The increased mobility of people and the ever growing complex integration of systems of delivery of services have together led governments the world over to introduce new systems of identification that can be interoperable across a multitude of local systems. Each such initiative has met with anxieties and resistance. The unique identification project that India has initiated has to be seen in that context. Such a project does not necessarily and directly result in compromising the ability of the poor to survive and it does not necessarily mean loss of privacy across the board. However, it does not also automatically signal empowerment as the Unique Identification Authority of India has been insisting. It simply means that the terrain of plausible action, the terrain on which citizens’ transactions with the state and the market agencies occur, will change.

Anant Maringanti (amaringanti@gmail.com) is a consulting researcher with the Urban Research and Policy Programme, National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bangalore.

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Instant commentaries range from strong opposition through cautious optimism to exuberant approval. Yet, for all this excitement among bloggers and media experts, there is little evidence of a considered academic opinion on the subject. Of course, in normal times it is hazardous for academics to offer instant opinions on current affairs, but unusual times offer unusual opportunities even for social scientists. This essay is prompted by a growing sense that the activities of the National UIDAI open up new avenues for critical social scientists to choose more effective theoretical perspectives and empirical sites to inform the state-citizenship debate in south Asia. Barely four months into the UIDAI’s career, it would be seem presumptuous to make definitive claims and prognoses.2 Instead, this essay attempts to suggest a tentative framework to structure further debate. I will do this in three steps: (1) identify the broad contours of the state-citizenship debate specifically in India but also more generally in the global circuits of knowledge; (2) establish the disruptions and the continuities in the state-citizenship relationship signalled by the UIDAI; and (3) suggest the key features of the emerging terrain of politics implied by the UIDAI.

In sum, I argue that there is an urgent need to revamp our understanding of the state-citizen relationship in India.

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late 1990s that the “citizen” as both a substantive and formal category begin to a ppear in the archives of Economic & P olitical Weekly. Increasingly concerned about the nature of the expanding “civil society”, and the dilemmas of secularism, historians and sociologists first began to debate “citizenship” in the EPW during 1998-99. Although convergent in some respects, the debate was marked by sharp differences and tensions that are all too familiar now: the value of post-Enlightenment modernity and universal ideals on the one hand, and the opportunities that are presented by postmodernist perspectives that valorise difference (see for example, Menon 1998).

Over a year after the rise of this new awareness of “citizenship” as an object of study, Andre Beteille, in a brief essay,

– to use citizenship as an entry point into an extended critique of the state, and develop a uniquely south Asian perspective on citizenship. However, with the receding of the Hindutva agendas from national a ffairs, “citizenship” also gradually disappeared from the radars of critical social science in India. This is not to suggest that citizenship was no longer invoked. Indeed, a large, fertile and evergrowing body of literature in international refereed journals on empowerment, participation, d evelopment, democracy (Cody 2009); cultural politics (Liang 2005); and transnational studies (Appadurai 2001) continues to refer to the practice and performance of citizenship.

In EPW itself, Chandhoke (2003) made a substantive contribution to the discussion by highlighting the challenges to state theory and the practice of democratic citizenship occasioned by what she refers to as the “pluralisation” of the state, a process whereby the boundaries between the state and non-state domains were getting more and more blurred. Yet few of these commentaries attempted to track the shifts under way in governmental imperatives and state technologies. How was the Indian state being restructured by its own strategic responses to the emergent challenges of managing its national e conomic space?

In part, this sad neglect of the interplay between state theory and citizenship studies in India could be attributed to the fact that state policy as an object of study in India has largely remained in the domain of two interrelated sub-disciplines – public administration and public finance – both of which tend to be dominated by unreconstructed Webarian state models. Further, it is not until recently that it has been e stablished that ethnographic techniques could be used effectively to study everyday state practices and to contribute to state theory. Work of this latter kind represented by Akhil Gupta et al’s essay on specialising states (Gupta and Ferguson 2005) and Karen Coelho’s extended study of engineers as frontline actors in the reform process in Chennai waterworks (Coelho 2005); is still relatively small.

To reiterate, the foregoing observations are not intended to suggest that Indian social science has largely been indifferent to state and citizenship theory. Far from it, apart from the large number of empirical work in the mould of south Asian area studies, the work of the Subaltern Studies Collective and scholars allied with it has made significant contributions not only to the study of the Indian state and society but also transformed the way in which Latin American, African and east Asian scholars think about the State. More d irectly, Chatterjee’s (2004) “reflections on political society in most of the world” have been so influential as to shape policy researchers’ thinking on the reconstruction of citizenship by the New Labour in the UK (Clarke 2005). Ideas that resonate with these formulations of the subaltern as an “improper” citizen, can also be found in the work of Aihwa Ong, whose influential analyses of state citizenship relations on east and south-east Asia are rendered through what she calls “graduated sovereignties”.3 However, recent transformations in the affairs of the State and society in India, have forced Chatterjee himself to revisit his previous formulation that “the majority of people in most of the world” inhabit what he calls the political society – a sphere in which cultural affinities, affective ties, electoral politics and local moral economies affords them possibilities of provisional and tentative entitlements.

In his revised position, Chatterjee suggests that the cumulative effects of the deepening of technologies of government, shifts in capitalist accumulation strategies from exploiting labour to expropriating natural resources and rapid urbanisation necessitate a reworking of the prevalent Gramscian model of passive revolution as a lens to understand Indian state and society. He holds that passive revolution – that is, a situation where the elites simply do not have the capacity to win hegemonic power, and must compromise to form coalitions, resort to coercion and appeasement – continues to be a useful description of the Indian state’s strategies. However, an unprecedented acceleration in the movement of subaltern populations from peasant societies to urban informal economies is altering the dynamics and structures of possibilities in the political society. While Chatterjee draws on and endorses Kalyan Sanyal’s (2007) study aimed at retheorising contemporary capitalism, a growing number of studies in Indian cities in other disciplines also confirm Chatterjee’s observations. In a sense, the question that is staring us in the face is how to t heorise what these accelerating sociospatial mobilities of populations portend

for the Indian state and how it constitutes its citizens.

Continuities and Disruptions

Thanks to an influential body of work in humanities and social sciences inspired by Foucault, we now know that projects of identifying and accounting for every citizen are the essence of modern states. Such projects are the very core of “governmentality”, which according to Foucault is the system of rule wherein the state does not exercise sovereign power on its subjects, but rather, manages the territory and the populations contained within it through technologies of enumeration and calculation that act directly on the bodies (e g, public health), the very lifeworlds of individuals forcing them to gradually internalise the rules for governing their own conduct. The problem of governance is u ltimately one of how to conduct the conduct of populations in the most economic manner. However, in nearly two decades of Foucault-inspired studies, one finds a sparse sample of studies that relate shifts in actual technologies of enumeration and accounting (e g, census and budget) to the challenges of governing territories and populations in times of crisis. In part, the difficulty in capturing these shifts is that the strategic responses of the state are rarely premeditated. They come together through a host of experiments whose coalescence is easy to grasp only in retrospect. Small wonder then, the most significant studies on enumeration as governmental technology are all historical studies based on archival research. Yet, the need to develop conceptual tools and methodologies to study contemporary shifts in technology has been facing us for quite some time.

Since the early 1990s, increased mobility of people and the ever growing complex integration of systems of delivery of services both by the market and by the state has led governments world over to introduce new systems of identification and generation of data that can be interoperable across a multitude of local systems. A lmost without fail, each such initiative has met with anxieties and resistance. Some states have been more successful than others in implementing these new systems. Almost everywhere, governments and civil society actors are rehearsing

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Applications are invited for the following temporary positions in sponsored Research Programmes:

Economists: For the National Research Programme on Plantation Development (NRPPD) sponsored by the Ministry of Commerce, Government of India. This programme is intended to conduct policy-oriented research on various socio-economic aspects of plantation sector, research capacity building and dissemination research findings. The incumbent should be Doctorates/theses submitted in Economics, Agricultural Economics, Econometrics with some experience in policy-oriented research.

Economist/Sociologist: For the Research Unit on International Migration sponsored by the Ministry of Overseas Indian Affairs, Government of India. The candidate should have a Doctorate in Economics/Sociology or related discipline with specialization in conducting studies on International Migration. He/she should have some experience in conducting migration surveys and analysis of survey data and writing study reports.

Programme Officer: For the Research Unit on Local Self Governments sponsored by the Government of Kerala. The candidate should be PhD in Economics/Statistics, Sociology or any related discipline with some experience in conducting research on decentralisation and local governments. More specifically, the person should be familiar with local government statistics having expertise in building up a data management system on local governments and experience in organizing field research.

Age: Below 40 years as on 30.11.2009. Salary: Negotiable, but will be fixed in the scale of pay range of Rs.15,600-39,100. Appointments will be initially for two years. Those who are employed will be considered on deputation. The Selection Committee reserves the right to relax age, qualifications and experience in exceptional cases, select candidates from outside the list of applicants and offer higher salary to candidates. The Centre shall not entertain any correspondence on short listing or selection. Please forward detailed Curriculum Vitae with two referees by post to: The Registrar, Centre for Development Studies, Prashanth Nagar, Ulloor, Trivandrum 695011, Kerala or E-mail to somannair@cds.ac.in before 10th December, 2009.

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PERSPECTIVE

the UIDAI has been insisting. It simply means that the terrain of plausible action, the terrain on which citizens’ transactions with the state and the market agencies occur, will change. In what follows, I will briefly indicate what these shifting goal posts in the empirical reality imply for theory and for action repertoires of activist groups.

Citizenship Redux

After nearly two decades of divergence, two theoretical trajectories in state theory under globalisation have recently begun to converge: one that may be broady called the neo-Gramscian state theories and the other that may be called the neo-Foucauldian governmentality studies. State theorists inspired by Gramsci, via Nicos Paulantzas’ influential argument that the state wins the consent of the oppressed through class alliances, characterise recent transformations in the nature of the state as essentially one of rescaling of state. They argue that as a consequence of the state’s strategic response to problems of capital accumulation, we have been witnessing an intensive and extensive rescaling and reconfiguring of power between national and subnational governments. In India, a direct illustration of this structuralist argument would be the way in which state governments have become influential and semi autonomous players in global markets, city governments are increasingly marketing themselves as attractive destinations for investors, and attempting to borrow from capital markets. While such perspectives on state restructuring can be very insightful about larger processes, they fail to account for the micropolitics, the minutiae of everyday negotiations of power. Filling in precisely where the neo-Gramscian perspectives fail, scholars persuaded by Foucauldian approaches map the ways in which populations have been internalising new economic rationalities, and new ways of conducting themselves. From this perspective, the shifts that we are witnessing are not imposed from top down but arise precisely because of capillary circulations of power; everyday actions of everyday states and they cannot be studied without attention to the desires and complicities of ordinary people.

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While both of these approaches have been extremely fertile, the actual mechanisms and politics of calculation and enumeration by which the contemporary state seeks to know and manage its population and territory remained understudied. The significance of this cannot be overstated. To illustrate using an Indian example, scholars and activists studying and engaging in urban transformations are sharply polarised around whether or not clean titles and zoning regulations are the most effective way to provide for the poor. One commonly held strong view is that securing proper legal protection for the poor is the direction to pursue, and the other equally common and equally strongly held view is that the very process of legalising claims results in the production of illegalities and is already biased in favour of corporate power and middle class entitlements.5 While both agree that rent gaps among other things in cities are increasingly resulting in dispossession of the poor from the city, one relies on the law, and the other on protecting the informal interactions.6 Yet, empirical investigation in cities suggests that the push towards a change in technology of documenting land titles from a paper-based system to computers has already made it possible for new actors to enter the interactions surrounding land, people far away from the actual location can invest in real estate without having to be physically present in the location (Benjamin et al 2007).

Projects such as land record digitisation have had far-reaching consequences for local economies, they alter the possibilities of governance, they bring in new actors and more often than not, they have unintended consequences. This is so precisely because during the process of transition from one technology to the other, when persistent claims of entitlements forged through years of local social practices and documenting systems (e g, paper-based records of rights, pattas, power of attorney documents, etc) are rapidly settled/displaced in favour or a spatially extensive technologies of mapping constellations of power, and alliances have to be reworked and by their very nature, such negotiations are unpredictable.

Like digitisation of land records, UIDai in its very conception aims to break down

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spatial barriers to the mobility of vital information about individuals, and by extension, it seeks to break down barriers to individual mobility and rationalise consumption and production (and rationalise welfare as a function of markets). In one sense, this is both a desirable and inevitable outcome especially as all available evidence suggests that the government of India is pursuing a growth strategy that relies on further liberalising the labour markets. Yet, this is so only in the most general sense. Both state and market agents are ultimately embedded in social, political and institutional contexts. Rules, codes and entitlements do not get altered at the mere touch of a button. Both for activists and for academic researchers, the UIDAI offers an opportunity and a challenge as it will radically alter mobilities of people, their entitlements as well as c apacities to organise themselves into c ollective bodies.

To me, retaining sharp divisions between Foucauldian and Gramscian approaches, modernist and postmodernist approaches, structuralist and post-structuralist approaches and so on is no longer useful. As familiar social structures are dissolving, it is tempting to go with the flow and abandon all notions of a state that can act coherently. Yet all technologies of governance must be initiated somewhere, ideas must be produced from some command centre, relayed through some beltways, strategically focused on specific locations and made spatially extensive in general implementation. If we keep that in mind, it becomes necessary to rework old analytical categories, invent new categories and find new entry points. The national unique id project offers an opportunity to do this. It is an extremely fluid situation where an authority charged with delivering on a core function of the state envisions itself as a “startup”, a moment when the Indian state is reinventing its sovereignty by adopting new technologies to know and calculate upon its populations, on its national economic space precisely in order to secure its position in the global geopolitical economies. It is imperative that social sciences seize the opportunity to follow the precise trajectories of the identification of individuals, the logics of enumeration and updation, the cost sharing arrangements, the uncertainties of technologies, in one word, the successes and failures of the UIDAI.

Notes

1 The recommendations can be downloaded from the web site http://egovstandards.gov.in/publicreview/egscontent.2008-09-04.3708808455/at_ download/file

2 The UIDAI was constituted with Nandan Nilekani, then co-chairperson of Infosys India Limited, as chairperson with cabinet rank on 25 June 2009.

3 Graduated sovereignty refers to (a) the different modes of governing segments of the population who relate or do not relate to global markets; and

(b) the different mixes of legal compromises and controls tailored to the requirements of special production zones

4 It may be recalled that 1997, when the government of Andhra Pradesh first toyed with the idea outsourcing a dedicated networking for file movement to a Singapore-based firm, it was strongly resisted by the non-gazetted officers. Although the arguments were framed in terms of loss of sovereignty, one of the key issues at stake was that switching to online file movement allowed for a tracking system to speed up processes. In contrast, the prevalent paper-based document systems allowed local government officials to exercise considerable influence on their mobility from one desk to the other, and up and down the hierarchy.

5 See Liang (2005a) for a discussion of planning and its quandaries. 6 See Whitehead et al (2007) for a discussion of “rent gap” in Mumbai.

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