Look who’s watching

Anyone who has moved cities in India for a job will agree, starting life afresh can be quite a task. Renting an apartment, then getting to know the new environment and coping with an alien culture is tough enough, but even simple things can prove to be enormously complicated. Try opening a bank account, for example.

Even if you have an account with the same bank in your previous location, you will have to surmount a mountain of formalities and provide a wide spectrum of documentation, all to prove your identity.
Proving who you are is a tough job in India. At one time it was simpler — you just produced a ration card and, if employed, a letter from the office. Over the years the ration card has lost its power, not the least because many middle-class people do not keep it any more and there are millions of fakes floating around. Since then, the PAN card and passport have also been deemed acceptable, but if you have shifted homes after getting the latter, you still have to provide proof of address. What if you live in a rented flat — the rent agreement should ordinarily be enough, but not everyone has one (the poor certainly don’t).
So back to the original question — how do you prove who you are? To surmount this monumental problem, the government has introduced the unique identity number (UID), which is supposed to be the most reliable indicator of identity, because it has, embedded in it, information that is unique to you. But — and there is always a but — to get it, you have to provide documents proving who you are, which include passports, PAN cards, electricity bill (for proof of address) etc. Sounds scary in more than one way, especially when one considers that all this information will be stored in vast databases controlled by the government. Just thinking about the potential for misuse and abuse is frightening, though the worthies running the UID assure us that there is no danger of that. In a country where the finance minister’s office is bugged; this is not very reassuring. All these documents are already recorded in some data base or the other. What is the need for one more?
The number of ways the government keeps an eye on its citizens has been steadily increasing. Apart from all the above named documents and now the UID, there are many other ways the government knows what you have been up to. Some are unavoidable — use of credit cards, PAN cards, filling of immigration forms (while entering and leaving the country). Some are newer and very frightening, the latest being the new rules for Internet monitoring. These regulations put the onus of content on intermediaries; put simply, Google, Facebook, Twitter, Blogspot and even ebay will also be held liable for any content that appears on their sites. If you post a comment on Twitter that angers anyone — say a political party — it can complain and Twitter will not only have to remove it but also face prosecution. How do you think such intermediaries are going to react? It could be goodbye to fair comment, because as we know, there is no dearth of people and organisations who feel offended.
Meanwhile, efforts to make Blackberry, Skype and others to give up proprietary technology to allow monitoring of phone calls and chats continue. The government says it wants to keep an eye on mischief makers, a perfectly valid argument. But who is to say that the privacy of innocent citizens will not be invaded? And at the rate technology is developing, criminals and other malcontents will find newer ways of staying below the official radar.
Clearly, big government is here to stay and its getting bigger and more intrusive. It appears that we not only do not mind it, we are welcoming it. The agitation of “civil society” for a Lokpal will create another humongous bureaucratic monster which will have the power to intrude into our lives in different ways. It will be judge, jury and executioner all rolled into one. Now, as if this wasn’t dangerous enough, there is a proposal to have one more body that will oversee the Lokpal. And this is an agitation that has the approval of our educated middle classes. Franz Kafka would have felt right at home here.
Twenty years ago, the then finance minister Manmohan Singh loosened the tight controls on the Indian economy. The fruits of those reforms are visible to us today. But while we celebrate these economic freedoms and choices, we are giving in — willingly, it appears — to personal restrictions. As long as the latest models of cellphones, cars and games are available on our shelves, who cares if Big Daddy is watching us?

The author is a senior journalist and commentator on current affairs based in Mumbai