor wire fencing and so on, seem like mere kitschy pieces of jewellery
which is being doled out for public consumption. And the market for a
national identity card is just a small fraction of the entire spectrum of
emerging smart card industry in India.

If Fingerprinting and numbering are central to a smart card based technology
then profiling is key to any CCTV based system. These three technologies of
identification have come a long way in the last two hundred years. Sometimes
it makes sense to revisit their point of origin.

More than a century ago Sir William James Herschel, a British Civil servant,
based in Hoogly near present day Kolkatta stumbled upon a method of
obtaining fingerprints for the purpose of identification. Since then
fingerprints were used to identify criminals.

Around 1830’s in the plains of central India, William Sleeman, an officer of
then Indian Police was trying to figure out a way to suppress thuggee. Thugs
were a group of conmen who used to murder travellers and loot their
belongings. Sleeman adopted a novel method of identifying thugs.

Initially captured thugs were given protection if they turned approver of
the state. Thugs who had turned approvers were interviewed extensively. From
the interview transcripts possible behavioural profiles of thugs were
generated. Sleeman then hired hundreds of people and trained them in the art
of spotting a thug. Once a thug was captured through profiling, a unique
number was attached to his name. The number was linked to a bundle of
registers where data related to genealogy, pseudo names, and method of
thuggee, caste and personal deity was entered. In this manner Sleeman was
able to generate knowledge and take corrective action against the deadly
practice of thuggee.

In the Indian context fingerprints originated to track and convict
criminals. Numbering and profiling to contain a cold blooded murderous cult
which claimed more than 50,000 lives by some accounts. Till a few years back
these technologies of identification were used for the purpose of keeping
troublemakers in check. Why is it then, that many people in India seems to
be excited about using these technologies of identification to track, tag
and measure common citizens? Why is it becoming okay for everybody to be
turned into a suspect identity?