Amid the BJP’s push for a “new India”, concerns around citizen rights and surveillance have frequently taken centre stage. It is this transformation that has been traced by Mumbai-based journalist and author Rahul Bhatia in his new book – The Identity Project: The Unmaking of a Democracy. The author has analysed the evolution of Hindu nationalism and how its ideas sparked the creation of the Aadhaar project.

In this conversation with Abhinandan Sekhri, Bhatia talks about his book, Hindutva, the Congress record on citizen rights, and his experience covering the 2020 Delhi riots.

“The whole idea about Aadhaar and about identification…one of the reasons why it was really contested over the last 10 years was because it was an extremely powerful tool. What are you going to use it for,” says the author about questions surrounding Aadhaar. About the Congress’s role in this biometric identification project, Bhatia says, “People say the BJP is terrible. Let’s vote in the Congress. Anybody who has a brain will remember what happened back then.”

On the origins of Aadhaar, the author points to a link to former deputy prime minister L K Advani. “I was talking to this person who designed the first identification project, and he said Advani…my jaw just dropped.”

Speaking about concerns around Aadhaar, Bhatia says, “When I looked at Aadhaar and saw that researchers who were uncovering data leaks were then receiving notices from the UIDAI, and there were people who were critics of Aadhaar who were blacklisted…where do rights come in when you talk about handing over a project to a single person? At what point do you as a citizen say I am okay with not getting to decide?”

It was his investigation into the 2020 Delhi riots that led Bhatia to write the book “as an act of curiosity”. “In all the interviews, the thing that came out was a sense of being let down by people who should have stopped the violence (in Delhi in 2020).”