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3. Tika Nipāta

6. Çakka Nipāta

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https://kafila.online/…/no-your-lordship-everybody-opposi…/…

There are two types of democracies followed in our Country. One for
just 1% intolerant, cunning, crooked, number one terrorists of the
world, violent, militant, ever shooting, lynching, lunatic, mentally
retarded chitpavan brahmins of RSS (Rakshasa Swayam Sevaks) for their
manusmriti based stealth, shadowy, discriminatory hindutva cult and
their stooges, chamchas, chelas, bootlickers and own mother’s flesh
eaters who gobbled the Master Key by tampering the Fraud EVMs and won
elections.

The other one for 99% Sarvajan Samaj based on the
Marvelous, Modern Constitution of the Chief Architect Dr BR Ambedkar who
provided the Universal Adult Franchise negated by the fraud EVMs.

Both the Democracies are surviving dividing Parliament, Executive, Judiciary and the Media.
99% are fraud EVM based and just 1% based on the Universal Adult Franchise.

We live in strange times. A judge in the country’s Supreme Court
believes anyone challenging the government’s decision to impose
Aadhar-based surveillance regime is following an “NGO line.” Another
judge wonders in the court whether “one nation one identity” is not the
necessary path forward. Soon, one wonders, if any opposition to
surveillance, and any resistance to being spied upon by the state, will
be deemed anti-national not only by the government but also by our top
judiciary.

Since the hearings on the various anti-Aadhar pleas
are being heard in the Supreme Court, and since such inconsiderate
observations are being made regularly, let us look at a few problematic
aspects of the biometry-based Aadhar idea itself—not only the technical
glitches and possible misuses (of which there are many), but the central
philosophy that underlines the state’s eagerness to bring every citizen
under one biometric identity.

At its heart, this move is an
abandonment of the very idea of the welfare state and liberal democracy
because it is premised not on the promise that this system of unique
identification will benefit individual citizens (which the government is
eager to promote) but on the necessary criminalization of the whole
citizenry. One is a criminal unless one is able to prove otherwise, and
that mechanism of proving one’s innocence is Aadhar. If read carefully,
every defense of the Aadhar system from the government so far has been
based on the assumption that it will “weed out” fake identities across
the board, and hence will be beneficial to the nation at large. This is
just the inverted version of wholesale criminalization, suggesting that
it is the burden of the individual citizen to prove that she is not a
fake identity or not a criminal to get benefits from the state. With
this, the state is also implying that all of us, including your
lordships, are potential criminals, unless we possess a card to disprove
it. This goes against not only our commonsense, but against the very
notion of democracy enshrined in the constitution.

This idea of
unique identification based on biometric data is not new. Despite the
bravado claims of people who have been the architects of this current
behemoth called Aadhar, each and every component of this idea was
introduced in the nineteenth century through colonial governance and its
entrenched racism. Indeed, this system has two different but related
genealogies through two of the most prominent criminologists of the
nineteenth-century France and England, Alphonse Bertillon and Francis
Galton. The first major breakthrough came from Bertillon, the police
prefecture at Paris, when he devised a unique system of filing data
about criminals. It is equally important to remember that the context
for this discovery was what was known as recidivism or repeat-offence,
something that was seen in France as an epidemic or contagion du mal
threatening the health of the body politic. Put simply, the initial
challenge was to establish a reliable judicial identification of an
individual—that is to say, when an individual was arrested, how did one
establish that the same person had not been arrested and tried in the
past. Bertillon realized that to establish individual identity across
time one needed an archive of criminals against which each and every
fresh case could be verified, and also that such an archive would need
extremely sophisticated filing system so that one could find what one
needed without much hassle. Initially, and even prior to Bertillon,
photographs were seen as a sure remedy since they were more reliable
than verbal descriptions and they could instantly establish one’s
identity beyond reasonable doubts. It soon transpired, however, that
individual faces changed over time for a number of reasons—age, disease,
accident and so on—and mere reliance on photographs or mug shots would
not take one far. Something more robust and more rigorous was needed,
and this is where Bertillon made his important intervention.

He
proposed an elaborate system of biometric measurements and their
systematic recording in his book Identification Anthropométrique:
Instructions Signalétiques (1885). According to this system (popularly
known as Bertillonage), the biometric data of an individual body had to
be taken at three different stages. In the first instance,
“Anthropometrical Signalment,” the body was divided and measured under
three different heads: “the body at large” (height, reach, and trunk),
the head (skull and right ear), and the limbs (left foot, left middle
finger, left little finger, and left forearm). He considered these
measurements as “indisputable” signalments and designed special calipers
for this purpose. These records were then carefully organized on “slips
of cardboard” and arranged in “small movable boxes.” In the second
stage called “Descriptive Signalment,” one had to rely on verbal
description that “describes in words, by the aid of observation alone,
without the assistance of instruments” and this descriptive part had to
independently confirm the findings of the signaletic cards. And in the
final part, these early two stages were combined as it relied on the
“description” of special marks on the body like moles, scars, tattoos
etc. with the “notation of their locality.”

Once this preliminary
plan was laid down, Bertillon insisted that he had found a solution to
the problem of judicial identification once and for all. He even claimed
that from now on the “signalectic notice” would accompany “every
reception and every delivery of a human individuality” within the prison
system, and in the process would organize a “muster-roll” for all
convicts in order to “preserve a sufficient record of the personality to
be able to identify the present description with one which may be
presented at some future time.” “From this point of view” he continued,
“signalment is the instrument, by excellence, of the proof of
recidivation, which necessarily implies the proof of identity
[constatation d’identité]. So there could be no judicial records without
the aid of signalment.”

Needless to say, the parallels between
Bertollonage and Aadhar are striking—one just needs to replace the
French criminal of Bertillon with the putative Indian citizen. This
eerie sense of déjà vu gets reinforced even more with the additional
justification Bertillon offered in support of his system. He suggested
that the system had a second implication, and called it “non-identity.”
The signaletic notice, he argued, could also be used “at the request of
honorable persons […] who demand the effacement from their record of
convictions unduly entered.” In effect, then, Bertillonage by his own
admission was not only a system intended to “verify the declared
identity” of recidivist criminals but also a vital device that could
“cause the true identity to be discovered.” Bertillon gave this point
further currency when he quoted Ed de Ryckère, assistant public
prosecutor at Bruges in Belgium, who pointed out the larger civil use of
Bertillonage—that it was able “to fix the human personality, to give to
each human being an identity, a positive, lasting and invariable
individuality, always recognizable and easily demonstrable.”

In
other words, the system was calculated not only to find a statistical
solution to criminal identity, but also to create a muster-roll of the
entire population. What is equally intriguing is the source of this
argument in Bertillon’s text. He developed this idea not through
criminological investigations, but through his other interest in
colonial anthropology recorded in his book Ethnographie Moderne: Les
Races Sauvages (1883). His treatise on the “savage races” of Africa, the
Americas, Oceania, and Asia deployed a similar system of biometric
measurement and recorded their savagery through their physiological
irregularities. The central point of this methodology was to use
biometry in order to measure how much these “savages” deviated from
normative European bodies, and to prepare a list of graded savageries on
the basis of their distance from the norm. This deeply racist idea was
then re-deployed for the purpose of Bertillonage, and marked the first
instance of unique biometrical identification in modern times.

However, this system was not exactly the solution that the colonial
masters were looking for. Soon, another system was proposed based on
unique finger prints. Curiously enough, this idea was first suggested by
an English civil servant stationed in India, William James Herschel. In
a letter published in the science journal Nature (1880) he first
described a native practice of using finger-prints to ascertain one’s
identity. It was, however, formalized as a system of criminal
identification by Francis Galton, a distant cousin of Charles Darwin. In
his book Finger Prints (1892), along with the notion of individual
identity, Galton proposed two other fields as necessarily
related—criminology and heredity. The first one was particularly
important for colonies like India which were plagued by anonymity or
fictitious identity, where “the features of natives are distinguished
with difficulty; where there is but little variety of surnames; where
there are strong motives for prevarication, especially connected with
land-tenure and pensions, and a proverbial prevalence of unveracity.” As
for hereditary traits in individual finger-prints, he admitted that he
had little success in his investigations so far, but his hopes were kept
alive by the colonies and their “savage” inhabitants: “It is doubtful
at present whether it is worth while to pursue the subject, except in
the case of the Hill tribes of India and a few other peculiarly diverse
races, for the chance of discovering some characteristic and perhaps a
more monkey-like pattern.” The inevitable link between biometrical data
and race, even when seen through “scientific” lenses, must alert one of
the coercive possibility inherent in the very method, as a way of
dealing with and putting under continuous surveillance the “inferior”
races and potential criminals.

By the turn of the twentieth
century, these two different systems of Bertillon and Galton came
together to form the foundation for modern biometric systems of
identification.But this system changed something fundamentally—as the
Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben points out, with the rampant use of
biometrics, the liberal state’s relationship with its citizens has been
criminalized irrevocably. Every citizen is now a “criminal body” since
what was primarily intended for criminal management has now been
universalized as population management.

Aadhar is perhaps the
most ambitious and scariest version of this universal criminalization as
it targets some 1.3 billion people within one unique system of
identification. Once enacted, the Aadhar will forever change our
relationship with the state, and will seriously undermine the democratic
structure of India. One can only hope that the constitutional bench
hearing the Aadhar pleas will spare a thought on the philosophical
implications of the Aadhar Act and will not be swayed by the propaganda
machine of the government. One can only hope that the bench would stick
to its promise of being loyal only to the constitution and see through
some illusory notion of “targeted benefits.”