2009: The Architecture of Aadhaar

Aadhaar’s development began in 2009, when Congress Party prime minister Manmohan Singh issued an executive order to establish the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI). Singh appointed industry titan Nandan Nilekani as the UIDAI’s first chairman. The Infosys cofounder recruited his peers from the technology sector and launched Aadhaar about a year later.

The UIDAI differentiated itself as a “start-up within government” with its lean one-hundred-person staff and its mission to disrupt outdated bureaucratic processes. The department promoted Aadhaar as a welfare-enhancing tool by emphasizing two promises. First, Aadhaar would neither validate nor grant citizenship, which UIDAI deemed “a complicated and involved issue.” The agency would not report to the Home Ministry, in charge of both the Registrar General, which manages the census, and the Department of Internal Security, which manages the police and domestic intelligence.

Second, Aadhaar would eliminate the burden of proving one’s identity. Residents only needed to provide basic demographic information, fingerprints, and iris scans in a simplified process that was sold as a way to “decrease the transaction costs for the poor,” who otherwise struggled to fill paperwork or complete multiple verification steps.

This emphasis on welfare was a strategic choice for the center-left government. Because of the association between biometric enrollment and future welfare benefits, six hundred million people enrolled in Aadhaar in the first five years.

But before long, the BJP stepped into office as the trustee of the most extensive biometric database in the world, containing the demographic data of over a billion Aadhaar holders.

The Aadhaar database also contains individualized records that track each time the ID is used, and it is indeed used extensively. Aadhaar is now required to access 252 welfare programs as well as to file taxes, purchase a cell phone, worship at certain religious sites, and participate in most aspects of daily life. According to the Home Ministry, this data trail ensures that police armed “with big data analysis” can provide a “360-degree profile of any person.”

“No other country, and certainly no democratic country, has ever held its own citizens hostage to such a powerful infrastructure of surveillance,” Indian scholar Jean Drèze claims.

2015: The Weaponization of Aadhaar in Assam

In 2015, Modi launched the Digital India campaign to bring citizens into a single digital infrastructure and to “clean” the state’s “impure elements.” That same year, the Home Ministry initiated a process to determine the family trees of thirty-three million residents in the state of Assam. The supposedly sophisticated technology that would be used to establish the nationality of an entire population rested on decaying paper documents riddled with errors.

Much of India’s poor and illiterate population in Assam was now burdened with the near-impossible task of proving ancestral links to Indian citizens present on pre-1971 government documents, such as decades-old voter records. Ironically, it was the very problem Aadhaar promised to solve. In 2018, the resulting citizen list excluded four million people. The Home Ministry also invited members of the public to file anonymous objections to the inclusion of anyone they suspected of being illegal, with the objecting party not even required to appear before an official.

Alongside this effort, the Supreme Court instructed the UIDAI to “undertake the process of biometric enrollment” for any person who wished to appeal their exclusion from the 2018 citizen list. Although the UIDAI maintains that Aadhaar “has got nothing to do with the citizenship issue,” the biometric enrollment campaign in Assam had the distinct purpose of generating a separate ID for foreigners.

The 2016 Aadhaar Act specifies that “every resident shall be entitled to obtain an Aadhaar number by submitting his demographic information and biometric information.” Nevertheless, access to Aadhaar has been denied to all people who submitted their biometrics to the UIDAI during the citizenship appeals process.

In interviews, “foreigners” in Assam described how they did not receive rations, subsidized homes, or other benefits they were entitled to because of the citizenship test’s faulty results. A young girl complained that she was no longer able to apply for school. “It’s torture,” another told me. “They know that we are not illegal. It’s economic, financial, and physical harassment.”

In 2019, an updated list reclassified 2.1 million foreigners as citizens after all. After spending upward of $185 million and enlisting thirty thousand government officials, the state’s exercise was revealed to have had an error rate of over 50 percent.

Many people the government now recognizes as citizens — and many more who are likely citizens but mired in lengthy proceedings to prove their ancestry — are blocked from using their Aadhaar numbers. Restrictions on Aadhaar access are now wielded as punishment for even facing accusations of being a foreigner. Because Aadhaar authentication is increasingly required to access public and private services, the errors of the citizenship list bleed into every sphere of economic and civic life.

The UIDAI’s involvement in Assam violates the core tenets of Aadhaar: that it is voluntary, available to all residents, and for their welfare. It has allowed Aadhaar to become a mechanism of exclusion and isolation in a larger project that intertwines religion with citizenship for BJP leaders like Assam’s chief minister, Himanta Biswa Sarma, who advocates for Muslim population control, bans hijab-wearing girls from completing exams, and shuts down Muslim schools, declaring that they have no place in the “new India.”

2019: The Nationalization of the Assam Experiment

To enforce new citizenship rules enacted in 2019, the Home Ministry plans to develop a national list of “authentic” Indian citizens, as has been done in Assam. The basis of the National Register of Citizens will be the National Population Register conducted as part of the decennial census process. This population count will, for the first time, collect the Aadhaar number of each resident.

The prospect of digitally identifying supposed foreigners has paved the way for the construction of new detention centers. In 2019, the Home Ministry ordered all twenty-eight states in India to build long-term foreigner detention facilities. Then, in early 2023, Assam police started moving people into a newly constructed facility in the Goalpara district. According to construction workers interviewed on site, these facilities, which hold detainees past the “gate of no return,” are commonly referred to locally as “concentration camps.”

The Goalpara camp is the size of eleven football fields and contains thirteen separate buildings, including a hospital, daycare, and cultural event center. The women’s facilities overlook a school for young children. Despite official nomenclature, it is unclear how such structures function as short-term “transit camps.” Nor is it clear what future awaits those detained.

The same month that the “foreigners” were transferred to the completed Goalpara facility, the capital city of Assam erected billboards of the prime minister that announced “India’s G20 Presidency to accelerate new ideas and collective action.” YouTube ads promoting United Nations events were used to launch an Assam Cop mobile app for police. From the automated banishment of supposed foreigners through the e-Foreigners Tribunal app to the rapid construction of detention camps around the country, Modi’s calls for “collective action” carry a particular connotation for Muslim citizens.

The e-Foreigners Tribunal software creates a biometric database of suspected and declared foreigners as well as an online geospatial tracking system. According to government documents, the e-Foreigners Tribunal app allows the UIDAI to validate the biometric data of those who apply for welfare benefits “from Assam or any other state of India” with the citizen register. If a person is deemed a foreigner, the system sends SMS and email alerts to nearby police officers with the suspect’s GPS location through the Crime and Criminal Tracking Networks and Systems. It has never been easier to identify the religion, caste, income, property ownership, marital status, employment, and family-tree data — not to mention the exact location — of every single citizen on demand.

The linking of Aadhaar and voter IDs, enabled through the 2021 Election Laws (Amendment) Bill, paves the way for the government to legally turn off the right to vote for millions of suspected foreigners in national elections. In 2019, Aadhaar data was already used to profile seventy-eight million people, leading to thirty million Muslim voters being scrubbed from the electoral rolls.

Amid rising vigilante violence and a culture of suspicion enhanced by the presence of new detention centers and digital surveillance platforms, people will have fewer places to appeal once the technological infrastructure has delivered a binary and superficially clear yes or no answer as to whether an individual socially, culturally, and physically belongs in India.

2024: The Globalization of Aadhaar

Regulatory regimes have yet to create safeguards against political parties’ use and misuse of sensitive biometric data, especially when it is harvested in the name of national security. In the meantime, the Gates Foundation is trying to spread the Aadhaar system across the developing world through grants to the World Bank’s Identification for Development (ID4D) initiative. In a blog post that advocates making the world’s invisible people visible, Bill Gates praises Aadhaar as a “valuable platform for delivering social welfare programs.” Certainly, governments need information about their citizens to distribute entitlements, but ID4D participation in authoritarian states such as the Philippines, Nigeria, Uganda, and Ethiopia raises questions about what kind of political future the world is banking on. According to ID4D’s own 2020 Annual Report, “empirical research that rigorously evaluates the impact of ID systems on development outcomes and the effectiveness of strategies to mitigate risks has been limited.”

The BJP’s weaponization of Aadhaar is a canary in the coal mine for the state violence that biometric ID systems can unleash the world over. If the “mother of all democracies” is utilizing these systems to sever millions from political participation, government services, and the right to statehood altogether, then perhaps Bill Gates is wrong to say that making people visible to the government will serve social welfare.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that those who benefit economically, such as Big Tech companies, and those who benefit politically, like Modi’s BJP, brush off concerns about digitally fueled authoritarianism. After BJP leaders bulldozed hundreds of Muslim homes, Modi was celebrated at a White House state dinner with a guest list that included the CEOs of Microsoft, Apple, Google, and OpenAI. While these leaders profess the importance of total visibility, they work hard to ensure the societal risks of the new biometric borders they champion stay in the dark.