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Ancient Anchors, Modern Machines, and the Anatomy of Being Indian
The New Indian Express Madurai
|September 14, 2025
With Bihar boiling in ballot battles, identity is back on the burner. Not as just names on voter lists, but as the existential question: What does it mean to be Indian?
Our modern state was stitched from colonial census categories: caste as checkbox, religion as registry, region as ruler's rubric. The British built India out of boxes. Aadhaar, in many ways, is that colonial impulse rebooted in code: identity as data, belonging as biometric, democracy as digits. Neutral on the surface, but beneath its biometric bravado lies a philosophical pitfall where belonging becomes conditional on a fingerprint. The Supreme Court's latest ruling that Aadhaar is only one among 15 proofs sounds like an assurance of choice. Yet insightfully, it exposes an unease: in a civilisation as layered as India, can identity ever be reduced to a card, a scan, a number?
This story is from the September 14, 2025 edition of The New Indian Express Madurai.
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