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Census, Sex aur Dhoka

By Taha Mehmood

07 April, 2010
Countercurrents.org

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?

Taha Mehmood is an independent researcher whose current research interest includes, Social life of risk and technology, politics of urban spatial restructuring, Identification practices, Notion of Work-especially in private securities industries, New Economy Labor, Knowledge and archives and Visual representation of risk in popular culture. Since 2006 he has been maintaining a research blog ( http://tahaz.wordpress.com/ ) to document and archive his eclectic research interests.




 

 

 


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