At various points in its career through the 20th Century, the Indian state has deployed technologies to govern the country. In its latest move, this has extended to a number of large scale projects to install digital technology, the most controversial being the Unique Identity Project, an ongoing project which is registering biometric data, along with demographic information of residents. This essay attempts to understand what is at stake in technology-mediated governance. Do these interventions signal a shift in the thinking around institutional systems while negotiating the political in a particular way? Do they reconcile
the participatory and procedural impulses of Indian democracy? How do they negotiate particular claims? Is this a change in the state-citizen relationship itself? The essay will propose that these interventions cannot be understood as an orthodox neoliberal policy initiative. Rather, they articulate a new desire to segregate and yet preserve the state, even as they free the executive from the encumbrance of populist democracy