THE IDENTITY PROJECT: THE UNMAKING OF A DEMOCRACY
By Rahul Bhatia
Context, Rs 899
A forest doesn’t appear overnight. It grows inch by inch, one vine, one creeping root, at a time. A surveillance State, too, is slow to take root. It takes years of silent growth, spreading through cracks in society, until it ensnares everything on its path. The “engineering of hatred, the creation of a reality in which the laws of god [take] primacy over those of men” doesn’t occur one fine day. It begins as an undergrowth and then turns, one tree, one creeper, another vine, at a time, into a dark forest.
Rahul Bhatia’s The Identity Project is the story of a forest in the making (and of a democracy’s unmaking, as the book’s subtitle suggests). It recounts the anti-CAA-NRC protests, the riots that ensued, the cover-ups by the State, the media trials and convictions, and the absence of policing. It’s also the story of the origins of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, beginning with the proponents of the Arya Samaj and concluding with the Bharatiya Janata Party. It also narrates the largest identity project undertaken in any democracy — that of Aadhaar — where citizens were compelled to submit their biometrics (and, in turn, their identity) to the government, first voluntarily and then involuntarily.
Investigative journalism, when done right, stems from a place of curiosity. This book, with its sequence after sequence of segues and rabbit holes into movements, organisations, personalities, and ideas is a long walk in curiosity. The book opens with the telling sentence, “A decade or so ago, people I loved began to go mad.” As the narrative moves forth, we discover that the madness was always an integral part of our society and that the idea of a secular, tolerant State had been perpetuated instead of being organic.
Bhatia writes like an unforgiving sculptor, his incredible storytelling capabilities complementing his knack for research. He introduces a figure, living or dead, and, then, through the narrative, builds his/her personality, setting the context, adding the nuances, brushing the fine corners. Thus, there’s “a young man with a problem the size of a country”; another man slips a key “which was attached to a small temple bell, into his pocket”; and a technocrat has “a brotherly lightness that laughed off troubles and burdens”.
Identity is a nascent concept in a society where the courts have only recently christened the right to privacy as fundamental, where duties are emphasised over rights, where the State has the power to rule over its subjects instead of governing, where “orders [come] from ‘above’, that catchword for a mysterious authority”, and where “the only realistic course — a course free of trouble and potential repercussion — [is] to fall in line.”
In this play-date of a democracy, where elections are grand circuses and adjectives like ‘free’ and ‘fair’ are just those – adjectives — individual freedom remains unattached to the democratic sensibility. In this ‘pretend republic’ then, the erosion of autonomy is less sensational and more inevitable, as has been seen with ‘bulldozer justice’, the passing of the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, or the widespread acceptance of Aadhaar. In this supposed free nation, identity is less a birthright and more a mortgage up for the taking, where it all “depend[s] on who was asked, and who was asking.”
It is in this context that identity becomes a tool to be wielded, reshaped, and documented against you. It is here, then, that the world’s largest identity project is carried out to create uniform, State-approved, twelve-digit identities stripped of uniqueness — mere shadows of individuality tethered to systems of control, all part of a dense and impenetrable forest.
And so, the forest consumes — over, under, within. It encroaches, engulfs, extinguishes. The jungle devours not in a day, but devour it does. Shadows deepen; freedoms wither. The question is not if it will stop but how much of ourselves, if at all, will be left.
The question is: what will freedom look like when it’s gone?