Problems arising from the Internet are generally thought of in terms of misinformation, violation of privacy, addiction to gadgets, depression brought on by social media, and manipulation of personal data for advertising and political ends by the Big Tech. In Asia, these problems take on even graver proportions as governments play a greater role in regulating access to the content available on the web.
Within Asia, India’s handling of online space lies between the extremes of being controlled by tech corporations and governments. The country has a strong start-up culture harnessing digital technology for social enterprises and, unlike China, say, none of the giant players in search or social media are barred from operating in India, adding to India’s image as a free society. On the other hand, while the Indian government does not explicitly control content on the Internet, it has been known to deploy the Internet for governance and welfare measures that have ended up as mechanisms of control and surveillance. Overload, Creep, and Excess: An Internet from India, a collection of essays from academicians and commentators Nishant Shah, Ashish Rajadhyaksha, and Nafis Aziz Hasan, is an academic history and critique of India’s usage of digital technology to manipulate the Indian citizenry.
Of all the examples discussed in the book, the UID (Unique IDentification number) or Aadhaar (a Hindi word for “support”) is the most telling. Aadhaar was initiated as a way of addressing leakages in distribution of aid—financial benefits, subsidies, scholarships, etc—directly to the poor by giving them an identification number connected to their bank accounts or payments system. It was promoted as a means to end corruption and was voluntary. It was supposed to include name, date and place of birth, gender, parents’ names, address, and the assigned UID/Aadhaar number and exclude markers of caste or religion.
However, since Aadhaar is a mandatory document required for everything from scholarships and free meals to children in government schools to schemes in minority affairs, urban housing, digital payment system, and social justice, the authors argue, it has become a case of “legal and administrative creep … riding on the technology that … could surely not have been entirely unintentional”. The authors also point out that such an identification system has serious repercussions when linked with population records and citizens’ register.
Regardless of the benefits, Aadhaar has the drawbacks of national ID card systems that civil libertarians warn about, but more so because it is fully automated and can track people. It can then be used to “enforce” various other policies that are directly pernicious. Although designed as a way of helping the bureaucracy take effective decisions in helping the poor (most of which are the lower castes), it is the same bureaucracy that discriminates against them more effectively because they can now be identified so easily.
Government-mandated Internet shutdowns are another area where India uses extreme mechanisms to handle crises such as large scale protests. While these shutdowns are common in regions prone to conflict (such as Kashmir), they seem to be becoming the norm in handling protests in other states as well. The authors point to the 2015 internet shutdown in Gujarat, which has been hailed as a region initiating progress in digital development, as a mechanism to curb protests by the Patidar community to be included in the category of backward classes, a section that is entitled to several benefits including reservation in jobs and education. The massive rallies were being supplemented immensely by a popular social media campaign in the form of circulation of videos, messages, memes and so on. The authors point out that while building digital infrastructure is packaged as a question of access to India’s population, the state nevertheless does not hesitate to withdraw this access should a situation such as that of dissent and protest arise. Such shutdowns bypass most judicial and legislative checks and balances.
With a few more instances, Shah, Rajadhyaksha, and Hasan point out that the Indian experiments in using digital technology packaged in the rhetoric of help and development set dangerous precedents for other governments and democracies. In their individual essays, these precedents are characterized by “overload” of data, “creep” of technology into citizens’ lives, and an “excess” of governmental control leading to “slow death”. The authors note:
These three terms are not necessarily connected to the internet, though (as we will argue through the three long sections) they remain defining characteristics of the internet as we know it. They might not be the buzzwords through which the internet is being described and coded right now, but we nevertheless hope that they may yet become the analytic frameworks – or at least curious pathways – to make sense of the state of the internet(s) today. The sections further anchor the argument by locating various debates, histories, and materialities in the geopolitical region of India. In so doing, they recognize the deep-seated irony of trying to localize and nationalize a technological medium and a rhetorical imaginary that was resolutely developed to transcend physical and territorial boundaries as arbitrary and redundant as nation-state.
Indian activists and academicians have been writing about the subtle and not-so-subtle technocratic stance taken by the Indian government from time to time in the form of open letters and as voiced in news articles. Overload, Creep, and Excess puts these together along with other resources such as an annotated timeline of India’s socio-political brush with technological questions. The chronology and the bibliography make for a useful resource for those who would like to build on the history of activism and documented arguments made by several stakeholders such as the Supreme Court judgments or a quick overview of the history of shifts from paper-files to computerized database creation and management.