Transfer of biometric database compromises the sovereignty of nations in South Asia.
The spectre of an authoritarian, vindictive, surveillance state thus continues looming large over India.
- Dr Shashi Tharoor, chairperson, parliamentary standing committee on external affairs in Our Living Constitution (2025), p. 97
There is no system for maintaining year-wise records of deactivations. Maintaining such a database is not required under the Aadhaar Act, 2016 and Aadhaar (Enrolment & Update) Regulations, 2016.
- Minister of electronics and information technology on 7 February 2018 in the Lok Sabha
The government said it may hear a person before deactivating the number, which means it can decide whether or not to hear someone before deactivating something as important as the Aadhaar number. Further, it is stated that a person is only informed post-deactivation through SMS and email, thereby completely ignoring the principle of audi alteram partem i.e to hear the other side before taking punitive action, and the difficulties faced by persons without SMS or internet services, as their Aadhaar numbers may be deactivated without them even knowing about it.
-Dr Shashi Tharoor
Unique identification (UID)/ Aadhaar number database is beyond the control of national entities. Regulation 28 and 28A of unique identification authority of India (Enrolment and Update) Regulations, 2016 read with Section 23 (1) (g) of Aadhaar Act, 2016 provides powers and functions of the unique identification authority of India (UIDAI) including power for "omitting and deactivating of an Aadhaar number and information relating thereto."
Section 54 (1) (l) of Aadhaar Act provides the power of UIDAI to make regulations including "the manner of omitting and deactivating an Aadhaar number and information relating thereto under clause (g) of sub-section (2) of section 23" which also provides powers and functions of UIDAI regarding "omitting and deactivating of an Aadhaar number and information." 23A of Aadhaar Act which provides power of UIDAI to issue directions to any entity in the Aadhaar ecosystem, which is required to be complied with by the entity in the Aadhaar ecosystem to whom such direction is issued.
These provisions pertain to cases requiring deactivation of the Aadhaar number. Notably, the power of UIDAI to deactivate has been challenged before the chief justice TS Sivagnanam and justice Hiranmay Bhattacharyya bench of the Calcutta High Court.
This database is a privacy invasion project which is inherently linked to national security. It is a means of social control. It is a tool for further victimisation of vulnerable groups. There is a history to it. There used to be suspect identification offices in Egypt and Bengal, India after the development of biometric identification by Sir Francis Galton, an English eugenicist who supported slavery.
Biometric mapping through identification is concerned with the enrolment and the filing away of the most private and incommunicable aspect of subjectivity which is consequent in the capture of the human body by the State and non-State actors for good. Till now, such assault on the private human body was an exception; now it is becoming the norm.
The biometric Aadhaar number—indeed a case of 'bio-political tattooing'—has been turned into a normal identity registration of a good citizen. It provides architecture for continuity between the world of the Nazi concentration camp and contemporary democracy. It shows how professor Giorgio Agamben's prediction of 2003, regarding the perpetuation of the genocidal liberal order, has turned out to be true.
It is increasingly becoming crystal clear that UID/Aadhaar number database is a tool of war against the natural rights of human beings. Its linking with all public services is designed to cause 'civil death' of persons and groups whom the state and non-state actors of certain kinds don't like. Public services and goods are fish baits to trap unsuspecting humans. Civil death is the loss of all or almost all civil rights by a person caused by the government of a country. It is clear that denial of rights in the absence of UID/Aadhaar is an act of coercion that would lead to civil death, this is tantamount to normalisation of cruelty towards Indian residents. It begins by classifying and profiling them. As to privacy, human life is a gift of privacy, the privacy of our parents and grandparents. Can the present generation safeguard future generations from unlimited profiling?
Citizens’ opposition to UID/Aadhaar has a historical context. It is linked to more than a century-old world-famous Satyagraha of Mahatma Gandhi in order to oppose the identification scheme of the government in South Africa. On 22 August 1906, the South African government published a draft Asiatic Law Amendment Ordinance. The ordinance required all Indians in the Transvaal region of South Africa, eight years and above, to report to the registrar of Asiatics and obtain, upon the submission of a complete set of fingerprints, a certificate which would then have to be produced upon demand. The move proposed stiff penalties, including deportation, for Indians who failed to comply with the terms of the ordinance.
Knowing the impact of the ordinance and effective criminalisation of the entire community, Mahatma Gandhi then decided to challenge it. Calling the ordinance a ‘Black Act’, he had mobilised around 3,000 Indians in Johannesburg who took an oath not to submit to a degrading and discriminatory piece of legislation.
The biometric Aadhaar case demonstrates how ‘Those who forget history are condemned to repeat it’.
Biometric profiling is inherently dangerous because it tracks individuals based on their religious, behavioural and/or biological traits. History is replete with examples wherein such profiling has been used for genocide, holocaust and violence against all kinds of minorities. Such profiling with biometric UID/Aadhaar is fraught with dangers of genocide and communal crisis at the local, regional and national level. It is akin to the census operation undertaken in Hitler's Germany.
The effective platform is supposedly for financial inclusion and targeted subsidy payments, but the same targeting measures can be used with vindictive motives against citizens of certain religion, caste and ethnicity or region or towards a section of society due to economic resentment.
It may be recalled that Edwin Black’s book IBM and the Holocaust revealed IBM’s strategic alliance with Nazi Germany. IBM and its subsidiaries helped create enabling technologies, “step-by-step, from the identification and cataloging programs of the 1930s to the selections of the 1940s”. Notably, IBM was in the census business. The book reveals that IBM technology was used to organise nearly everything in Germany and then Nazi Europe, from the identification of the Jews in censuses, registrations, and ancestral tracing programs to the running of railroads and organising of concentration camp slave labour.
Coincidentally, IBM is involved in the UID/Aadhaar project as well.
Also quite coincidentally, Pramod Varma, who has been a ‘volunteer’ chief architect at UIDAI, has been with a company which is now part of IBM. He had joined UIDAI in July 2009 and led the overall technology and application architecture and application development within UIDAI technology unit based in Bengaluru. His role “has been pivotal in ensuring an open, scalable, and secure architecture is built to meet the needs of the Aadhaar project.”
If Mr Varma were only a volunteer as per UIDAI Volunteers Guidelines, 2011 then it implies that he may have continued as the chief technology architect and vice-president of research at Sterling Commerce, which is now part of IBM because, as per this guideline, a 'volunteer' is a person who wants to give services to the authority, either on a part-time basis or on a full-time basis, without any remuneration from the authority.
The related UIDAI’s guidelines for recruitment of personnel on sabbatical/ secondment refer to “conflict of interest from private sector members moving from one category of employment to another”. This guideline defines “applicant on sabbatical/ secondment or applicant” as “a person who wants to give services to and work with the authority, on a full-time or part-time basis while on sabbatical from a parent organisation, without seeking any remuneration from the authority.”
Given the fact that one of the presentations of UIDAI’s chairman made it clear that he wants a '360-degree view of citizens' for a single view as per the attached presentation which was available on the website of the Cabinet secretariat till 14 January 2018 (now it has been removed) and IBM also wants to have 'single view of a citizen', the interest of the chief architect is conclusively established.
Transnational companies like Ernst & Young, L1 Identities Solution, Safran and Accenture are involved in it. Ironically, these companies are taking personal sensitive information for 'seven years' and the government is paying for it. At no stage was the political class briefed about the far-reaching implications for the right to privacy, national security and national sovereignty. It is apparent that the national treasure of India, the entire Indian database registry of its people has been robbed through questionable contract agreements signed by UIDAI with these companies in the name of the president of India.
In a related development, on 16 December 2015, Bangladesh introduced mandatory biometric registration for all SIM card-owners. With this new system in place, every mobile phone SIM card will be associated with its user's identity as it appears in the national identity card database of the election commission. Every SIM card owner will be asked to verify their identity by providing their fingerprint which will be checked against the fingerprint data associated with their national identification. Each person will be allowed to register a maximum of 20 mobile phone SIM cards to their national identity card. This scheme connects communications data together with individual, government-assigned identities. By implication, it allowed the government to have unprecedented oversight of the daily lives of Bangladeshi citizens.
Disregarding criticism, the Nepal government had officially launched the national identity card distribution campaign in 2018 by presenting a card to a 101-year-old woman in the Panchthar district and to government employees at Singha Durbar. It announced plans to digitally integrate the driving licence, vehicle ownership certificate, banking services, tax payment system, voter ID card and social security system into the national ID.
In May 2024, it had decided to make the national ID compulsory to provide social security benefits and retirement pensions. A writ petition was filed at the Supreme Court but in a decision issued on 19 January 2025 a full bench of chief justice Prakash Man Singh Raut and justices Abdul Aziz Musalman and Nripadhwaj Niraula issued a directive to implement the national ID card by making it mandatory for receiving social security funds along with pensions and other government services and provisions.
Responding to a complaint, Nepal's parliamentary accounts committee (PAC) had raised national security concerns over the contract to be awarded to Morpho Safran, a French company working in India, for preparing the national identity card in January 2016. Its members had argued that any firm belonging to, or working in India or China, should not be awarded such a sensitive project as preparing the national identity card that contains all vital information on Nepali citizens.
The national identity management centre (NIDMC) has chosen Morpho Safran to print the national IDs, the same firm that had been disqualified earlier for a conflict of interests. Only Morpho Safran was deemed 'technically eligible' to set up infrastructure and print the ID cards. While the selection has to be approved by the funding agency, Asian Development Bank (ADB), the fact that only one firm was found to be technically eligible has raised many an eyebrow.
Nepal’s parliamentary accounts committee members had claimed that Morpho’s subsidiary firm is involved in many projects in India including in preparing a similar kind of national identity card (Aadhaar).
The NIDMC of Nepal's home ministry had chosen Morpho Safran from among five other bidders namely, Gemalto (France), IRIS Corporation (Malaysia), Informatics (Sri Lanka), Dermalog and Arjowiggins (France). Nepal’s parliamentary accounts committee had formed a sub-committee under Ramhari Khatiwada to probe if there are irregularities in picking only one firm.
In June 2015, the Nepal government had called a global tender for the procurement and installation of hardware at its offices and project sites. The ADB had extended a US$8mn (million) loan for the project while the rest is to be financed by the World Bank. After the sub-committee’s report, the parliamentary accounts committee gave its endorsement to the home ministry after Dinesh Bhattarai, executive director of NIDMC, gave an assurance saying, “We have set up enough gatekeeping measures on data security” and Nepali engineers and technicians would be in charge of the data.
It is evident that the governments of Nepal, Bangladesh and India are following the footprints of an experiment which has been tried, tested and failed in the developed countries.
It may be recalled that on 23 April 2010, the World Bank had launched its eTransform Initiative by signing a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with France and South Korea besides transnational companies like L-1 Identity Solutions, IBM, Gemalto, Pfizer and others. It was launched in the presence of the ministers of finance and communications from many developing countries.
The World Bank is currently funding 14 projects related to e-government and e-ID around the world. These projects are unfolding under the influence of international finance and not because there was a domestic need for it. It is apparent that India, Nepal and Bangladesh are among the World Bank’s 14 projects.
Dr M Vijayanunni, former registrar general and census commissioner and former chief secretary of government of the Kerala, said, “China, which is the other country in the world comparable to India in terms of size and diversity of population, abandoned its universal ID system midway in the face of insurmountable problems encountered during its implementation, despite the supposed advantage of their totalitarian system in pushing through such a humongous but ill-advised project.”
He pointed out, “While the US has the social security number for all residents, it does not intrude into the privacy of the individuals and is so liberally implemented that it does not block or stand in the way of getting any deserved benefits from the state or from availing of any services from other agencies.”
He added, “The government's attraction to the project is the supposed reduction achieved in disbursal of subsidies through avoidance of duplicate and bogus claims. This has to be achieved through other administrative modalities in each individual scheme rather than by steamrolling it through an uncaring denial of thousands of claims based merely on faults in the biometric and data retrieval systems. The real pressure for continuance of the scheme will be from the police and secret surveillance systems to pry into the privacy of everyone which gives them unlimited powers over the lives of helpless individuals and enjoy unchallenged supremacy in the days to come. That will sound the death knell of freedom and democracy.”
He observed: “There have been umpteen complaints from the affected citizens in the actual collection and collation of the biometric and personal data in the field so far and the project is engulfed in the tears and curses of lakhs of people of all social strata up against the uncaring ways of the officials doing the aadhaar exercise. It is pulling wool over one's eyes if it were to be claimed that it has been perfectly implemented so far.”
Dr Usha Ramanathan, a noted jurist, says, “Biometrics, unlike passwords or pin numbers, cannot be replaced. What is a person supposed to do if their biometrics get compromised? We know now that fingerprints, for instance, can be faked, that they can be ‘lost’ because someone ‘stole’ them, that they can become unusable because of a range of reasons, including that their work wears out their fingerprints or that working in the sun affects iris recognition. This is a risk that is being foisted on the people, and no one else is willing to accept liability for the harm and loss that this may cause.”
Pointing out its unconstitutionality, she said, “In making biometrics compulsory for the poor, the poor are being told that they do not have any interest in privacy, and that they should only care about the money they may get from the government or the food that may be provided. This reduction of citizenship of the poor person to a rightless welfare recipient is itself unconstitutional.”
She underlined, “This project has made it necessary to remind the governments that the Constitution is not about the power of the state over the people. It is about the limits of state power.”
This backdrop gives birth to a few questions:
Is it a coincidence that similar schemes are unfolding in South Asia? Isn’t there a design behind persuading and compelling developing countries to biometrically profile their citizens? Is it too early to infer that international bankers, UN agencies and Western military alliances wish to create profiles in their biometric and electronic database for the coercive use of social control measures?
Is it not true that uninformed citizens, parliamentarians and gullible government agencies are too eager to be profiled and tracked through an online database? Would freedom fighters have approved of mass surveillance by any national or transnational agency? Is it not clear that UN agencies, World Bank Group transnational intelligence companies and military alliances are working in tandem to create the bio-electronic database of Indians, Nepalis and Bangladeshi as per their pre-determined design?
Is this design structured to safeguard the interests of present and future generations? Can citizens compel their national governments to explain how the national security of the US, France and their allies converge with the national interest of India, Nepal and Bangladesh?
Will the transnational owners of national biometric data and metadata be subservient to people’s will? Who is stopping the political class in South Asia from resisting the subjugation of fellow citizens by transnational imperial powers? Why are illegitimate advances of these transnational entities being legalised? Will unlimited and endless mass surveillance enrich democracy?
The Supreme Court of India is seized with the matter. The seven-judge Constitution bench of the court is likely to unanimously declare the Aadhaar Act as unconstitutional after a five-judge bench reached the conclusion in November 2019 that the Aadhaar Act was not a money Bill. The Union government may readily accept the verdict because its Plan B in the form of the Criminal Procedure (Identification) Act, 2022, which authorises taking measurements of convicts and other persons for the purposes of identification and investigation in criminal matters and to preserve records and for matters connected therewith and incidental thereto, has already been enacted.
The struggle against biometric identification is a struggle against genetic profiling of human beings. Such identification and profiling are part of the efforts by beneficial owners of biometric technology and big data companies to create a universal database of all human population in order to make prisons and most police forces redundant through a universal database of all.
In the near future, most prisons are likely to be sold in the real estate market. This struggle is not a national struggle alone. It is a struggle against dehumanisation and for the natural rights of present and future generations of all human beings. It is a universal freedom struggle by the freedom fighters for the right to life, liberty and dignity of all humans.
Feminist literature teaches us about the ugliness of the male gaze that objectifies females. Databases like the central identities data repository (CIDR) of UID/Aadhaar numbers objectify all humans through its ugly panoptic gaze. Eugenicists are on the prowl. There is a compelling need to examine the constitutionality and legitimacy of such initiatives in a global and South Asian context.
Notably, Thomas J Watson, CEO of IBM during the holocaust, had received the Order of the German Eagle medal in 1937. The Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce was right when he said that "all history is contemporary history."
To draw from the title of the book The Economics of Innocent Fraud by JK Galbraith, it emerges that most media owners and editors have been complicit with privacy and national security invaders like fifth columnists and have been guilty of seemingly 'innocent fraud' because of the structural compulsions of advertisement revenue they get from these invaders.
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(Dr Gopal Krishna is a lawyer and a researcher of philosophy and law. His current work is focused on the philosophy of digital totalitarianism and the monetisation of nature. He has appeared before the Supreme Court's Committees, Parliamentary Committees of Europe, Germany and India and UN agencies on the subject of national and international legislation. He is the co-founder of the East India Research Council (EIRC). He is the convener of the Citizens Forum for Civil Liberties (CFCL) which has been campaigning for freedom from UID/Aadhaar/NPR and DNA profiling through criminal identification procedures since 2010. He had appeared before the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Finance that questioned and trashed the biometric identification of Indians through UID/Aadhaar Number. He is an ex-Fellow, Berlin-based International Research Group on Authoritarianism and Counter Strategies (IRGAC). He is also the editor of www.toxicswatch.org.)
