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Paper short abstract:

Interrogating the hunger deaths that have resulted in India due to people's exclusion from food subsidies due to issues related to Aadhaar- India's universal biometric ID system- this paper examines the necropolitical effects of linking biometric authentication to welfare distribution.

Paper long abstract:

Aadhaar, India's biometric ID system has long been articulated as a tool that brings countless marginalized Indians into the purview of the government by giving them legitimate and universal identification. Since its initiation in 2010, it has rapidly been linked to over 300 public welfare schemes and policies, most notably the Public Distribution System (PDS), India's nationwide infrastructure that sells food-grains at heavily subsidized prices to qualifying families. While Aadhaar has been lauded as an objective and accurate technological intervention, this paper contextualizes Aadhaar in a longer legacy of neoliberal reforms in India seeking to curtail welfare spending. This paper critically reviews several types of texts and discourses that have been made about Aadhar from stakeholders with diverse interest to empirically analyze divergences between political discourses about Aadhaar and some of India's most marginalized people's lived experiences with it. In analyzing these divergences, the article employs Joseph Pugliese's framework of 'infrastructural normativities' to interrogate the normativities of body, class and ability that shape Aadhaar as a 'regime of truth'. Aadhaar's truth-telling regime categorizes those unable to conform to said normativities as 'error', excluding them from government services and benefits they are entitled to. The paper builds on this conception of exclusion by focusing on the occurrence of starvation deaths as a result of exclusion from or due to Aadhaar. Employing Achille Mbembe's 'necropolitics', the paper demonstrates how as a securitizing technology, Aadhaar casts marginalized people as 'excess' populations invisible to the state, relegated to the status of the 'living dead.'