And Aadhaar lived happily ever after…

The Aadhaar Effect

N S Ramnath & Charles Assisi 

Oxford University Press 

279 pages 

Rs 595

If N S Ramnath and Charles Assisi’s book were to be re-imagined as an Amar Chitra Katha tale, it would read as follows:

In a rich kingdom of poor subjects, a noble prince wanted to identify the faceless beneficiaries of his administration’s largesse. His subjects were given 100 days of work every year when there was no work anywhere. The prince’s council ensured nobody went to bed hungry when no food was to be found. The prince wanted to unmask the faceless destitute who would continue to patronise his rule for perpetuity. Rulers before him had sought to achieve this but could never do so. 

Far away from the seat of power in Delhi, a wealthy wizard whose fame and ingenuity travelled wide and far was identified. It was believed there could be no man better than this wizard to undertake the onerous task of identifying this vast swathe of humanity. The wizard was summoned to the seat of power, endowed with the services of the best minds of the kingdom and bestowed with infinite powers to execute his task. The wizard was answerable to no one but the king.

In his initial days, the wizard struggled to navigate the labyrinthine corridors of power and the scheming ways of the king's council. They said the wizard was wasting the king's time and resources by doing what they were already doing. Others said the wizard was not one among them - he was just a wizard. Many felt they were doing all the work but his acolytes hogged all the accolades. The wizard's ambition and his charisma won everyone over in no time. Everybody now wanted to be seen with him, be with him and work with him. The only opposition left was a bunch of privileged people who loved to live with the poor and dress like street urchins.  

And so started the great task of unmasking the faceless. The wizard and his acolytes meditated for months and came up with a plan that would stand the test of time if not the vagaries of nature. The wizard's agents would span out across the length and breadth of the kingdom to capture body parts that were unique to every man, woman, child, newborn, dead and every one in between. Every subject's eyes and fingerprints would be copied and stowed in the "great vault". A ten-digit number would be assigned to every fingerprint and pair of eyes. Since no living subject would have the same pair of either, the great vault would become an even greater repository of these subjects. With the wizard's acumen and the king's propaganda, the subjects flocked with great enthusiasm to get themselves cloned in the pursuit of uniqueness. 

The winds of change blew and the prince and his king were overthrown. The wizard was gone but his creation was pursued by the new king with more vigour. With time, all subjects had a unique ten-digit number. Their clones existed in the great vault whose keys now lay with the new king and his council. The new king had other ideas. He issued a set of diktats - subjects could spend their own money only if it was deposited in the great vault, subjects could speak to one another only inside the great vault and all their life's history from their vocation to their sickness to their educational attainments were to be deposited in the great vault. These would then be shared with enterprising merchants and money lenders who would determine the levels of usury each unique person could be subjected to. Some people felt short-changed. The wizard, now ousted from the seat of power, felt betrayed. The gods of the kingdom set about to decide if the old king and the new one had transgressed the divine powers bestowed on them. Meanwhile, the clones of the subjects lived happily ever after in the great vault.

Mr Ramnath and Mr Assisi wrote the book before the Supreme Court delivered its judgment on September 26, 2018 in which the court upheld many facets of the Aadhaar programme and struck down some others. But the judgment makes little difference to this book. The book heavily glorifies Infosys founder Nandan Nilekani and his role in the Aadhaar programme. The authors make little attempt at either explaining how so many Indians ended up enrolling for Mr Nilekani's brainchild voluntarily, the use of Aadhaar for citizens instead of the State and the role of third parties involved in gathering people's basic information and biometrics over the years. That may be misleading for a book that claims to inform readers "why the world's largest identity project matters" on its cover.

However, it provides useful glimpses into how big businesses including some e-commerce majors and a big telecom company among others benefitted massively from an identity giving exercise that was meant to reduce corruption and ensure that poor Indians got the subsidies they deserve. The book is filled with irrelevant gossip about Mr Nilekani's Delhi stint and fails to further critical understanding on Aadhaar. For those who wish to understand what their future looks like in the government's hands, the 1,400-odd page judgment of the five-judge bench of the Supreme Court may be a better option. Or, for that matter, Justice D Y Chandrachud's dissent note.