Citizen-State relations and the burden of document raj

Hindustan Times

a day ago

For over a month now, the Election Commission of India (ECI) has ensnared the bulk of Bihar's voting population in a maze of paperwork, thanks to its Special Intensive Review (SIR) of the voter rolls. In the process, widely accepted documents — Aadhaar, ration card and the voter card itself — have been declared suspect, despite the Supreme Court's intervention. Through executive fiat, ECI has created a new, arbitrary document hierarchy, declaring 11 specific documents — some of which even the most privileged Indians struggle to procure — as appropriate for determining citizenship. Now, as the process moves to the question of deletions from the voter rolls and the very real threat of disenfranchisement, ECI is obdurately hiding behind its paperwork, refusing public access to the list of deleted names. This tyranny of paper is also at the centre of another controversy. The enduring image of Rahul Gandhi's recent press conference is the seven-foot-high stack of paper — the physical electoral rolls — that the Congress team trawled through to identify discrepancies. The Indian bureaucracy's obsession with paper (files, orders, documents) is well known. Anthropologist Mathew Hull traces this to the colonial bureaucracy's distrust of local Indian functionaries, which manifested itself in kaghaz raj or 'documentary rule'. (HT Photo)
In different ways, both episodes reveal one of the most pernicious aspects of the exercise of State power in India — the use of documents to mediate citizen-State relations and their role in feeding the State's obsession with ordering citizens into administrative categories of 'eligible' and 'ineligible'. Bureaucratic norms cohere around the idea that 'good governance' is about weeding out the 'ineligible'.
At one level, this is a legitimate governance impulse. After all, who will disagree with the need to ensure that all citizens access their rights, particularly voting rights, and that no 'ineligible' person misuses the system? However, the practices this unleashes often lead to the kind of documentation chaos as we are witnessing in Bihar. Worse, it opens the window for co-opting bureaucratic practices into legitimising exclusionary political projects. In hiding behind its mounds of paper, obdurately refusing to make its processes and documents transparent to the public, ECI has demonstrated how effectively the State can weaponise paper even in pursuit of ostensibly legitimate goals.
Proving eligibility via documents is a unique burden that the Indian State places on its citizens. After Partition, governments in India and Pakistan adopted the practice of adjudicating citizenship claims by evaluating documents such as passports and, later, ration/voter cards that claimants possessed to determine their authenticity as citizens. This, as political scientist Niraja Jayal has argued, inverted the standard relationship between citizenship and documents. In most contexts, the possession of citizenship is the means to acquire identity documents such as passports. In the Indian case, documents became the means for determining citizenship.
This penchant for relying on documents to mediate citizenship soon extended to routine administrative tasks. The Indian bureaucracy's obsession with paper (files, orders, documents) is well known. Anthropologist Mathew Hull traces this to the colonial bureaucracy's distrust of local Indian functionaries, which manifested itself in kaghaz raj or 'documentary rule'. Only through a connection with paper, Hull argues, could an action be construed as an action. Contemporary Indian bureaucracy adopted this practice and extended this culture of distrust to how it deals both with itself and with the public at large. In dealing with the public, documents — ration cards, BPL cards, job cards, Aadhaar cards, voter cards — came to play the role of gatekeepers. For citizens, they are the primary means to make themselves visible to the State and place claims. For the State, they are the means through which it seeks to 'see' society, categorising the population into administratively legible segments that become the basis for administrative action.
The culture of distrust that underpins this allowed for an intriguing twist. The State took it upon itself to categorise the population as 'eligible' and 'ineligible'; after all, corruption enables the 'ineligible' beneficiary to access the State. But to achieve this goal, the bureaucracy appropriated the power to verify its own documents, casting suspicion both on its documents and, rather conveniently, on those in possession of these documents. This administrative suspicion can easily be weaponised and placed in service of political projects, as we are now witnessing in Bihar. Words like 'verification', 'authentication', 'deletion' and 'doubtful' are routinely deployed in administrative parlance. The citizen is a suspicious actor, in constant need of verification. It is this bureaucratic impulse that has allowed the ECI, with absolutely no irony, to claim the voter card, distributed by its own machinery, to be inaccurate, leaving it to the Supreme Court judges to remind the ECI of the principle of 'presumption of correctness'.
Crucially, it is precisely this suspicion that can become a convenient weapon in the politics of exclusion. Political narratives of 'infiltrators' and outsiders find legitimacy precisely because the State regularly reminds us of how suspiciously it views its documents, allowing itself the luxury of authenticating documents at will. It should be no surprise that the spectre of NRC is writ large over the SIR as well.
As the SIR and electoral roll controversy unfolds, the risk of mass disenfranchisement (6.5 million deletions in the draft list), procedural arbitrariness, the constitutional overreach of ECI, and its sheer incompetence are at the centre of the ongoing political and legal challenge. The debate, however, is missing a deeper interrogation into the tyranny of paper and the culture of distrust it has entrenched that makes even our institutions capable of undermining democracy and citizens' rights. The struggle to protect democratic freedoms must extend to interrogating and indeed challenging the culture of kaghaz raj within the State that makes critical independent public institutions vulnerable.
Yamini Aiyar is senior visiting fellow, Brown University. The views expressed are personal.