2013
This article was published in New Art (February 2013) in the "Thought" section under the theme "Filming vs. Spectacle".
Secrecy, wrote Elias Canneti, is at the core of modern power. The secret of the state produces a kind of peculiar enchantment, generating a fetish power for those who construct it, and who remain consumed by the fear of the dissolution of the secret. Today after media modernity, the secret seems under greater turmoil than ever before. The secret is now encased in a perilous sieve, where necessary sharing of information in multiple networks produces constant conditions of seepage. This sharing was seen as a necessary condition after the computer and internet age, the digital distribution of information increased systemic velocity and efficiency. In short, proliferation is fundamental to our time, information has value only if it has some velocity and is exchanged. Information once collected, always moves, at some point. The leak is a fundamental potential of all digital information models of our time – this is also a condition of our unstable present.
In this sense, after the digital, the old secret of the state is increasingly subject to a kind of tense postponement of its eventual demise. Now the secret and the modern leak share in a perilous dance with death, at some point the leak chips away at the edifice. Whose secrets are permanent anymore? Yet, when moment of dissolution happens, there is a fleeting and temporary paralysis of power, with a surplus spreading beyond the event. Canetti calls this moment of the secret’s exposure “a flash,” almost like lightning, we can see the recent case of the Wikileaks, the public shaming of a great power, a drama of unmasking that we can all partake, even temporarily. As if having read Cannetti, the Wikileaks team sought in his book Defacement, Michael Taussig builds on Canneti’s insight to suggest that secrecy, is 'an invention that comes out of the public secret'[1]. The public secret is ''that which is generally known, but cannot be articulated'[2]. The public secret is a known-unknown, at some point all these public secrets erupt despite great strategies of concealment.
If the Wikileaks moment heralded a new moment in the destabilization of systems of state secrecy after new media, India too has not been far behind in technologically aided exposures of the structures of state and political power. But this was a phenomemon that went beyond the state, but to the body of the population itself.
As one writer in Bombay based Economic and Political weekly wrote, “unlike societies in the 1970s, our social body is defined by leaks; everything leaks, from surveillance tapes, wire taps, nudity on a remote beach, books, music, medicinal drugs and lives. Secrets and leaks are no longer governed by the state; there is a egalitarianism of secrets.”
One of the main reasons for the fragility of the secret in India is the new media landscape from the 1980s, after the advent of globalization and a fast growing media modernity. From the beginning of the video era in the 1980s, to three decades later a new media geography has emerged in India, and a vast new zone of media experiences. The expansion of media formats and platforms has been fairly kinetic, VHS, audiocassette, VCDs, DVDs, digital cinema, and an endless profusion of personalized media gadgets which range from the higher priced transnational brands to low cost Chinese greyware models used by the poor. The expansion of the media infrastructure, along with a generalized technological culture is surely the most substantial in our time; the majority of the population now possesses cellular phones in India, and, despite the indifferent internet infrastructure, the country has one of the worlds fastest growing social media communities. More people if not the majority, access and circulate technological media (cinema, video, music, print, images) through environments that have formed around, and intersecting with the older sites like the cinema theatre. In India, if not anywhere, the media experience now forms an integral part of our everyday life than ever before.
At one level, there is little denying the significance of the shift in India since the 1980s. The post-1947 official approach to media was two fold. On the one hand the regime saw radio and television as pedagogic institutions to groom populations into a new national-cultural citizenship. Film and print were subject to different models of regulation: mobilised for their pedagogic and affective possibilities, managed by a host of intermediate institutions that included censor codes, courts, the import-export regime, that carefully filtered foreign exchange and newsprint/film stock quotas. The sites of media production had recognizable representational formats: film studios, state radio, newspaper houses. The population simply received media, filtered through these sites.
Today the old model seems fairly limited. After the cellular phone, a growing section of the population is now the source of new media produced, - that in turn links to online social networks, mainstream television (through ‘citizen’ journalism), and peer-to-peer exchanges of text, music and video. The cellular phone has become a transmitter and media production device: activists capture police brutality and protests, ordinary people enter the world of mass photography and share them with their friends. These massive expansions of the older media infrastructures have thrown the old control models of the regime into disarray. The archive fever of digital modernity, where we capture, store and re-circulated images inflects both states and populations. In a situation of media porosity, the information ‘leak’ from the state is regular and widespread: leaked audio surveillance, secret documents – all of which leaks and feeds into the media ‘event’. Not unlike other governments around the world, the Indian government has resorted to digital storage systems to hold information, including audio surveillance, and text documents. Once digitally stored, governmental information makes periodically emerges in the public domain, or deployed in political and business wars. Among the first of these was the audio recording of a conversation by Amar Singh, a north Indian politician, who was variously heard fixing high court judges, managing various sexual and financial favors of the Indian elite. Though the circulation of the tapes was stayed by the Supreme court, they have attained the status of Taussig’s public secret, a reference in most political discourse. In a more recent and sensational case, audio surveillance tapes of Nira Radia, a Delhi based lobbyist made their way to local newsmagazines, exposing a stunning trail involving India’s major companies, the telecom minister and local journalists, in order to fix a multibillion dollar telecom contracts. 100 hours of audio is now online, providing the public a dramatic entry into the corridors of political and social power. Image, internet,.
In the early years of globalization Indian television channels pioneered the television sting. This consisted of the entrapment of public officials on hidden cameras, when they were shown to take bribes from journalists posing as the bribe givers. The early scandals involved military officials, then members of parliament. In court cases that followed , the journalists used older police entrapment legal case law judgments to argue for a legitimate breach of privacy in public interest. The idea of transparency was also held out as a public good, and the sting a crucial tool for that project. Today the sting has become the routinesed technique of all, political parties sting their opponents, television channels all over the country entrap not just public officials, but more, transparency campaigns moved to the population at large. Thus there are stings of sex scandals, scams, sensational murder trials. Not In the summer of 2007, a local Delhi TV station, ran a sting where a school student accused a high school teacher in the old city of running a prostitution racket, and riots broke out immediately (Image). It turned out that the sting itself was fabricated, with the student an employee of the TV station, the video edited.
In 2000 Lev Manovich had suggested that digital culture was primarily cinematographic in appearance, and digital in material and driven by software. Despite its insights, the limits of this formulation are clear when we look at the expansion of digital screens in South Asia – primarily due to cellular phones, whose numbers now reach into hundreds of millions. (storage and communication, 2,054 kindle)The phone screen draws from running text display, photography, game design and video; the object itself carries a link with analog memories of the radio transistor. The cellular phone is much more; it has become a transmitter and media production device, a feature that will surely increase with low cost ‘smart’ devices. Millions of people have become amateur photographers and videographers for the first time in their lives. Phone networks and media traffic on them vastly surpass online worlds in South Asia, a phenomenon that will surely increase as costs fall further and computational power of phone processors rise. Today, a vast archive of images, text, sounds, video is emerging from phones, many produced by subaltern populations who may have never worked with computers, video or still cameras.
Expanding mobile phone media networks have periodically led to a series of disturbed environments, which highlight not just the power and vulnerability of populations immersed in the new media culture, but also the problem of governmental control and management of the media.
Since the coming of video, the control model of the 1950s post independence regime in India has gone into long term paralysis. With video’s destabilization of film’s distribution and theatrical exhibition model, the certainties of the censorship regime have been fundamentally eroded. Censorship demands outside the state, have proliferated rapidly from a wide spectrum of regional and right wing groups, text books and art exhibitions, and print publications over which governmental control still exists.
The viral proliferation of digital video and images through telephones periodically expose the limits of the existing control regime. In the past few years mobile video has exposed personal sexual scandals, political terror and death, torture, police atrocities. Mobile video is an archive of destroyed lives, expose culture, political agitprop, and indicative of the disturbed digital environments that I refer to. What is remarkable is that despite claims of ‘doctoring’ that accompanies most such digital artifacts, their existence as ‘documents’ are rarely questioned by the wider public. These are mostly situations of temporary intensity, impossible for courts and governments to easily manage. By the time case law catches up, the event is over and restrictions largely ineffective.
The new, self-proclaimed antagonist of the secret in a post-digital world is the slogan of transparency. Just about everyone seems to want transparency today, the media, Julian Assange, government modernizers, information activists from left to right, consultants, corporate reformers, angry television anchors, the Federal Reserve. Transparency is the legitimate progressive slogan of our time, much like planning in the 1950s, or modernity a decade ago – and often connects activists with government reformers.
In India, transparency is a significant argument for the massive rollout of information infrastructures all across India. These initiatives range from biometric cards for slum dwellers which are linked to governmental welfare schemes, enumeration of urban land by linking it to digitized property titling schemes, CCTV platforms to survey streets and neighborhoods, massive transportation databases that are linked to GPS enabled road machines, and large GIS mapping initiatives sponsored by the Department of Science and Technology. Along with the recent national ID scheme to be deployed at the national level, these technological interventions have little parallel in any postcolonial society, dwarfing many such schemes worldwide in their ambition. The new technological initiatives have tapped into an information populism that cuts across activists, judges, elite managers and liberal modernizers. If a post digital environment has disrupted the old monopoly of secrecy by government, transparency and information infrastructures have emerged an argument for a new social relationship of permanent visibility, between governments and populations.
Transparency had its first origins in French Enlightenment ideas on vision, light and optics. Light, it was believed, had the great power to penetrate dark spaces. The power of transparency lay, as Foucault pointed out in his Eye of Power, in the ability to see, without being seen. The new strategies of illumination were political technologies of visibility: statistics, hygiene, criminology, and the human sciences. In the first half of the 20th century, transparency as a concept had become the mainstream wisdom of the social sciences, rather than the older 19th century optico-political register. By the post World War 2 period transparency arguments had dissolved into the larger body of modernization theory and development in the Third World.
Transparency’s great revival was in the 1990s, in a decade of neoliberal ideologies, financial speculation, and the delegitimation of a large corpus of the older human sciences after the critiques of the 1960s and 1970s. This was the discovery of new sources of opacity, along with legal rationalism. The new concern to make the invisible visible, moved into a diverse set of interventions: Hernan de Soto argued for formal property rights to mobilize what he called the dead (informal) capital of the South, corporate reform called for new ‘transparent’ models of financial disclosure, NGO activists called for legally visible and enumerated rights for migrants, microfinance, and new forms of documentation. A vast army of consultants and new forms of expertise emerged devoted to extract some form of visibility that could be measured for efficiency. This began an era of periodic institutional audits, review reports, and new standards set by consultants, ushering in what the anthropologist Marilyn Stathern calls the ‘tyranny of transparency,” the suppression of experimental and long term possibilities, in order to denote quantifiable standards.
THE UID project: Indian information infrastructure
Among the early supporters of transparency initiatives in India the 1990s was the entrepreneur Nandan Nilekeni, one of the founders of the Bangalore-based software giant Infosys.[3] An alumni of Bombay’s Indian Institute of Technology, Nilekeni became one of India’s most successful IT industrialists when he set up Infosys with his colleague MR Narayanamurthy. Infosys rode the IT boom of the 1990s by establishing supply networks with US companies and continuing to expand after 2001. From 2003 Nilekeni positioned himself in the centre of India’s intellectual discourse on transparency and economic transformation. A son of Fabian Socialist parents, Nilekeni has suggested that his own journey to capitalist market beliefs as representative of India’s transition to globalization from 1950s socialist planning. A believer in free market principles and globalization Nilekeni famously coined the phrase “the world is flat” to suggest that the global power equation had change after globalization – a term used as a book title by Nilekeni’s friend and New York Times columnist Thomas Freidman.
In 2008, Nilekeni published Imagining India: the Idea of a Renewed Nation. The book opened to ecstatic reviews in the Indian and international press; Nilekeni had book tour events organized in Delhi, Bangalore, Europe and the US, where events ranged from New York Review of Books’ sponsored talks to a slot in the Daily Show. For many global commentators, Nilekeni represented the new post-global IT savvy Indian, articulate, intellectually polished and committed to individual freedom.
Widely researched by a large team that worked for him, Imagining India argued for Nilekeni’s typical mix of civic liberal ideas where of individual freedom in markets free of interference would prosper with social infrastructure built by the state. Citizenship in the new order was to be based on a transparency regime that guaranteed rights through unhindered access to universal identification. India’s government departments are isolated technologically, argued Nilekeni, choked with paperwork, and lack a common technological grid. Service delivery is crippled and inefficiency abounds.[4]
What was need was not just a common technology platform but a common ID for each citizen:
Creating a national register of citizens, assigning them a unique ID, and linking them across a set of national data bases…can have far reaching effects in delivering public services better and targeting services more accurately. Unique identification for each citizen also acknowledges a basic right, the ‘right to an acknowledged existence” in the country, without which much of the nation’s poor can be nameless and ignored, and governments can draw a veil over large-scale poverty and destitution.[5]
An ID system concluded Nilekeni, would have “revolutionary” implications for India. "No one else can claim a benefit that is rightfully yours, and no one else can deny their economic status."[6]. Nilekeni cited the experience of the US social security administration’s early deployment of the IBM 705 computer systems to streamline and standardize records and increase efficiency, which soon became a model for Europe. At the helm of Infosys Nilekeni was surely familiar with information systems of US and European welfare, where processing and management was often subcontracted to Indian companies. In the link of individual freedom and rational information systems and service delivery to the poor Imagining India articulated an emerging elite consensus on developing new techniques of government in the years after 2005, where the old ‘social’ based on political incorporation into welfare became increasingly difficult to sustain following the neo-liberal era. The entry of millions into the formal economy after globalization, and the rise of an information technology industry magnified the space of the ‘informal’ as a ‘not yet’ – a space where techniques of escape by errant populations were seen not just as sources of waste but also potential criminality and terrorism. ‘Countability’ along with new forms of visibility through digital surfaces, has now come to occupy prime place in the new discourses on modernization in contemporary India.
In June 2009, the Indian Prime Minister invited Nandan Nilekeni to join the newly created Unique Identification Authority of India as a head with a cabinet rank. The Authority would set about creating a common Unique Identifying Number (UID) for all residents. Nilekeni resigned his post in Infosys, and in his farewell message on his Facebook page, Nilekeni repeated many of the arguments in his book:
Many people have asked me why I accepted this appointment. I have long been a champion of a reform approach that is inclusive of the poor, and in my book, I described unique identity as one of the key steps for achieving this goal. Giving every individual in India a unique identification number can go a long way in enabling direct benefits, and fixing weak public delivery systems, giving the poor access to better healthcare, education, and welfare safety nets. When Prime Minister Manmohan Singh offered me the opportunity to head the UIDAI, I saw it as a chance to help enable ideas I have supported for a long time. [7]
The setting up of the UID authority came up in the background of expanding social welfare schemes from 2005, these included the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme(NREGA), that guaranteed a minimum of 100 days employment to the rural poor in most districts across the country. NREGA was widely seen as a factor in the return to power of the Congress regime. With the return of the Congress coalition to power NREGA was planned to include urban areas, along with existing social programs like the National Literacy Mission, and the Rural Health Mission. In this environment, informationalization and IT enabled information infrastructures were key to elite fears of stabilizing welfare delivery.[8]
Welfare schemes have been linked to new biometric identification schemes in various Indian cities in recent years. Biometric identification gained visibility after the events of September 11, and Indian technology companies actively pushed them to government bureaucrats and security agencies. By 2006 biometric identification technologies became popular in welfare schemes in Hyderabad, Pune and then Delhi. An ambitious biometric identification drive among the Delhi’s urban poor called Mission Convergence seeks to document uncounted urban populations and bypass political networks of welfare disbursal. These new efforts of identifying the urban poor will be integrated with the larger UID project on a national scale.
Imagining Countability: the UID vision document
The UID initiative came in the background of existing historical practices of identification in 20th century India. The colonial regime had set up an information infrastructure for food rationing in the late 1930s, which made complex classifications based on the war economy and the need to manage food shortages in India.[9] Ration cards were introduced to different categories of the urban population, including able workers, government servants, and food distribution managed through authorized shops.
In the postcolonial 1950s the Planning Commission under Dr P.C Mahalonobis, standardized data collection and sampling, and introduced computers for data processing.[10] The colonial ration card was standardized to remove multiple categories and a family-unit based system covering select urban populations was initiated. It was in late 1993 that a massive ID project was launched by the Election commission, using electro rolls and video cameras for still photography of the entire voting population. Though the Election ID project had mixed results, the Election ID has emerged as a recognizable identity document in airports and courts of law as proof of identity. With globalization and the entry of millions into the formal financial economy, the Income Tax department came out with PAN (permanent account number) for all taxpayers.
The establishment of the UID aims to build on and standardize all the existing information data bases in the country.
In November 2009, at a closed door academic conference in Shimla the UID Authority came out with its first vision document. Though tagged as ‘confidential’ the UID document represents an ambitious vision for information infrastructure after digital media.[11] It carefully places its own project within the larger trajectory of efficiency, democratic citizenship’s link to transparency and right to countability, and the deployment of new computation technologies in the process. At every level Nilekeni’s own hand is clearly visible in the document. The UID document is a working paper, the actual practices of identification will emerge in the years to come once the process is underway. Nevertheless the UID document offers an important window into the elite roadmap for an ambitious information infrastructure.
The UID number will only provide identity not rights or citizenship. The UIDAI’s mandate will be limited to the issuance of unique identification numbers linked to a person’s demographic and biometric information. The UID will be a proof of identity not citizenship, a clear departure from Nilekeni’s model in his book. Further, the UID would work with registrars (local and other governmental institutions to enroll residents into its database with proper verification of their demographic and biometric information. Standardization is seen by the UID as an enticement not a barrier to the enrollment of the poor. “The Authority will ensure that …standards don’t become a barrier for enrolling the poor, and will devise suitable procedures to ensure their inclusion without compromising the integrity of the data.” [12]
The UIDAI will provide standards to enable Registrars maintain uniformity in collecting certain demographic and biometric information. These standards will be finalized by committees the Authority constitutes. The Authority will only collect basic demographic and biometric information on residents, a process that will be not mandated but ‘demand-driven.’
The UIDAI document gestures to its sense of historical place in its own summary:
India will be the first country to implement a biometric‐based unique ID system for its residents on such a large scale. The UID will serve as a universal proof of identity, allowing residents to prove their credentials anywhere in the country. It will give the government a clear view of India’s population, enabling it to target and deliver services effectively, achieve greater returns on social investments, and track money and resource flows across the country. [13]
In a massive financial inclusion scheme the poor will be asked to take bank accounts, and welfare transfers with UID codes will only happen through bank accounts. This way the scheme hopes to cut away the large cash economy among India’s poor, and link them to financial networks of banks. Banks will access UID information data bases and produce credit histories.
Here we are witness to a strange paradox: a regime whose own information is vulnerable to leaks, sets in motion one of the largest biometric IDs projects ever known.
It is possible to read the new moves to information infrastructures as a functional supplement to a larger story of class differentiation and elite assertion after globalization, a sideshow in an essentially political dramaturgy. Equally, it is also possible to see these as the rollout of new technologies of visibility, a biopolitical expansion for the twenty first century.
Or, perhaps we can add a third, supplementary proposition. The information projects, for all their crackpot schemes and techno-fetishism still locate themselves as transcending an epoch where the urban population was seen as a passive absorber of welfare mechanisms and technologies of control. They now address a population that actively produces media, or is increasingly implicated in information infrastructures of mobile telephony and media use. Populations now participate as part producers, part consumers and proliferators of media. This changes the dance of the secret and transparent.
More than the state, for transparency ideologues it is the new mediatised population that is the source of the secret. New technologies of visibility seek to prise open this riddle, not just by stabilizing it, but also channeling the opaque energies into formal structures of money, consumption, documentation. Its great wager is a vitalism of a growing population whose proximity to an emerging expressive media culture gives it radical strengths of subverting power, and terrifying vulnerabilities. Along with the great exposes of police torture, and land grabs through mobile photography that we have seen recently, there is also a larger archive of collapsed inner worlds of a post media population also recorded on phones – that reach social networks, and moving through lightning speeds between users. Here, following Cannetti, the secret explodes, with a terrifying regularity.
It is in the interstices of this world that we may possibly see the future of transparency being fought out.
[1] Michael T. Taussig, Defacement: Public Secrecy and the Labor of the Negative (Stanford University Press, 1999), p. 7.
[2] Taussig, p. 5.
[3] Nilekeni supported local Bangalore based initiatives like Janagraha, that sought to argue for transparency based solutions in local government. For Jangaraha’s politics see Solomon Benjamin and Bhuvaneswari Raman, ‘Illegible Claims, Legal Titles, and the Worlding of Bangalore’, Revue Tiers Monde, 206.2 (2011), pp. 37–54.
[4] Nandan Nilekani, Imagining India: The Idea of a Renewed Nation (Penguin, 2009), p. 350.
[5] Nilekani.
[6] Nilekani, p. 354.
[7] See Nandan Nilekeni, http://www.facebook.com/notes.php?id=32842369434.
[8] At the time of the announcement of Nilekeni as the head of the UID authority, a government source explicitly linked the UID with welfare. “The aim is to ensure that development objectives are achieved without leakages and pilferage,’’ http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Nilekani-to-have-Cabinet-minister-rank-as-Identification-project-head-/articleshow/4701148.cms
[9] Sir Henry Knight, Food Administration in India, 1939-1947 (Stanford University Press, 1954) Knight set up the main rationing system for Bombay in late colonial India. By October 1946, the number of towns and rural areas covered under colonial rationing held a population of over 150 million. Ibid. 189. Also National Archives of India, No. 1023/IX, Food, Rationing, 1946-48.
[10] The National Sample Survey was the main agency for data collection. The Indian Statistical Institute was largely P.C Mahalanobis’ baby and began using computers from the 1950s. The first machine was the British Tabulating Machines (BTM) HEC-2M; later the Russian Ural computer was procured. By 1962 the HEC-2M and Ural were used to design the next generation of computers, including India's first indigenous computer, the 'Tifrac' (or Tata Institute of Fundamental Research Automatic Computer), in 1962. Legend has it that Che Guevara was interested in deploying the Indian Tifrac for Cuban planning operations. The Soviet Ural now sits in the museum of the Nehru Science center in Mumbai.
[11] Unique Identification Authority of India, Creating a unique identity number for every resident in India, Version 1.1, November 2009
[12] Ibid., p. 7.
[13] Ibid., p. 8.
This article was published in New Art (February 2013) in the "Thought" section under the theme "Filming vs. Spectacle".
Secrecy, wrote Elias Canneti, is at the core of modern power. The secret of the state produces a kind of peculiar enchantment, generating a fetish power for those who construct it, and who remain consumed by the fear of the dissolution of the secret. Today after media modernity, the secret seems under greater turmoil than ever before. The secret is now encased in a perilous sieve, where necessary sharing of information in multiple networks produces constant conditions of seepage. This sharing was seen as a necessary condition after the computer and internet age, the digital distribution of information increased systemic velocity and efficiency. In short, proliferation is fundamental to our time, information has value only if it has some velocity and is exchanged. Information once collected, always moves, at some point. The leak is a fundamental potential of all digital information models of our time – this is also a condition of our unstable present.
In this sense, after the digital, the old secret of the state is increasingly subject to a kind of tense postponement of its eventual demise. Now the secret and the modern leak share in a perilous dance with death, at some point the leak chips away at the edifice. Whose secrets are permanent anymore? Yet, when moment of dissolution happens, there is a fleeting and temporary paralysis of power, with a surplus spreading beyond the event. Canetti calls this moment of the secret’s exposure “a flash,” almost like lightning, we can see the recent case of the Wikileaks, the public shaming of a great power, a drama of unmasking that we can all partake, even temporarily. As if having read Cannetti, the Wikileaks team sought in his book Defacement, Michael Taussig builds on Canneti’s insight to suggest that secrecy, is 'an invention that comes out of the public secret'[1]. The public secret is ''that which is generally known, but cannot be articulated'[2]. The public secret is a known-unknown, at some point all these public secrets erupt despite great strategies of concealment.
If the Wikileaks moment heralded a new moment in the destabilization of systems of state secrecy after new media, India too has not been far behind in technologically aided exposures of the structures of state and political power. But this was a phenomemon that went beyond the state, but to the body of the population itself.
As one writer in Bombay based Economic and Political weekly wrote, “unlike societies in the 1970s, our social body is defined by leaks; everything leaks, from surveillance tapes, wire taps, nudity on a remote beach, books, music, medicinal drugs and lives. Secrets and leaks are no longer governed by the state; there is a egalitarianism of secrets.”
One of the main reasons for the fragility of the secret in India is the new media landscape from the 1980s, after the advent of globalization and a fast growing media modernity. From the beginning of the video era in the 1980s, to three decades later a new media geography has emerged in India, and a vast new zone of media experiences. The expansion of media formats and platforms has been fairly kinetic, VHS, audiocassette, VCDs, DVDs, digital cinema, and an endless profusion of personalized media gadgets which range from the higher priced transnational brands to low cost Chinese greyware models used by the poor. The expansion of the media infrastructure, along with a generalized technological culture is surely the most substantial in our time; the majority of the population now possesses cellular phones in India, and, despite the indifferent internet infrastructure, the country has one of the worlds fastest growing social media communities. More people if not the majority, access and circulate technological media (cinema, video, music, print, images) through environments that have formed around, and intersecting with the older sites like the cinema theatre. In India, if not anywhere, the media experience now forms an integral part of our everyday life than ever before.
At one level, there is little denying the significance of the shift in India since the 1980s. The post-1947 official approach to media was two fold. On the one hand the regime saw radio and television as pedagogic institutions to groom populations into a new national-cultural citizenship. Film and print were subject to different models of regulation: mobilised for their pedagogic and affective possibilities, managed by a host of intermediate institutions that included censor codes, courts, the import-export regime, that carefully filtered foreign exchange and newsprint/film stock quotas. The sites of media production had recognizable representational formats: film studios, state radio, newspaper houses. The population simply received media, filtered through these sites.
Today the old model seems fairly limited. After the cellular phone, a growing section of the population is now the source of new media produced, - that in turn links to online social networks, mainstream television (through ‘citizen’ journalism), and peer-to-peer exchanges of text, music and video. The cellular phone has become a transmitter and media production device: activists capture police brutality and protests, ordinary people enter the world of mass photography and share them with their friends. These massive expansions of the older media infrastructures have thrown the old control models of the regime into disarray. The archive fever of digital modernity, where we capture, store and re-circulated images inflects both states and populations. In a situation of media porosity, the information ‘leak’ from the state is regular and widespread: leaked audio surveillance, secret documents – all of which leaks and feeds into the media ‘event’. Not unlike other governments around the world, the Indian government has resorted to digital storage systems to hold information, including audio surveillance, and text documents. Once digitally stored, governmental information makes periodically emerges in the public domain, or deployed in political and business wars. Among the first of these was the audio recording of a conversation by Amar Singh, a north Indian politician, who was variously heard fixing high court judges, managing various sexual and financial favors of the Indian elite. Though the circulation of the tapes was stayed by the Supreme court, they have attained the status of Taussig’s public secret, a reference in most political discourse. In a more recent and sensational case, audio surveillance tapes of Nira Radia, a Delhi based lobbyist made their way to local newsmagazines, exposing a stunning trail involving India’s major companies, the telecom minister and local journalists, in order to fix a multibillion dollar telecom contracts. 100 hours of audio is now online, providing the public a dramatic entry into the corridors of political and social power. Image, internet,.
In the early years of globalization Indian television channels pioneered the television sting. This consisted of the entrapment of public officials on hidden cameras, when they were shown to take bribes from journalists posing as the bribe givers. The early scandals involved military officials, then members of parliament. In court cases that followed , the journalists used older police entrapment legal case law judgments to argue for a legitimate breach of privacy in public interest. The idea of transparency was also held out as a public good, and the sting a crucial tool for that project. Today the sting has become the routinesed technique of all, political parties sting their opponents, television channels all over the country entrap not just public officials, but more, transparency campaigns moved to the population at large. Thus there are stings of sex scandals, scams, sensational murder trials. Not In the summer of 2007, a local Delhi TV station, ran a sting where a school student accused a high school teacher in the old city of running a prostitution racket, and riots broke out immediately (Image). It turned out that the sting itself was fabricated, with the student an employee of the TV station, the video edited.
In 2000 Lev Manovich had suggested that digital culture was primarily cinematographic in appearance, and digital in material and driven by software. Despite its insights, the limits of this formulation are clear when we look at the expansion of digital screens in South Asia – primarily due to cellular phones, whose numbers now reach into hundreds of millions. (storage and communication, 2,054 kindle)The phone screen draws from running text display, photography, game design and video; the object itself carries a link with analog memories of the radio transistor. The cellular phone is much more; it has become a transmitter and media production device, a feature that will surely increase with low cost ‘smart’ devices. Millions of people have become amateur photographers and videographers for the first time in their lives. Phone networks and media traffic on them vastly surpass online worlds in South Asia, a phenomenon that will surely increase as costs fall further and computational power of phone processors rise. Today, a vast archive of images, text, sounds, video is emerging from phones, many produced by subaltern populations who may have never worked with computers, video or still cameras.
Expanding mobile phone media networks have periodically led to a series of disturbed environments, which highlight not just the power and vulnerability of populations immersed in the new media culture, but also the problem of governmental control and management of the media.
Since the coming of video, the control model of the 1950s post independence regime in India has gone into long term paralysis. With video’s destabilization of film’s distribution and theatrical exhibition model, the certainties of the censorship regime have been fundamentally eroded. Censorship demands outside the state, have proliferated rapidly from a wide spectrum of regional and right wing groups, text books and art exhibitions, and print publications over which governmental control still exists.
The viral proliferation of digital video and images through telephones periodically expose the limits of the existing control regime. In the past few years mobile video has exposed personal sexual scandals, political terror and death, torture, police atrocities. Mobile video is an archive of destroyed lives, expose culture, political agitprop, and indicative of the disturbed digital environments that I refer to. What is remarkable is that despite claims of ‘doctoring’ that accompanies most such digital artifacts, their existence as ‘documents’ are rarely questioned by the wider public. These are mostly situations of temporary intensity, impossible for courts and governments to easily manage. By the time case law catches up, the event is over and restrictions largely ineffective.
The new, self-proclaimed antagonist of the secret in a post-digital world is the slogan of transparency. Just about everyone seems to want transparency today, the media, Julian Assange, government modernizers, information activists from left to right, consultants, corporate reformers, angry television anchors, the Federal Reserve. Transparency is the legitimate progressive slogan of our time, much like planning in the 1950s, or modernity a decade ago – and often connects activists with government reformers.
In India, transparency is a significant argument for the massive rollout of information infrastructures all across India. These initiatives range from biometric cards for slum dwellers which are linked to governmental welfare schemes, enumeration of urban land by linking it to digitized property titling schemes, CCTV platforms to survey streets and neighborhoods, massive transportation databases that are linked to GPS enabled road machines, and large GIS mapping initiatives sponsored by the Department of Science and Technology. Along with the recent national ID scheme to be deployed at the national level, these technological interventions have little parallel in any postcolonial society, dwarfing many such schemes worldwide in their ambition. The new technological initiatives have tapped into an information populism that cuts across activists, judges, elite managers and liberal modernizers. If a post digital environment has disrupted the old monopoly of secrecy by government, transparency and information infrastructures have emerged an argument for a new social relationship of permanent visibility, between governments and populations.
Transparency had its first origins in French Enlightenment ideas on vision, light and optics. Light, it was believed, had the great power to penetrate dark spaces. The power of transparency lay, as Foucault pointed out in his Eye of Power, in the ability to see, without being seen. The new strategies of illumination were political technologies of visibility: statistics, hygiene, criminology, and the human sciences. In the first half of the 20th century, transparency as a concept had become the mainstream wisdom of the social sciences, rather than the older 19th century optico-political register. By the post World War 2 period transparency arguments had dissolved into the larger body of modernization theory and development in the Third World.
Transparency’s great revival was in the 1990s, in a decade of neoliberal ideologies, financial speculation, and the delegitimation of a large corpus of the older human sciences after the critiques of the 1960s and 1970s. This was the discovery of new sources of opacity, along with legal rationalism. The new concern to make the invisible visible, moved into a diverse set of interventions: Hernan de Soto argued for formal property rights to mobilize what he called the dead (informal) capital of the South, corporate reform called for new ‘transparent’ models of financial disclosure, NGO activists called for legally visible and enumerated rights for migrants, microfinance, and new forms of documentation. A vast army of consultants and new forms of expertise emerged devoted to extract some form of visibility that could be measured for efficiency. This began an era of periodic institutional audits, review reports, and new standards set by consultants, ushering in what the anthropologist Marilyn Stathern calls the ‘tyranny of transparency,” the suppression of experimental and long term possibilities, in order to denote quantifiable standards.
THE UID project: Indian information infrastructure
Among the early supporters of transparency initiatives in India the 1990s was the entrepreneur Nandan Nilekeni, one of the founders of the Bangalore-based software giant Infosys.[3] An alumni of Bombay’s Indian Institute of Technology, Nilekeni became one of India’s most successful IT industrialists when he set up Infosys with his colleague MR Narayanamurthy. Infosys rode the IT boom of the 1990s by establishing supply networks with US companies and continuing to expand after 2001. From 2003 Nilekeni positioned himself in the centre of India’s intellectual discourse on transparency and economic transformation. A son of Fabian Socialist parents, Nilekeni has suggested that his own journey to capitalist market beliefs as representative of India’s transition to globalization from 1950s socialist planning. A believer in free market principles and globalization Nilekeni famously coined the phrase “the world is flat” to suggest that the global power equation had change after globalization – a term used as a book title by Nilekeni’s friend and New York Times columnist Thomas Freidman.
In 2008, Nilekeni published Imagining India: the Idea of a Renewed Nation. The book opened to ecstatic reviews in the Indian and international press; Nilekeni had book tour events organized in Delhi, Bangalore, Europe and the US, where events ranged from New York Review of Books’ sponsored talks to a slot in the Daily Show. For many global commentators, Nilekeni represented the new post-global IT savvy Indian, articulate, intellectually polished and committed to individual freedom.
Widely researched by a large team that worked for him, Imagining India argued for Nilekeni’s typical mix of civic liberal ideas where of individual freedom in markets free of interference would prosper with social infrastructure built by the state. Citizenship in the new order was to be based on a transparency regime that guaranteed rights through unhindered access to universal identification. India’s government departments are isolated technologically, argued Nilekeni, choked with paperwork, and lack a common technological grid. Service delivery is crippled and inefficiency abounds.[4]
What was need was not just a common technology platform but a common ID for each citizen:
Creating a national register of citizens, assigning them a unique ID, and linking them across a set of national data bases…can have far reaching effects in delivering public services better and targeting services more accurately. Unique identification for each citizen also acknowledges a basic right, the ‘right to an acknowledged existence” in the country, without which much of the nation’s poor can be nameless and ignored, and governments can draw a veil over large-scale poverty and destitution.[5]
An ID system concluded Nilekeni, would have “revolutionary” implications for India. "No one else can claim a benefit that is rightfully yours, and no one else can deny their economic status."[6]. Nilekeni cited the experience of the US social security administration’s early deployment of the IBM 705 computer systems to streamline and standardize records and increase efficiency, which soon became a model for Europe. At the helm of Infosys Nilekeni was surely familiar with information systems of US and European welfare, where processing and management was often subcontracted to Indian companies. In the link of individual freedom and rational information systems and service delivery to the poor Imagining India articulated an emerging elite consensus on developing new techniques of government in the years after 2005, where the old ‘social’ based on political incorporation into welfare became increasingly difficult to sustain following the neo-liberal era. The entry of millions into the formal economy after globalization, and the rise of an information technology industry magnified the space of the ‘informal’ as a ‘not yet’ – a space where techniques of escape by errant populations were seen not just as sources of waste but also potential criminality and terrorism. ‘Countability’ along with new forms of visibility through digital surfaces, has now come to occupy prime place in the new discourses on modernization in contemporary India.
In June 2009, the Indian Prime Minister invited Nandan Nilekeni to join the newly created Unique Identification Authority of India as a head with a cabinet rank. The Authority would set about creating a common Unique Identifying Number (UID) for all residents. Nilekeni resigned his post in Infosys, and in his farewell message on his Facebook page, Nilekeni repeated many of the arguments in his book:
Many people have asked me why I accepted this appointment. I have long been a champion of a reform approach that is inclusive of the poor, and in my book, I described unique identity as one of the key steps for achieving this goal. Giving every individual in India a unique identification number can go a long way in enabling direct benefits, and fixing weak public delivery systems, giving the poor access to better healthcare, education, and welfare safety nets. When Prime Minister Manmohan Singh offered me the opportunity to head the UIDAI, I saw it as a chance to help enable ideas I have supported for a long time. [7]
The setting up of the UID authority came up in the background of expanding social welfare schemes from 2005, these included the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme(NREGA), that guaranteed a minimum of 100 days employment to the rural poor in most districts across the country. NREGA was widely seen as a factor in the return to power of the Congress regime. With the return of the Congress coalition to power NREGA was planned to include urban areas, along with existing social programs like the National Literacy Mission, and the Rural Health Mission. In this environment, informationalization and IT enabled information infrastructures were key to elite fears of stabilizing welfare delivery.[8]
Welfare schemes have been linked to new biometric identification schemes in various Indian cities in recent years. Biometric identification gained visibility after the events of September 11, and Indian technology companies actively pushed them to government bureaucrats and security agencies. By 2006 biometric identification technologies became popular in welfare schemes in Hyderabad, Pune and then Delhi. An ambitious biometric identification drive among the Delhi’s urban poor called Mission Convergence seeks to document uncounted urban populations and bypass political networks of welfare disbursal. These new efforts of identifying the urban poor will be integrated with the larger UID project on a national scale.
Imagining Countability: the UID vision document
The UID initiative came in the background of existing historical practices of identification in 20th century India. The colonial regime had set up an information infrastructure for food rationing in the late 1930s, which made complex classifications based on the war economy and the need to manage food shortages in India.[9] Ration cards were introduced to different categories of the urban population, including able workers, government servants, and food distribution managed through authorized shops.
In the postcolonial 1950s the Planning Commission under Dr P.C Mahalonobis, standardized data collection and sampling, and introduced computers for data processing.[10] The colonial ration card was standardized to remove multiple categories and a family-unit based system covering select urban populations was initiated. It was in late 1993 that a massive ID project was launched by the Election commission, using electro rolls and video cameras for still photography of the entire voting population. Though the Election ID project had mixed results, the Election ID has emerged as a recognizable identity document in airports and courts of law as proof of identity. With globalization and the entry of millions into the formal financial economy, the Income Tax department came out with PAN (permanent account number) for all taxpayers.
The establishment of the UID aims to build on and standardize all the existing information data bases in the country.
In November 2009, at a closed door academic conference in Shimla the UID Authority came out with its first vision document. Though tagged as ‘confidential’ the UID document represents an ambitious vision for information infrastructure after digital media.[11] It carefully places its own project within the larger trajectory of efficiency, democratic citizenship’s link to transparency and right to countability, and the deployment of new computation technologies in the process. At every level Nilekeni’s own hand is clearly visible in the document. The UID document is a working paper, the actual practices of identification will emerge in the years to come once the process is underway. Nevertheless the UID document offers an important window into the elite roadmap for an ambitious information infrastructure.
The UID number will only provide identity not rights or citizenship. The UIDAI’s mandate will be limited to the issuance of unique identification numbers linked to a person’s demographic and biometric information. The UID will be a proof of identity not citizenship, a clear departure from Nilekeni’s model in his book. Further, the UID would work with registrars (local and other governmental institutions to enroll residents into its database with proper verification of their demographic and biometric information. Standardization is seen by the UID as an enticement not a barrier to the enrollment of the poor. “The Authority will ensure that …standards don’t become a barrier for enrolling the poor, and will devise suitable procedures to ensure their inclusion without compromising the integrity of the data.” [12]
The UIDAI will provide standards to enable Registrars maintain uniformity in collecting certain demographic and biometric information. These standards will be finalized by committees the Authority constitutes. The Authority will only collect basic demographic and biometric information on residents, a process that will be not mandated but ‘demand-driven.’
The UIDAI document gestures to its sense of historical place in its own summary:
India will be the first country to implement a biometric‐based unique ID system for its residents on such a large scale. The UID will serve as a universal proof of identity, allowing residents to prove their credentials anywhere in the country. It will give the government a clear view of India’s population, enabling it to target and deliver services effectively, achieve greater returns on social investments, and track money and resource flows across the country. [13]
In a massive financial inclusion scheme the poor will be asked to take bank accounts, and welfare transfers with UID codes will only happen through bank accounts. This way the scheme hopes to cut away the large cash economy among India’s poor, and link them to financial networks of banks. Banks will access UID information data bases and produce credit histories.
Here we are witness to a strange paradox: a regime whose own information is vulnerable to leaks, sets in motion one of the largest biometric IDs projects ever known.
It is possible to read the new moves to information infrastructures as a functional supplement to a larger story of class differentiation and elite assertion after globalization, a sideshow in an essentially political dramaturgy. Equally, it is also possible to see these as the rollout of new technologies of visibility, a biopolitical expansion for the twenty first century.
Or, perhaps we can add a third, supplementary proposition. The information projects, for all their crackpot schemes and techno-fetishism still locate themselves as transcending an epoch where the urban population was seen as a passive absorber of welfare mechanisms and technologies of control. They now address a population that actively produces media, or is increasingly implicated in information infrastructures of mobile telephony and media use. Populations now participate as part producers, part consumers and proliferators of media. This changes the dance of the secret and transparent.
More than the state, for transparency ideologues it is the new mediatised population that is the source of the secret. New technologies of visibility seek to prise open this riddle, not just by stabilizing it, but also channeling the opaque energies into formal structures of money, consumption, documentation. Its great wager is a vitalism of a growing population whose proximity to an emerging expressive media culture gives it radical strengths of subverting power, and terrifying vulnerabilities. Along with the great exposes of police torture, and land grabs through mobile photography that we have seen recently, there is also a larger archive of collapsed inner worlds of a post media population also recorded on phones – that reach social networks, and moving through lightning speeds between users. Here, following Cannetti, the secret explodes, with a terrifying regularity.
It is in the interstices of this world that we may possibly see the future of transparency being fought out.
[1] Michael T. Taussig, Defacement: Public Secrecy and the Labor of the Negative (Stanford University Press, 1999), p. 7.
[2] Taussig, p. 5.
[3] Nilekeni supported local Bangalore based initiatives like Janagraha, that sought to argue for transparency based solutions in local government. For Jangaraha’s politics see Solomon Benjamin and Bhuvaneswari Raman, ‘Illegible Claims, Legal Titles, and the Worlding of Bangalore’, Revue Tiers Monde, 206.2 (2011), pp. 37–54.
[4] Nandan Nilekani, Imagining India: The Idea of a Renewed Nation (Penguin, 2009), p. 350.
[5] Nilekani.
[6] Nilekani, p. 354.
[7] See Nandan Nilekeni, http://www.facebook.com/notes.php?id=32842369434.
[8] At the time of the announcement of Nilekeni as the head of the UID authority, a government source explicitly linked the UID with welfare. “The aim is to ensure that development objectives are achieved without leakages and pilferage,’’ http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Nilekani-to-have-Cabinet-minister-rank-as-Identification-project-head-/articleshow/4701148.cms
[9] Sir Henry Knight, Food Administration in India, 1939-1947 (Stanford University Press, 1954) Knight set up the main rationing system for Bombay in late colonial India. By October 1946, the number of towns and rural areas covered under colonial rationing held a population of over 150 million. Ibid. 189. Also National Archives of India, No. 1023/IX, Food, Rationing, 1946-48.
[10] The National Sample Survey was the main agency for data collection. The Indian Statistical Institute was largely P.C Mahalanobis’ baby and began using computers from the 1950s. The first machine was the British Tabulating Machines (BTM) HEC-2M; later the Russian Ural computer was procured. By 1962 the HEC-2M and Ural were used to design the next generation of computers, including India's first indigenous computer, the 'Tifrac' (or Tata Institute of Fundamental Research Automatic Computer), in 1962. Legend has it that Che Guevara was interested in deploying the Indian Tifrac for Cuban planning operations. The Soviet Ural now sits in the museum of the Nehru Science center in Mumbai.
[11] Unique Identification Authority of India, Creating a unique identity number for every resident in India, Version 1.1, November 2009
[12] Ibid., p. 7.
[13] Ibid., p. 8.