Subir Roy: Who are you, anyway?

The young man who came to set up the cable broadband connection in our apartment knew his job and also appeared quite street-smart. After he was done, he handed me a form and explained with an informed air: "You have to fill this up, fix your picture and attach a copy of your voter ID card. If you don't do this within 24 hours, we will cut you off."

When I told him that I did not have a Kolkata voter ID and would a copy of my driving licence do, he looked a bit doubtful. Then, when I showed him that the form listed the driving licence was one of half a dozen permissible options through which I could establish that I was myself, he agreed but continued to look unsatisfied. In his world view, who were you if you did not have a voter ID?

A couple of days later while waiting at a neighbourhood shop that photocopied things, a gentleman ahead of me produced a couple of Aadhaar cards for copying. Still a bit of a novelty, others around took a keen look that said, "We must soon have one of these." A humble-looking person among them seemed the most determined and said he had recently been turned away from a bank that refused to open an account without an Aadhaar card. My assertion that you don't need an Aadhaar card to open a bank account was drowned in a flood of stories of how someone or the other had recently been told to produce an Aadhaar card or get lost.

As if all this wasn't enough, we had just returned from a movie where we were treated not only to ad films on cosmetics and motorbikes but also a longish one that I first thought was on the theme of Incredible India. The scenes were pretty but what was disconcerting was the way everyone kept having mud and dust dumped on them and quite liking it. The final shot established it as a promo on the National Population Register (NPR), the message being - be Indian, be rooted in its soil and get enrolled as an Indian.

The NPR, of course, has a political history. Conceived during the earlier National Democratic Alliance rule, it is meant to fish out illegal immigrants and in intent is similar to various laws brought in by several American states to make it difficult for illegal immigrants to vote. The key criticism about these American states' laws is that they are being used to disenfranchise the minorities and the poor who fear any kind of officialdom and try to keep away from it.

In India today, there is a veritable "identity" industry and customer-facing people fixate upon one or the other piece of paper or plastic that is the flavour of the month to either harass people or simply to appear important. So many people, from the home ministry downwards, earn a livelihood by manning bits of this industry.

What is more serious is if you have to have little bits of paper or plastic that determine whether you are you, then what happens if you lose some or all of those bits of paper. What if you are poor and illiterate and live in a jhuggi jhopri where mysterious fires, with land sharks lurking behind, are not at all unknown?

What if you lose those all important papers in a natural calamity like a flood? And what if you have a Muslim name to boot? Then not even Bhagwan or Allah can help you. This scenario was vividly portrayed in long reports in The Hindu by novelist Amitav Ghosh on the unique situation in which even educated middle-class people in the Andamans suddenly found themselves when the tsunami of 2004 swept away all paperwork that affirmed that they were themselves.

If identity can be established by itself, as in the case of Aadhaar, then that would be some consolation. But the Aadhaar card has to be mailed to some address, and what at times proves an insurmountable hurdle is establishing where you live. When our children moved out to Delhi and Mumbai to study and work and moved in and out of digs whose landlords would not give rent receipts, opening a bank account became a major hurdle for them. And when we moved to Kolkata and unthinkingly I took out the electricity and telephone landline connections in my name, I soon realised I had unpersoned my wife.

Put off by all this, I have decided to put a stop to the unending list of identity proofs that I have and try to avoid going for an Aadhaar card as I neither need nor am I entitled to subsidies. And I wish I could simply show my passport and cast my vote and not have to go for a voter ID.

subirkroy@gmail.com