India's totalitarian panopticon

She oversaw the rapid development and deployment of Aarogya Setu. Deployed by executive decree without statutory safeguards, the tool harvested sensitive health records and mapped citizens' private social networks. Critics warned that vacuuming up medical history and social interactions without privacy laws normalised permanent state surveillance under the cover of a public health crisis.

Of course, you can argue that this speaks to her competence. But as I keep reminding you, competence only compounds the severity of an offence. She cannot plead ignorance to rationalise locking out on-ground Electoral Registration Officers, preventing them from executing statutory duties.

I know, I know, the harvesting of health records and social context is an even graver issue.

Consider the warning of UK judge Sir Nicolas Browne-Wilkinson in the 1992 Marcel case: "If the information obtained by the police, the Inland Revenue, the social security offices, the health service and other agencies were to be gathered together in one file, the freedom of the individual would be gravely at risk.

The dossier of private information is the badge of the totalitarian state. "The dossier of private information should worry any citizen in any given country. But weigh it against two compounding factors: In which country is this happening?

And in which technological age is it happening? Country first. Last week, when I showed you how Shudra identity is being systematically dissolved, it did not mean their names are already being purged from electoral rolls, nor that prejudice against them has vanished.

Their overt targeting is simply deferred until after a Hindu Rashtra is consolidated. Like slow-boiling frogs, right now, they are led to believe that the rising temperature is meant exclusively for Muslims, minorities, Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, an intoxicating illusion of "Hindu consolidation" that masks their own gradual erasure.

Yet, while the word "Shudra" has practically been scrubbed from polite public discourse, the ironclad mandate of endogamy has not. Open any newspaper matrimonial page and the obsession with wedding within one's varna stares back at you.

When social prejudice cannot be sanctioned by law, it retreats into an unspoken shadow ledger of social rating. India is the textbook case. Consider how many instances of Pratiloma violence, inter-caste honour killings, are sanitised in police registers as random murders or suicides.

Even though the constitutional state claims to view its citizens as equals, society does not. Use your imagination: what happens when such a dossier of private information is handed to a centralised state apparatus captured by an entrenched upper-caste elite?

Now consider the age. Only a decade ago, the Cambridge Analytica scandal revealed how mere social media breadcrumbs could be weaponised: first to build psychographic profiles of individual citizens, and then to push their psychological buttons to manipulate democratic outcomes.

Technology has not stood still. It has accelerated exponentially since then. Rukmini S's Whole Numbers and Half Truths reveals a terrifying reality: the ground-level data feeding this surveillance machine is inherently prejudiced.

When police manipulate FIRs to classify inter-caste marriages as kidnappings, or municipal clerks miss rural deaths, they hardcode bias and incompetence into the system. Sucked into national registries, this flawed data is laundered into objective truth, weaponised by algorithms to deny welfare and profile citizens under an illusion of infallibility.

The rollout of the surveillance state started ostensibly with great innocence in 2009 when the Unique Identification Authority of India, led by Nandan Nilekani, introduced Aadhaar. Stated as a benevolent tool to plug welfare leakages, it instead created the master architectural key.

Tethering biological markers (facial photograph, scans of both irises and ten fingerprints) to a twelve-digit number stripped citizens of anonymity, anchoring all future dossiers. By 2013, the intellectual engine room moved to Bengaluru with the formation of the Indian Software Product Industry Round Table, or iSPIRT, co-founded by Sharad Sharma.

This think tank engineered the India Stack. Where Silicon Valley pioneered surveillance capitalism for advertising, Bengaluru adapted these tools into surveillance statecraft, building the plumbing to monitor, categorise and manage a population. Between 2014 and 2015, the vision accelerated through the Jan Dhan, Aadhaar and Mobile trinity.

Sold for direct benefit transfers, JAM served as a digital enclosure, soldering biological identity, communication trails and banking ledgers. The sledgehammer of 2016 followed. Demonetisation corralled the cash economy onto digital rails, paving the way for the Unified Payments Interface.

UPI eliminated the privacy of the informal bazaar, logging transactions to map financial behaviour in real time. Between 2017 and 2019, the architecture leapt to algorithmic governance. Using Telangana's Samagra Vedika as a testing ground, algorithms fused isolated departmental databases into a single predictive profile without citizen consent.

This laid the foundation for the National Social Registry, a 360-degree database tracking every life event, resulting in algorithms silently cancelling pensions. The 2020 Covid crisis justified completing the biological ledger through Aarogya Setu, developed by the National Informatics Centre with Dr Seema Khanna overseeing operations.

Evolving into the Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission, it converted a temporary epidemic response into permanent biological surveillance. Now consider this. Nandan Nilekani and Sharad Sharma are Brahmin.

Seema Khanna a Khatri. All movers and shakers of iSPIRT belong to the upper castes. The totalitarian state's panopticon is ready and actively being deployed.

How it is used after safeguards of a secular state and constitution are removed does not require much imagination. This raises a final question about Western media, international wire services, search engines and news aggregators.

They never tire of spotlighting Chinese security measures, yet this story rarely reaches your screens. We will need another piece to explore exactly why. Stay tuned.