Governing India in Cybertime: Biometric IDs, Start-Ups and the Temporalised State

Abstract

Building on anthropological attention that has been devoted, appropriately, to the question of how states are spatialised, this article analyses how the swirl of discourse and everyday practice around India’s biometric identification programme serves to temporalise the state. The first half of the article examines how the Aadhaar initiative endeavours to assign the temporalising characteristics of innovativeness and expeditiousness to the contemporary Indian state. I show how mobility, change and speed are motivating factors for personnel at the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI). In turn, I argue that Aadhaar is emblematic of the reimagination of the Indian state as a ‘start-up state’, or a lithe platform for innovation. I then explore the ways in which this start-up state is constructed in what one might call ‘cybertime’—a mode of imagining time that unsettles received understandings of historical time. In the second half of the article, I investigate how centralised efforts to temporalise the state are experienced by local implementers of Aadhaar as well as by its targets.