How an amoral technocracy powers Modi’s India… For the engineers of Bengaluru and their allies in neoliberal think tanks, the BJP’s Hindutva politics is the necessary condition to put their designs to work.
In 2023, this ideology has become the common sense of how India should be governed, shared by all major political forces in the country. At the launch of Midnight’s Machines, the panel discussing the book included both Amitabh Kant and the Congress MP Shashi Tharoor. The book’s dust jacket carries glowing blurbs by distinguished historians of modern India. Even as the book courts the BJP, it also channels the imaginations of the opposition Congress and everyone else in between.
“THE FUNDAMENTAL NATURE of government is a platform,” the tech billionaire Nandan Nilekani declared in the 2015 book Rebooting India: Realizing a Billion Aspirations, which he co-authored with the software engineer Viral Shah. “We are talking about radically reimagining government, its purpose, its role and the way it carries out its functions, with technology at its core.” A campaign to realise this promise had been underway since 2009, in the form of the Aadhaar biometric identification system and the various digital systems that mushroomed around it. Nilekani and his coterie were now prescribing this approach to all domains of the state, from healthcare to education. The Indian state has since built countless platforms—for identification, payments, healthcare, e-commerce—for government and private companies to use.
Aided by the Narendra Modi government, which aggressively portrays itself as an efficient technocracy and has harnessed technology to maximise its own power, such infrastructures are now in use on a massive scale. Indians use the CoWIN platform to register for COVID-19 vaccinations, their Aadhaar details to open a bank account, the Unified Payments Interface to pay for groceries and a host of digital systems to access welfare schemes. The effect of this—often forced—digitalisation, we are told, has been a “digital revolution” that has resulted in vast improvement in the life of the average citizen.
As Modi’s Digital India becomes ubiquitous, older forms of technocracy are being whittled away. In 2015, the Modi government replaced the Planning Commission—the seat of postcolonial technocracy—with the NITI Aayog, the national institute for transforming India. This finally put to rest the supposedly out-of-date, out-of-touch institution that relied on sample surveys and five-year plans. Modi’s favoured technocrats are not the economists, statisticians or social scientists of the old order but a group of savvy bureaucrats masquerading as CEOs. The bureaucracy itself is being radically altered by the introduction of lithe digital systems designed in Bengaluru-based startups.
Older forms of data are being done away with, too. The census, which was conducted every ten years since 1872, through war and famine, was due in 2021 but has repeatedly been postponed; it is now scheduled for late 2024. Various surveys, which were released regularly since the 1950s, have been suppressed, obscuring data on poverty, unemployment and economic growth. These independently collected statistics, the data journalist Rukmini S notes in her 2021 book Whole Numbers and Half Truths, are increasingly being replaced by administrative data that make an accurate evaluation of the Indian economy and social life difficult, if not impossible.
In an environment where data is more plentiful but less informative than ever, the core of Digital India’s appeal lies not in concrete evidence of efficacy but in an aura of transformation. Produced by the government and its entrepreneurial allies in the startups of Bengaluru and the business houses of Mumbai, this aura convinces us that we live in a new India, where even street vendors use micropayments. In Digital India, technocracy is not only a way of governing but a potent project of political branding.
This hype about a digital golden age is based on claims that are historical in nature. For the new technologically savvy present to constitute a meaningful transformation, it must have been preceded by a backward, inefficient past. Arun Mohan Sukumar’s 2019 book, Midnight’s Machines: A Political History of Techonology in India, is the most comprehensive attempt yet to construct this history. It distils complex social, economic and technical factors into a narrative of the triumph of technological innovators in the face of adversity. India’s quasi-socialist decades are anathema to Sukumar, an enthusiast of the liberalisation that began in the 1980s. Combining a screed against elite politicians, a soft spot for soft Hindutva and an unquestioning celebration of new-age technocrats such as Nilekani, Midnight’s Machines is a transparent expression of what might be called a “Bangalore Ideology,” the form of technocratic neoliberalism that is the fountainhead for Digital India.
Operating at the interface of the state, think tanks and the private sector, Sukumar is a consummate insider and beneficiary of this transforming India. He headed the cyber initiative at the Reliance-funded think tank Observer Research Foundation, which is intimately involved with the policies of the Indian state under Modi. He is currently a core volunteer at the Indian Software Product Industry Roundtable, or iSPIRT, the body that made Aadhaar accessible to private players and is now working to export this model to the rest of the world. He is also the son-in-law of Amitabh Kant, the former CEO of NITI Aayog and currently India’s G20 “sherpa.”
Focussing on an earlier moment in the 1950s, Nikhil Menon’s Planning Democracy, published in 2022, argues instead that today’s data-driven technocracy should be traced to the pioneering use of statistical techniques in the Nehruvian period. For Menon, the Indian state’s “data revolution” began in the 1940s, with the work of the physicist-turned-statistician-turned-planner Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis, who founded the Indian Statistical Institute and eventually spearheaded the Second Five Year Plan. By recounting the history of statistics and economic planning from the 1940s to the 1960s, Menon suggests that what appear to be the unprecedented technological upheavals of the present are directly traceable to major experiments in the past.
Even in the high noon of postcolonial modernity, the state’s technocratic policies required popular outreach and support, and Menon documents with great acuity the odd alliances that resulted. Some, like an ill-fated collaboration between the Planning Commission’s policy wonks and the Bharat Sadhu Samaj, an organisation of Hindu clerics, foreshadow the alignments of the present. Though Menon’s arguments are persuasive, he overstates the continuities between the 1950s and the present, and has trouble accounting for what is distinctively new about Digital India and the broader socioeconomic situation in the country under Modi.
Critically reading Sukumar and Menon alongside a range of other recent writings—by Nasir Tyabji, Ajantha Subramanian and Nafis Aziz Hasan among others—we can begin to piece together a more complex picture of how the state’s use of technology has changed and how it has remained the same in the seventy-five years since Independence. Together, these texts reveal Digital India to be a new strain of a disease that is as old as the postcolonial state. Ever since its origins in the United States, in the early twentieth century, the central conviction of technocracy has been that technology—and, by extension, a small cadre of technical elites—can stand above politics to secure the most optimal outcomes for society. This paternalistic conceit became a cornerstone of governance in newly independent India and continues to be so today.
But, as digital technology makes its way unevenly but indefatigably into everyday life, through mobile phones, QR codes and facial recognition, the government and private companies are gaining unprecedented access to people’s lives. More familiar and more extractive than before, today’s technocracy facilitates an upward distribution of wealth while functioning as shiny branding for a violent regime. The longstanding argument that technology can stand above politics is more spurious and more dangerous than ever.
SUKUMAR FRAMES Indian history since 1947 as a battle between politics and technology. He blames a succession of meddling politicians for holding India back for the first decades after Independence. This history is divided into four “ages.”
In the initial Age of Innocence, the early Nehruvian state, flush with idealistic optimism, established dominance over technology, setting the tone for ages to come. But, according to Sukumar, Nehru’s India was naïve about technology and its possibilities, ultimately leading his grand vision of planned nationwide industrialisation to failure. With the first prime minister’s death and the loss of the 1962 war against China, “Innocence” gave way to “Doubt,” inaugurating an era of left-leaning populist governments. In Sukumar’s telling, the state’s dominance over technology began to solidify in this period.
By the 1980s, the people’s aspirations for technological development could no longer be suppressed. During this Age of Struggle, tech-savvy politicians and bureaucrats began to shrug off the scepticism of the previous two ages, laying the ground for the Age of Rediscovery. Sukumar’s final age, through which we are living today, began in 2000 and coincided with the rise of technological services as a dominant sector in the Indian economy and the nation’s wholehearted embrace of technology. The sweeping argument across the four ages is the technocratic notion that “political intervention manipulated and hindered technological progress.”
The leitmotif of political manipulation, according to Sukumar, is an episode from the 1950s. As part of their commitment to the nation’s development, the scientists of the National Physical Laboratory channelled their energies into inventing a solar cooker for the masses, an idea that had originated in the political establishment. The device, it was hoped, would see massive uptake in the countryside, cutting fuel costs and playing a major role in ending the chronic hunger that bedevilled the country. The device received a major national and international PR blitz, being covered in papers such as the New York Times. News of Nehru enjoying a solar-cooked meal was circulated widely in the Indian press.
Despite years of development and political buy-in from the highest levels, the scientists failed to produce a working consumer technology. Owing to Nehru’s demands, they continued to work on the cooker even as it became increasingly clear that it was not working. According to Sukumar, the project failed because of “its attempt to appease politicians and pander to popular sentiment.” He calls it “a cautionary tale against channelling science for political ends.” This may be a stretch but it is still somewhat reasonable.
In Sukumar’s hands, however, this cherry-picked incident becomes the basis for a radical reappraisal of Nehru. A far cry from the prime minister who said he would have preferred one technocrat to any four bureaucrats and called dams “the temples of modern India,” Sukumar’s Nehru harbours a “scepticism towards technology and its ability to modernize a nation in its truest sense.” He was “convinced that Indians, if exposed overnight to the awesome power of technology, would become beholden to it.” This is not the industrialising moderniser we are otherwise familiar with, but a technophobe who believes that humans lacked the “moral capacity” to use technology rightly.
This conviction, Sukumar argues, caused Nehru to channel the Indian state’s resources towards projects to “nativize” or “Indianize” technology. He claims this legacy continued in Indira Gandhi’s exhortations to “appropriate technology” and has resonances in the valorisation of jugad—improvised technology—today. To save his people from the dangers of technology, Nehru committed to follies like the solar cooker and the ambitious, but eventually ineffective, Community Development Scheme, which was aimed at developing knowledge and preparedness for industrialisation in rural areas. Sukumar writes that the solar cooker’s failure “should have prompted Nehru and his advisors to correct course, to turn their resources to supporting private innovation (and failure), and create an environment for collaboration between the Indian scientist and the entrepreneur.” Instead, he claims, it turned “India’s, and Nehru’s own, gaze away from ‘niche’ technologies, towards big industrial projects.”
By the end of the 1950s, Sukumar writes, “India had a lot of turbines, metallurgical equipment and mining machinery, but few motorbikes on the road, air conditioners in offices, tractors in farms or televisions in homes. Except for reading about it in newspapers, journals or magazines, most Indians had not come face-to-face with technology in any meaningful way.”
Reading Sukumar, it appears that Nehru singlehandedly crafted the nation’s economic policy stung by a dysfunctional kitchen device. This is far from the truth. Several scholars, including the postcolonial theorist Partha Chatterjee, the economic historian Tirthankar Roy and the historian of science Dhruva Raina, none of whom Sukumar cites, have used various approaches to trace the ideology that undergirded Nehruvian industrialisation as far back as the 1920s and the concrete plans to the deliberations of the National Planning Committee in the 1930s.
Further, notwithstanding Sukumar’s kneejerk call for private innovation, whether the private sector could even have produced innovation in the 1950s is not settled. In fact, over the last two decades, the economic historian Nasir Tyabji, whom Sukumar does not cite either, has developed a persuasive argument that, far from being visionary capitalists, most Indian businessmen of the period were immured deep in feudal networks. In his 2015 book, Forging Capitalism in Nehru’s India, Tyabji suggests that they were more interested in using their profits to make a quick buck in rural moneylending rather than investing in research and development or new technology. The neoliberal lament for the lost decades of Nehruvianism assumes the existence of an alternative that may never have existed.
The early postcolonial state’s economic commitment to large-scale industry should not be personalised as Nehru’s technophobia but understood as a pragmatic response to economic conditions. Early postcolonial history was characterised by a scarcity of foreign exchange and a negative balance of payments. In this situation, depending on foreign imports of manufactured goods risked making India beholden to Western powers. Instead, India chose to develop its own industrial capacity, which would eventually have enabled it to manufacture more consumer goods. There were good reasons, in other words, for the state to spend its scarce resources building dams and steel mills rather than importing refrigerators and motorcycles. While Sukumar nods to these conditions, they do not figure meaningfully in his account of Indian technological development in the period.
Casting Nehru as anti-technological is an innovative escalation of the Nehru-bashing that has been characteristic of the last few years. It allows Sukumar to set up the populist binary that pervades the rest of the book, in which “technology,” understood by Sukumar as consumer-facing machines, is on the side of an Indian people who are locked in a perpetual struggle against a political and scientific elite.
With no new archival research to back it up and an uncertain grasp of the existing literature, Sukumar’s reappraisal of early postcolonial history is, at best, an exaggeration and, at worst, a distortion. This is not an isolated mistake but a general pattern in a book that sputters along on selective citations, reductive hyperbole and an outsized focus on personality. Sukumar is not interested in explaining why history took the course it did. Instead, he neatly apportions blame in a way that feeds directly into his politics in the present.
THE POSTCOLONIAL HISTORY OF TECHNOCRACY conventionally begins with the Planning Commission, the powerful institution that promulgated five-year plans for India’s mixed economy based on extensive statistical surveys. With his focus on consumer products, Sukumar has little to say about planning. But, in Planning Democracy, Nikhil Menon revisits the commission’s history through one of its most prominent figures, PC Mahalanobis, and the Indian Statistical Institute. In his career, Mahalanobis provided the basis for the government’s industrial policies of import substitution that were central to the postcolonial state. This was India’s first technocracy.
Most historical writing on planning has understood it as a straightforward means of realising the path to development that Nehru and Congress elites decreed for newly independent India. Depending on one’s position, planning has been seen as a genuine commitment to the development and upliftment of an impoverished former colony, a heavy-handed attempt to impose socialism from above, or—in a well-known argument made by Partha Chatterjee—a means of installing a cadre of unelected technocrats like Mahalanobis as major decisionmakers to serve elite class interests. But, in all these narratives, the techniques by which planning was carried out—chiefly those of statistics—were seen merely as the means of providing scientific respectability to a political schema that was already set in place. The technocrats who oversaw the planning were little more than politicians’ yes men.
By placing Mahalanobis and statistics front and centre, Menon shows how statistical techniques fundamentally enabled the policies that came to be. The edifice of the planned economy was built on what Menon calls a new “data infrastructure.” The consumer needs, resource usage and manpower and machinery requirements of the entire country had to be counted, so the economy could be made “tractable.”
Statistics was the “digital revolution” of its time. The numbers that undergirded the planned economy were collected using a new method of enumeration: the large-scale area-based randomised survey that Mahalanobis pioneered in the 1930s and 1940s. The surveys allowed the postcolonial state to develop a snapshot of its economy. The sophisticated data-processing this required led to the import of the first digital computer to India, in 1955. Looking through the tables of the Second Five Year Plan, in which the Nehruvian economic order found its definitive expression, one finds detailed numbers for everything from pairs of shoes manufactured to miles of road constructed to tonnes of iron smelted. If this level of granular detail sounds matter of fact today, when ubiquitous networked devices produce endless streams of data, it was a remarkable feat at the time.
Eventually, Menon notes, statistical techniques dominated planning, the ISI controlled the Planning Commission and Mahalanobis became the country’s chief planner. Much more than a yes man, he was a major institution builder, a political power broker and even a de facto diplomat. His globetrotting networking with scientists and politicians on both sides of the Iron Curtain enabled the ISI’s work to spread globally and, today, many of these techniques are standard procedures in national statistics.
Although elite technocrats like Mahalanobis decided how resources would be distributed to hundreds of millions of Indians, they did so with a claim to utter neutrality. Even as their work propped up the entire postcolonial economic order, the statisticians disavowed politics. Always seeing himself as true scientist, who remained wary of economists, Mahalanobis
intended to approach the economy as he did physics, with the expectation of a single value-neutral answer. It was why he often brushed aside questions regarding his own politics or the political ramifications of his prescriptions for the economy. All of that was politics, he said. ‘I am interested in physics.’
This supposedly neutral development strategy was commonly accepted in the 1950s, but the Second Five Year Plan did not live up to its promise to radically improve India’s growth and had to be scaled back almost immediately. Menon devotes only a few short lines to this outcome. “Put simply,” he writes, “imports considerably outpaced exports.”
Menon’s history stops at the very moment that the plan was introduced into the world as an agenda for economic action. Though he devotes the second half of his book to the state’s attempts to publicise planning among its populace, he has nothing to say about the people as citizens whose material realities would be affected by the plan’s statistical calculations. By limiting itself to the interface between statistics, planning and the state, Planning Democracy does not, unfortunately, attempt an insight into the vast impacts of Mahalanobis’s statistical planning on the lives of most Indians.
TECHNOCRACY IS, today—as it was in Mahalanobis’s day—paternalistic, extra-institutional and unaccountable. The notion that technocratic decisions can be separate from politics is the source of technocracy’s continuing appeal. The origins of the modern idea of technocracy can be traced to the United States of the 1910s, when a coterie of economists and planners around the pioneering social scientist Thorstein Veblen founded a movement that came to be called Technocracy Inc. Their central conviction was that technology and technical knowledge could be used to secure the most optimal outcomes for society, free of political motivations. Sukumar is an exemplary, though unorthodox, partisan of this school of thought in India today.
In his final chapter, Sukumar describes the ideal technocrat. “A technocrat, as understood in the true sense of the term, should meet three requirements,” he recommends. These are an “unyielding belief in the promise of technology to resolve social or economic problems; the occupation of a formal role within government that enabled a technological enterprise; and the commanding of loyalty and compliance from peers and colleagues of the same vocational or professional background.”
The usual suspects of progressive technocracy, however, are largely absent from this history. Mahalanobis meets Sukumar’s requirements—perhaps more than anyone in postcolonial history—but only merits three passing mentions in Midnight’s Machines, one of which is a vitriolic comparison with M Visvesvaraya, the civil engineer who became the diwan of Mysore in the 1930s and 1940s: “before this data savvy technocrat, the great PC Mahalanobis was but a number-cruncher.” Sam Pitroda, the US-returned engineer who oversaw the introduction of electronic telephony to India in the 1980s, usually a staple of histories of computing in India, is only mentioned thrice. The excision of Pitroda enables Sukumar to make the inflated claim that “Nilekani is the first entrepreneur to steer a technological venture for the public sector.” Instead, Sukumar celebrates an unlikely trio as a counter-canon of technocrats: Visvesvaraya, Nilekani and the physicist Vikram Sarabhai, who headed India’s space programme.
Despite Sukumar’s seemingly objective list of “requirements,” the technocrat, for him, is a fuzzy, undefined figure. These three very different men are united only in being savvy political entrepreneurs, navigating between the state and private industry with an oracular feel for the direction of technological and political change. Sukumar’s ideal technocrat resembles nothing more than a venture capitalist, a character who, in Silicon Valley mythology, has nearly godlike powers to intuit and invest in the next big thing. Sukumar does not shy away from the comparison. In his own words, “if the Indian state was a start-up, Sarabhai was its angel investor.”
Though these men came from immensely privileged backgrounds, Sukumar takes great pains to describe them as channelling popular aspirations for technology. To do so, he selectively and strategically deploys caste, religion and class critiques—the question of gender does not ever arise, as every player in this story is a man. Even as Sukumar rightly calls out their contemporaries’ elitism, he easily lets his own chosen technocrats off the hook.
Thus, he notes that the nuclear physicist and institution builder Homi J Bhabha “milked affluent Parsi networks to finance expensive projects.” Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar, who led the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research in the 1940s and was, according to Sukumar, “Nehru’s Man Friday,” and KS Krishnan, who set up the National Physical Laboratory, are both described as “upper-caste men who hailed from families of letters, and in some cases, considerable means.” The government’s scientific establishment, Sukumar writes, was ruled by the “bhadralok class” and “dominated by Bengali Brahmins like S.N. Bose.” (The caste critique is not at all misplaced, but the details are sloppy. Bose was not Brahmin but Kayastha.)
But Sukumar changes his tune when describing his chosen threesome. Sarabhai, the scion of one of Gujarat’s wealthiest industrialists, had a private physics lab at his disposal in his childhood, and family networks played a large part in his rise. Yet, while Sarabhai’s peers “struggled to make technology relevant for the average Indian citizen,” the physicist was able to do so, Sukumar writes, since he could “straddle the worlds of the Cambridge-educated scientist and the amdavadi baniya with equal ease.” Recast as a relatable Amdavadi Baniya—hailing from Ahmedabad, where the mercantile caste group is dominant—Sarabhai almost sounds like a man of the people.
While Sukumar describes Nehru as sceptical of technology, he reserves quiet praise for the orthodox Congress leader Madan Mohan Malaviya, who founded the Hindu Mahasabha. Malaviya and Visvesvaraya are described as “the intellectual progenitors of a school of thought, alive and well in India today that argued technology would inevitably improve the citizen’s way of life.” Sukumar writes of “the watchful guidance” of Visvesvaraya, who “commanded enormous respect from policymakers even after independence.” In fact, Visvesvaraya was such a rabid casteist that, in 1918, he resigned as diwan to protest the institution of reservations for non-Brahmins. Sukumar excuses this by writing, “whether this reflected his paternalistic attitude or a deep-rooted mistrust of the political class, one cannot tell.” If this recasting of upper-caste aggrievement and Baniya entrepreneurialism as mass sentiment sounds familiar, that is because it is: these are also key rhetorical manoeuvres in the populist playbook that the Hindu Right draws from today.
TECHNOLOGIES REVEAL their power most bluntly when they fail, and it is the marginalised who often pay the price. But failure does not fit into Sukumar’s schema except when it can be used to bash elite politicians. The Bhopal gas disaster of 1984, one of the deadliest industrial accidents of all time, merits a scant half page of analysis. Likewise, the state of environmental collapse that is devastating the country and its citizens is not alluded to at all. In fact, Sukumar celebrates the notorious insecticide DDT without a single word about its adverse environmental and health impacts.
Sukumar has next to nothing to say of the structural forms in which technology shapes society. He does not mention the well-documented entrenchment of upper-caste farmers through the Green Revolution, the facilitation of increased atrocities against Muslims and other minorities by social media or the disastrous consequences of the implementation of Aadhaar in welfare distribution. In her illuminating 2019 book, The Caste of Merit, the anthropologist Ajantha Subramanian describes how engineering education and the cultivation of the information technology sector as a site of upper-caste opportunity has strengthened the Brahminical order. This is, of course, entirely beyond Sukumar’s purview.
Instead, Sukumar focusses on what he calls technology’s “awesome power,” which has the potential to break down social cohesion. This idea is drawn from the political scientist Robert Putnam, who argued that the rise of technologies such as television in the United States during the 1960s resulted in an atomisation of society and an erosion in civic-mindedness. This narrative of technology’s “dis-social tendencies” appeals to common-sense fears—of the sort that parents draw on when they chastise children for spending too much time looking at screens—but not much evidence. To attest to these ill effects in postcolonial India, Sukumar cites only a 2017 survey of thirty-five hundred youths that showed that smartphone usage has increased without a corresponding increase in volunteerism—hardly the gold standard of empirical evidence.
Sukumar prefers ill-defined fears about technology causing social breakdown over the concrete catastrophes caused by the forms of technological development pursued by the postcolonial state. This suits him well. If we see technology and its failures as political, the solutions to the problems it causes become a matter for politics. But seeing technology as a mystical individualised domain, separate from the business of living together, allows room for a mystical solution to its problems: a cadre of technocratic soothsayers who can guide society with a stable hand.
Sukumar does not provide any evidence for the notion that technocrats are more efficient or efficacious than politicians. He does not need to. In Sukumar’s hands, a technocracy becomes a rhetorical appeal to the aspirational middle-class upper castes that see themselves as victims of politics and of messy, hierarchical, outdated systems of power. This is the populist drama practised by the Aam Aadmi Party and perfected by the Bharatiya Janata Party, elevating entrepreneurs over politicians, consumer goods over industry, CEOs over planners, meritocracy over reservations and technology over politics.
MUCH HAS CHANGED between the technocracies of Mahalanobis and Nilekani, between Nehru’s commitment to scientific planning and Modi’s embrace of Digital India. How did we go from a technocracy of sample surveys to one of real-time databases? Neither Sukumar nor Menon answer this question.
The major economic shift in this period was the rise of a massive software services industry in India after the 1990s. This is a history that has been catalogued in detail by the journalist Dinesh Sharma in his 2015 book, The Outsourcer: The Story of India’s IT Revolution. While the dominance of this industry has had a tremendous economic and social impact on the country, for Sukumar, its chief effect was to open up an Indian “psyche” that had long been constrained by the state. After the rise of outsourcing, Indians began to “ascribe a sense of purpose to technology.” By the turn of the millennium, he writes, the world “had reached out directly to Indian coders” and the Indian state, “long a mediator of the relationship between technology and the citizen, could only watch as they stepped up to the occasion.”
Yet Sukumar misses the way the state itself was morphing in the 1980s and 1990s. The return to India of Sam Pitroda, a techie who had made millions in the United States, to transform Indian telephony from analogue to digital switching is the stuff of tech legend, though it is largely ignored by Sukumar. Run by the extra-institutional Centre for Development of Telematics, the telecommunications mission, as it was called, rapidly improved and increased the scale of telephony in India. With its success, as the scholar Itty Abraham has argued, the “mission mode,” a new mode of technological development was inaugurated. This was shortly applied to domains as separate as literacy, drinking water, immunisation and oilseeds. In 1988, the social scientist Harsh Sethi wrote that this model played “on our disgust with our non-functioning and ineffective institutions.” It was, in other words, a foretaste of the present, in which the public–private partnerships that undergird Digital India have been built on promises of transparency and efficiency.
Meanwhile, Menon, focussed on the 1950s, is intent on asserting that “it was the country’s socialistic planned economy that brought [computers] to the subcontinent, long before its liberalizing capitalist avatar.” This is true but also untrue, for computers are no longer what they were in Mahalanobis’s time. As they became miniaturised and networked, computers could be used in more places to generate more data, more frequently. The mainframes used at the ISI enabled very different forms of governance from the ubiquitous connected devices of the present.
The anthropologist Nafis Aziz Hasan speaks to the changing forms of data-enabled power in his contribution to Overload, Excess, Creep, an excellent recent book focussed on “an internet from India.” According to Hasan, the Relational Database Management System, a new software introduced in this period, enabled data to move and be manipulated from a distance, through a network, for the first time at scale. Introduced in India after the liberalisation of imports spurred by the New Computer Policy of 1984, the RDBMS proliferated both in government and private industries during the 1990s.
Hasan writes that these new databasing technologies undergirded several of the major shifts in the functioning of the state that began in the early 1990s. From Indian Railways ticketing systems to the management of land records, the RDBMS slowly remade the paper-based bureaucracies of the state. Many attribute the rise of the private fulfilment of state functions to the new economic incentives of liberalisation. By allowing data to be operated upon at a distance, Hasan argues, it was the RDBMS that enabled private operators to take on large portions of governmental work, eventually resulting in the large-scale public–private partnerships that are characteristic of governance today. Perhaps more than any other factor, it is these databases that have enabled Digital India’s fantasy that every single instance of something—be it a person or a parcel of land—can be tracked and analysed by the government. The RDBMS caused the very meaning of data to shift from the sample surveys that produced aggregate data about broad sectors to granular and ubiquitous data about everything.
A large portion of Hasan’s evidence comes from ethnographic interviews with engineers and technicians who coded and deployed these infrastructures. Rather than selling grand designs, these informants are forthcoming about the systems’ failures and the labours necessary to keep things running. According to them, the increasing proliferation of the RDBMS increased the number of errors and the amount of repair needed to keep governmental records functional.
In the age of the networked RDBMS, local bureaucrats have been transformed into data entry workers. If citizens once mobilised community networks and local pressures to prevail upon local bureaucrats, today they must beseech them to repair and maintain their existence on dysfunctional government databases. Hasan notes how farmers waiting for these repairs experience digitisation as “a form of harassment often physical, involving multiple trips to offices, courts, hiring and paying advocates, waiting for months sometimes years to have their errors resolved”—a far cry from the glossy images promised by Nilekani and Sukumar. He describes this as a “form of temporary, circuitous low-grade suffering” which amounts to “slow violence.”
This extends far beyond land records into all areas of governance that are digitised, such as welfare, healthcare and even the very fact of citizenship, as in the ruthless National Register for Citizens process in Assam. As long as the errors remain unresolved, many Indians live in a state of precarity, deprived of the benefits or rights that they are constitutionally guaranteed. This is the reality that activists, journalists and ethnographers of Digital India have repeatedly uncovered. The new technologies of governance through data have reshaped, almost always for the worse, the practice of welfare, rights and citizenship.
Nilekani is, for Sukumar, the messianic figure of this database state, a “technocrat who came in from the cold.” After liberalisation, the government appeared to have given up its role of purveying technological advancement, he writes, “until Nandan Nilekani stepped into the picture.” Nilekani applied the approach of a nimble-minded CEO to the “gigantic, lumbering corporation” that was the Indian state. Once Aadhaar had been rolled out, by hook or by crook, to over a billion Indians in five years, Nilekani argued for the replication of the Aadhaar model—an approach in which the state builds platforms that private companies can use—as a solution to all of India’s most difficult problems.
“The technocracy that Nilekani has nurtured,” Sukumar writes, “looks poised to have a profound impact on India’s governance,” dramatically reordering the state and opening up new avenues for private profit and innovation. Sukumar calls this “the Gilded Age of Koramangala,” after the Bengaluru neighbourhood in which many startups are headquartered, clearly seeing it as a positive shift. The historical gilded age in the nineteenth-century United States, he argues, was not only a period of incredible accumulation of private wealth but also a time when state capacity grew, paving the way for the welfarist policies of the New Deal era of the 1930s.
The unspoken implication for our Indian present is that the mounting inequality and violence of the present will lead to a better future for everyone. Of course, there is plenty of evidence to counter this kind of neoliberal snake oil. After the RDBMS, the introduction of Aadhaar-based platforms has made welfare more exclusionary and citizenship more precarious, a major blow to the country’s already weak social-security net. Nilekani, less coy than Sukumar, has called this what it is: “trickle-up.”
AT THE SAME TIME, technocracy’s interface with political ideology has shifted dramatically. In the past, technocrats in India usually claimed association with progressivism and secularism. Nehru hoped that widespread “plan consciousness,” or awareness of the five-year plans, could even make the “‘crooked paths of provincialism, communalism, casteism’ less tempting.” That was not the history that came to pass. Today, technocracy and Hindutva have become easy bedfellows. Yet, for all its apparent unlikeliness, this pairing has a longer history, which Menon recounts in one of the more entertaining parts of his book.
Beginning in 1956, the minister of planning, Gulzarilal Nanda, an austere and deeply devout moderniser who subsisted on a “diet of milk, fruit, boiled vegetables and nuts,” spearheaded a novel initiative. The Planning Commission recruited India’s sadhus with the aim of spreading the plans “to the unlettered and religious millions in familiar idioms.” The holy men, initially dismissed by the Hindu Mahasabha as “Congress sadhus,” formed themselves into an official body, the Bharat Sadhu Samaj. However, they ended up devoting most of their time to organising cow protection rallies and other thinly veiled communal activities. “It is likely that they were more interested in the [state’s] patronage than the Plans,” Menon writes. “They probably only paid lip service to planning, while pursuing their own conservative social and religious agenda.”
The sadhus’ career as servants of the state ended in disaster. On 7 November 1966, a cow protection rally called by the BSS resulted in over a hundred thousand sadhus attacking parliament and rioting through central Delhi. Forty people were seriously injured and eight died in the violence. By the evening, a curfew had been declared, and the army was patrolling the streets. Tukdoji Maharaj, who had founded the body, went on to become one of the founding vice-presidents of the Vishva Hindu Parishad. Long after its state patronage had ended, the BSS would participate in the Ram Janmabhoomi movement and cheer on the destruction of the Babri Masjid, the foundational moment of Hindutva’s ascendancy as a national political force.
As Partha Chatterjee once put it, “rational strategies pursued in a political field … have the unpleasant habit of producing unintended circumstances.” In India, even the forces of an avowedly secular and apolitical technocracy had to be filtered through the categories of mass politics: caste, community, religion. But, for many, the distinction between technocracy and religion was not clear in the first place. “To Nanda, the material couldn’t be separated from the spiritual,” Menon writes. “Economic development was but a mode of national spiritual regeneration. It was a different way of abstracting the economy: while technocrats like Mahalanobis saw the economy in statistical schedules and input-output tables, Nanda and the Sadhu Samaj saw the economy on a continuum with the spiritual.” Sukumar makes a similar point about one of his favoured technocratic figures, Madan Mohan Malviya, who “cared deeply about the upliftment and rejuvenation of his religion, which he believed would occur through technology-led modernization.”
The compact between technocracy and religion—the ur category of mass politics in the last few decades—has only amplified since the 1950s. Modi, Sukumar argues in one of his finer insights, offers the vision of “a once-glorious Hindu past that can be realized with tools of the future.” Unfortunately, Sukumar abandons this line of thinking and suggests in short order that “the Prime Minister has been able to sustain his advocacy of technology free of the trappings of dogma or ideology.”
He goes even further, arguing that “communal violence in India is no longer manifested in the form of large-scale riots but as micro-aggressions involving localized rumors on Facebook, Twitter, Tik Tok or WhatsApp.” The year after the book’s publication, 53 people, mostly Muslim, were killed in communal violence in north-east Delhi, which was sparked in no small part by the circulation of a hateful speech by a BJP politician on social media. Even describing the lynchings of Muslims that have become commonplace in recent years—which Sukumar was surely aware of—as “micro-aggressions” is a criminal understatement.
Today, the Hindu Right is the centre that anyone desirous of power must engage with. Neither Sukumar nor his hero Nilekani is a Hindu nationalist. But, for the engineers of Bengaluru and their allies in neoliberal think tanks, the BJP’s Hindutva politics is the necessary condition to put their designs to work. Being largely upper-caste Hindus themselves, they would not have found the compromise too difficult to stomach. Modi, Sukumar suggests, is, after all, only “a technocrat eager to understand and embrace innovation.”
IN 1995, the digital theorists Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron diagnosed the Californian Ideology, “a heterogenous orthodoxy for the coming information age,” combining free-market ideals, hippie anti-authoritarianism and technological determinism. In India today, the Bangalore Ideology combines anti-political populism, the hijacking of the state and soft Hindutva. Because of its power to coerce at scale and in the name of the people, the state is central to this school of thought. If, as Menon put it, Calcutta—where Mahalanobis set up the first ISI—once conquered Delhi, today, with Nilekani at the helm and with the likes of Sukumar as his propagandists, Bengaluru is conquering Delhi.
In 2023, this ideology has become the common sense of how India should be governed, shared by all major political forces in the country. At the launch of Midnight’s Machines, the panel discussing the book included both Amitabh Kant and the Congress MP Shashi Tharoor. The book’s dust jacket carries glowing blurbs by distinguished historians of modern India. Even as the book courts the BJP, it also channels the imaginations of the opposition Congress and everyone else in between.
The Bangalore Ideology justifies the power and privilege of a new ruling coalition of Hindutva politicians and digital capitalists. It allows Digital India to retain all the extra-institutionalism and unaccountability of older technocracies while facilitating a project of extraction cloaked in a rhetoric of populism.
MILA T SAMDUB is a researcher at the Information Society Project at Yale Law School.
https://caravanmagazine.in/books/amoral-technocracy-powering-modi-india-nandan-nilekani
*********************************************
Will India remain untouched by the slide of Adani?
Modi-Adani Nexus: बीजेपी की नोटबंदी
Jairus Banaji on the Indian corporate strategy of subordinating farm households and family labor
Apoorva Mandhani: Judge Loya’s Confidants Died Mysterious Deaths
After the truth-shower 