As the Right to Information (RTI) Act, 2005 and Digital Personal Data Protection Act (DPDPA), 2023 return to the headlines, what resurfaces is not just a policy debate but the unresolved question of who must remain visible in India’s data-driven democracy and who gets to disappear. The RTI was historically articulated as an instrument of democratic visibility: a juridical right through which citizens could pierce the opacity of the state. Its promise rested on an antagonistic relation—citizens claim trans­parency from the state, and this claim is a condition of democratic control (Dey and Roy 2025). In this sense, RTI presupposes a particular political ontology: the state is the holder of information, and the citizen’s right is to demand disclosure in order to check power. The DPDPA 2023 radically reorganises this relation. On the surface, both frameworks appear to balance transparency and privacy (Shlomo 2020), but in practice, DPDPA inverts (Roy and Zanfir-Fortuna 2022) the direction of accountability. Instead of constraining state power, it creates a regime in which the citizen becomes increasingly transparent to the state, while the state itself becomes more opaque (Sinha and Mason 2016) to public scrutiny.