Writing in defence of the National Register of Citizens, the prominent Assamese intellectual Hiren Gohain says: “The process was impersonal and its strict machine-like operation pre-empted the targeting of any particular community.”In contrast to this technological optimism, Rabindranath Tagore in his essay ‘Nationalism in the West’ (1917) is most worried about the machine-like nature of the nation. Tagore relates the machine of the nation to the idea of a “perfect organisation of power”. When such an organisation comes into being, Tagore thinks, there are “few crimes which it is unable to perpetrate”. The point being made is that if the idea of the nation is a political one, then the political machinery in charge of the affairs of the state enjoys impunity for the crime it commits. In other words, the state is a legitimate machine of crime. Tagore likens this organisation of power to an inflated “engine”, and tells us how “mechanics are made into parts of the machine”. The “mechanics” that runs this machine can mean both its organic and inorganic parts, namely, people as well as structural components.Also read: ‘New India’ Will Soon Need Its Own Gulags Tagore has precisely described what lies behind the very idea of the modern state and what dictates its functions. The “machine-like” NRC, in this sense, includes both a machine of people and the process of identification involved in the exercise. The tactile component of this machine is the register sheet, where the fate of names is being decided. What could be so admirable about this “machine-like operation”? In the same essay, Tagore further makes the incisive point that when the expansive web of mechanics engulfs the nation, “the personal man is eliminated to a phantom”. Imagine the number of people whose names appear in the NRC having been reduced to numbers, and the lives of people whose names don’t appear, being currently reduced to a status of statelessness. In the middle of this politics of contestation regarding citizenship, people run the risk of ending up in detention camps, a fate no better than deportation. These are concrete spaces of segregation where Tagore’s “personal man” will be “eliminated to a phantom”. The language of human rights falls short of addressing this predicament. As Hannah Arendt argued in her essay ‘Perplexities in the Rights of Man’, it doesn’t matter if you are considered “human” or not if you are not a citizen. If your rights as a citizen evaporate, no law will protect the so-called human being, who will resemble another species. Tagore attacks the idea of the machine-like nation as antithetical to the possibilities of both ethics and aesthetics: “(T)his is the logic of the Nation. And it will never heed the voice of truth and goodness. It will go on in its ring-dance of moral corruption, linking steel unto steel, and machine unto machine; trampling under its tread all the sweet flowers of simple faith and the living ideals of man.” What Tagore draws our attention to is the cold and rigid working of the machine called the nation. He identifies the moral rift between the beingness of being (human) and the beingness of technology. The technology of the nation merely suits its technological (that is, its operational) unfolding. It has no concern for the vulnerable concerns of the people. This impersonality of the machine is precisely, in Tagore’s view, the central problem of the nation’s technology of being.Also read: From the Accord to NRC, Assam’s Tumultuous History Captured in New BookIs the NRC-machine impersonal? Unlike a civilian airplane, the NRC-machine is an organ of the state. Its motives are political. Imagine a machine that is cold, rigid and motivated. To have great conviction about such a machine (or, machine-like process) that will carry out an operation having a huge bearing on people’s lives, requires a high degree of blind faith. What is more disturbing is what (or who) does that faith seek to serve. Gohain’s assumption that the NRC does not target any particular community has been questioned by other commentators. What I find particularly striking is his unproblematic belief in a “machine-like” process as a technology of justice. In his famous work, Questions Concerning Technology, Martin Heidegger made this clear point: “Everywhere we remain unfree and chained to technology, whether we passionately affirm or deny it. But we are delivered over to it in the worst possible way when we regard it as something neutral” (emphasis added). Technology is not neutral of values. The technology of the state, in its abstract form (defining citizenship, for instance), or of governmental technology (inventing processes like the NRC to detect “outsiders”), cannot be neutral to the values that concern human life. The unethical use (and control) of technology has produced the environmental and other forms of crises the world is facing today. Any impersonal machine being put into the orbit of social life is a matter of concern. Gohain contends, as he must, that “there may have been errors and lapses”. The uncertainty of error is a bad enough admission. But what is crucial is the element of error itself. What is being passed over without sufficient alarm is: if a machine in charge of people’s destinies errs, it unjustly throws people’s fate into a terrifying realm. What is our bigger concern: a casual sense of dependability on an erring “machine-like operation”, or the millions of lives that this machine will erase from the register of history? Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee is the author of Looking for the Nation: Towards Another Idea of India, published by Speaking Tiger Books (August 2018).
