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Identifying Kin Biometric Belonging and Databased Governance in Colonial South Asia and Postcolonial Pakistan
by
Zehra Hashmi
A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy (Anthropology and History) in the University of Michigan
2021
Doctoral Committee: Associate Professor William Glover, Co-Chair Associate Professor Matthew Hull, Co-Chair Professor Alaina Lemon Professor Andrew Shryock Associate Professor Vazira Zamindar, Brown University
Zehra Hashmi
ORCID iD: 0000-0003-1452-3008
© Zehra Hashmi 2021
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I want to acknowledge, first and foremost, all those who welcomed, encouraged, tolerated and
befriended me at NADRA and in Pashtun neighborhoods across Islamabad. Thank you for teaching
me how to identify.
I am indebted to Matthew Hull for sharing his capacious way of thinking, intellectual care,
and curiosity that sharpened my thinking and made this entire process so intellectually fulfilling.
Also, thank you, Matt, for teaching me that all problems can be solved with a spreadsheet and for
convincing me to code. I feel very fortunate to have been advised by William Glover, who
challenged me to deepen my capacity for historical analysis and bring rigorous precision to both
research and writing. From the very beginning, from our Anthro-History seminars to her discerning
insights on chapter drafts, Alaina Lemon’s teaching and scholarship have continually made me
examine in a fresh light the questions at the heart of this dissertation. Andrew Shryock’s exceptional
questions and ethnographic sensibility on all matters concerning kinship and genealogy have never
failed to reinvigorate my excitement for this project. Vazira Zamindar’s scholarship had made this
project possible long before we had ever met. Her acute reading and feedback was invaluable at a
critical juncture of writing this dissertation.
The warmth and wit of Seçil Binboğa and Daniel Williford during the past seven years has
made everything feel possible. Thank you for our friendship.
It must have been ancestral prayers and kismet that brought me to Anthro-History, a rare
intellectual community that I hope will forever be protected from the evil eye. Also, how others are
able to get through a PhD without sage AH lounge knowledge will forever remain a mystery. Thank
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you for your wisdom, engagement and comradery: Richard Reinhardt, Haydar Darici, Nana
Quarshie, Bruno Renero-Hannan, Shana Melnysyn, Kevin Donavan, Robyn D’Avignon, Tasha
Rijke-Epstein, Kristen Connor, Reuben Riggs-Bookman, Amelia Burke, Colin Garon and Anisha
Padma.
In the Anthropology and History departments at Michigan, I feel fortunate to have been
able to think with Christine Chalifoux, Nishita Trisal, Saquib Usman, Sheng Long, Nick Caverly,
James Meador, Ozge Korkmaz, Amelia Frank-Vitale, Huatse Huazejia, Lamin Manneh and Omer
Sharir. The South-Asianist crew at Michigan was central to my intellectual growth. I express sincere
gratitude to the friendship and warmth of Faiza Moatasim, Meenu Deswal, Sangita Saha, Sikandar
Kumar, Vishal Khandewal, Brittany Puller, Tapsi Mathur, Hafsa Kanjwal, Leslie Hempson and
Sriram Mohan.
I would also like to acknowledge the teaching and encouragement of Ruth Behar, Mike
McGovern, Thomas Trautmann, Webb Keane, Perrin Selcer, Gabrielle Hecht, Deirdre de la Cruz,
Howie Brick and Henry Cowles. Thank you to Stuart Kirsch and Mrinalini Sinha who graciously
read multiple chapters of this dissertation and provided generous and productive comments. Farina
Mir’s commitment to scholarship on Pakistan, her mentorship and warmth are unmatched. Gillian
Feeley-Harnik not only taught me most of what I know about kinship, but in doing so also provided
an exemplary model of intellectual engagement and generosity.
While fieldwork can be lonely for some, I was lucky to be surrounded by the closest friends
and family. I was fortunate to be with Amna Mawaz, in what has been a lifetime of friendship and
intuitive understanding. Returning to Pakistan for fieldwork meant building a new home with Nida
Mushtaq, who is always being willing to laugh at the absurdity… while accepting that “bus ab aur kar
hi kya saktay hain?” I owe a special debt to Hasrat Turi for not only accompanying me to Tarnol but
also bringing his big heart, for being willing to go down any and all rabbit holes and for his
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unsolicited feedback on my driving. Those in Pakistan who kept and continue to keep me afloat:
Ahsan Kamal, Fahad Desmukh, Rubab Karrar, Ashraf Kakar, Saleha Rauf, Ammar Rashid, Sunny
Jamil, Sher Ali Khan and Sarah Eleazar. For all the “token” chai at QAU, I am grateful to Junaid
Babar, Abdur Rahman, Salma Marwat and Ayesha Marwat. Babi khala and Diki khala, thank you for
being models of persistence and strength, and for making sure everyone even remotely NADRA-
adjacent that you could find in Islamabad spoke to me for my research. I am grateful to Sonia
Ahmed, Safi Burki, Ishpal Bedi and Hyder Cheema for enlivening my time in the British Library
archives. Joy and pleasure were miraculously brought into the last year of writing during a pandemic
thanks to Benjamin Fogarty, Theo Di Castri, Alex Jinich-Diamant and Melina Davis.
This dissertation would not exist without my family. John Cheney-Lippold has engaged
every idea and argument in this dissertation with his characteristic brilliance and generosity, and
every moment of writing despair with characteristic kindness and support. I must thank Mariam
Hashmi, the embodiment of optimism, who in every crisis reminds that I have been here before.
Layla and Humza have buoyed and infected me with their joy, humor, and unbounded affection.
This path would have been impossible if not for Masood Hashmi who encouraged all the questions
even when they were difficult, impractical, and annoying. And Shaheen Hashmi, who made sure that
once they were asked, they were answered honestly.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgements ...................................................................................................................................... ii
List of Figures .............................................................................................................................................. vi
Abstract ....................................................................................................................................................... vii
Introduction .................................................................................................................................................. 1
Chapter 1 Kinning Biometrics and Biometric Kinmaking...................................................................... 39
Chapter 2 Coding Kinship ......................................................................................................................... 96
Chapter 3 Bird’s Milk ...............................................................................................................................144
Chapter 4 Internalizing Security ..............................................................................................................213
Chapter 5 The Individual in Colonial Registers .....................................................................................283
Conclusion ................................................................................................................................................356
Bibliography ..............................................................................................................................................378
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LIST OF FIGURES
Figure 1: NADRA's Insignia (source: www.nadra.gov.pk) 40
Figure 2: NADRA van “Catalyst for Change” outside the Registration Center in Blue Area, Islamabad (source: photo by author) 42
Figure 3: Family Registration Certificate (source: nadra.gov.pk) 47
Figure 4: Data Entry Stations (source: architecture firm for NADRA's Mega Registration Center in Islamabad, www.ejad.com) 52
Figure 5: List of Requirements for the ID card (source: www.nadra.gov.pk/identity-requirements) 60
Figure 6: Tarnol, encircled in red and starred (source: Google maps) 160
Figure 7: A woman carrying a fan from her home during the eviction of I-11 in Islamabad (source: photo by author) 163
Figure 8: Document dossiers compiled for unblocking procedures in Tarnol (source: photo by author) 193
Figure 9: Form M, an Application for Registering a Minor as a Citizen of Pakistan (source: NAP) 236
Figure 10: Form R-1: Certificate of Registration as a Citizen of Pakistan (source: NAP) 237
Figure 11: Letter from Haridas Lalji to the Ministry of Interior (source: NAP) 240
Figure 12: Form A for ID Card Registration (source: NLP) 272
Figure 13: Form B for ID Card Registration (source: NLP) 273
Figure 14: Woman with placard of her missing son’s ID card at the Pashtun Tahaffuz Movement protest in Swat (source: photo by author) 358
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ABSTRACT
This dissertation is an inquiry into practices of identification in their historical and contemporary
form. Pakistan’s National Database and Registration Authority (NADRA), which produces
Pakistan’s biometric-based identity card, is the subject of this historical ethnography. NADRA
integrates and verifies data from individuals as well as kin units to determine who is and is not a
Pakistani citizen. Identifying Kin develops and uses the concept of “datafied kinship” to describe how
NADRA deploys blood relations to construct a databased model of individuation. While this
technology is geared at producing a singular identifiable individual, this dissertation argues that such
an individual can only ever be constituted through its relations with others. This apparent paradox—
where one is constituted through many—animates this dissertation’s concern with how
identification as securitized state practice becomes a transformative force in social relations,
including and especially in the domain of kinship. Whereas most scholarship on biometric
technology analytically centers the individual body and its unique markings, Identifying Kin examines
how Pakistan’s state-run identification regime uses information about kinship to redefine who
counts as kin and, by extension, citizen. In so doing, it reveals how modern identification practices,
historically and at present, rely on relatedness to produce uniquely identifiable individuals.
Drawing on twenty-two months of ethnographic fieldwork and archival research, I trace the
rise of identification technologies from early paper-based information systems through databased
identification in Pakistan today. Tracking technologies across the colonial/postcolonial divide
through archival work in Pakistan’s National Archives and the India Office Records, this
dissertation follows the shifting landscapes of identity, identification, citizenship and governance in
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modern South Asia. It asks how and why certain forms of colonial governance persist while others
recede. To this end, this dissertation ethnographically tracks the interconnections between
governance and identification practices at the NADRA Registration Office, Headquarters, and
Projects Division, as well as in three Pashtun neighborhoods in Islamabad. It traces the historical
and current navigations of Pashtun migrants to show how national identification procedures
reproduce the frontier as a spatial and a political category in Islamabad. I analyze how this mode of
governance conditions the possibility of political and ethical claims upon a security state.
This dissertation contributes to the anthropology of bureaucracy and kinship, science and
technology studies, and the history of modern South Asia in three ways. It interrogates how
identification deploys relatedness to reconstitute kinship, ethnic dynamics and citizenship status in
ways neither intended nor imagined. By attending to internal shifts in frontier rule and postcolonial
history in Pakistan, it foregrounds the emergence of new governance techniques and reconsiders
legacies of taxonomic representation beyond the historical classificatory schemas so vital to imperial
rule, knowledge making and identity in colonial South Asia. Lastly, it ethnographically engages the
recursive process by which Pashtun migrants shape protocols of identification and surveillance
technology in Islamabad. Thus, this dissertation offers historical and anthropological insights into
the comparative implications of biometric identification, networked databases, and surveillance
technologies in everyday life.
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INTRODUCTION
Following the US-led “War on Terror,” Pakistan saw a proliferation of conventional securitization
procedures: military checkpoints, barbed wire fences and growing walls. But equally pervasive, while
less visible, was the emergence of digital infrastructures of security, such as Pakistan’s National
Database and Registration Authority (NADRA). NADRA began its operations in 2000 by launching
a biometric (fingerprints, facial and iris recognition) “computerized” national identity card (CNIC).
NADRA is a digital identity system, characterized as an “information system that typically support[s]
identity proofing, authentication and authorization,” that claims to be one of the largest centralized
identity databases in the world (Nyst et. al., 2016, 28-29, quoted in Weitzberg et al., 2021). Initially
motivated by the goal of reducing inaccuracies in citizens’ identifying data through a computerized
registration process, the project took on higher stakes after 9/11 as the process of uniquely
identifying individuals came to be directed towards ensuring securitization in Pakistan. NADRA’s
significance in daily life in Pakistan lies in its ubiquity: the card is used for banking, paying bills,
school admissions, acquiring a cell phone chip, property transactions and voting. At NADRA,
custom-made software integrates and verifies data from individuals as well as kin units, an act that
ultimately determines who is and is not a Pakistani citizen.
During my preliminary fieldwork in 2015 in Islamabad, I met the first chairman and architect
of NADRA, Brigadier (retired) Moin. Moin had served as the chairman of NADRA when it had
started in 2000 until 2008. In this early conversation, I expressed that I was interested in NADRA as
an object of anthropological inquiry and its place in, and implications for, social life. Brigadier Moin
responded (to my surprise) that NADRA would be ideally suited for an anthropological study. This
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was not only because of the kind of demographic data they collected, but also because NADRA
operated by tracing kinship networks. NADRA’s multi-biometric registration—iris, finger and
facial—was in fact not what held primacy in terms of establishing and verifying identity. In order to
know who someone was, you had to know who they were in relation to others—in particular, who
their kin were. Given the absence of existing international identification systems directly suited to
the Pakistani context, in Moin’s words, NADRA was a “socio-technical matrix” created in
accordance with Pakistan’s specific social and political landscape. From the outset, there was more
to NADRA’s identification regime than the technological hype over biometrics, whose primary
function was to link an individual’s unique bodily information with the same individual’s name.
Instead of the uniqueness of recorded biometrics alone, Moin emphasized the significance of
the unique identification number on an individual’s identity card as the centerpiece of the identity
database. He described that while each card has a unique ID number on the front end, there are at
least two other numbers that are on the backend: one of these is a “beta number” that links a person
with their spouse, and thus extends into a different family tree from the original family that one was
born into; the other is a “household” (gharana) number, which was specifically developed for the
extended joint family system so that members of a single household can be listed under that unique
number. Further, Moin drew my attention to how NADRA was built upon a legacy system of
earlier, district-based paper registries of identity cards records, through which NADRA officials
could trace descent-based relations. As individuals’ unique identity card numbers were always being
connected to one another, this would ultimately create what he referred to as a “global family”—a
databased network of Pakistani kin both across the entire country and those abroad.
Identifying Individuals
This dissertation is an attempt to understand how identification technologies are enacted by the
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Pakistani government in ways that reconstitute social and political relations in an increasingly
securitized Pakistan. In the chapters that follow, I examine how NADRA’s techno-bureaucratic
procedures not only communicate meaning about one’s identity but, through documentary and
database technology, functionally produces a very specific type of databased identity. This databased
identity—in the form of a unique ID number and its relationship to other individuals’ unique ID
numbers—is what enables each entity in the database to be repeatedly identifiable by NADRA. I
foreground the frequently overlooked process of identifying individuals, that is how an individual
comes to be identified uniquely as that individual. In turn, I follow how such a process of
identification is continually transformed by those individuals who are simultaneously both its
subjects and its objects.
The core argument of this dissertation is a simple one: while the process of individuation
attempts to generate the singular, identifiable entity of an individual (person or thing), such an
individual can only ever be constituted through its relations with others (Ricoeur 1990; Mol 2002).
This apparent paradox—where one is constituted through many—animates this dissertation’s
concern with how identification as securitized state practice becomes a transformative force in social
relations, including and especially in the domain of kinship. Approaching identification in this mode
allows us to rethink concepts like national identity and citizenship, conceiving both not as prefigured
legal categories but as actively produced, effectual ideas grounded in distinct technological and social
contexts. Thus, I trace, both ethnographically and historically, how a security platform becomes
increasingly generalized as a template for daily life, extending into social and political practices far
beyond what is normally recognized as security. “Security” in national and political discourse in
Pakistan often operates as a floating signifier, and in this dissertation I seek to show how the
meaning of security has changed through both time and political circumstances. In addition, rather
than holding a concrete meaning in itself, the idea of security in the arguments that follow emerges
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as the specific mode by which the relations between individuals—as well as with the state—are
concretized as a means to make individuals sharply-defined, and thus more effectively traceable.
Many readers are by this point probably thinking “Foucault.” Foucault as a historian of
modern disciplinary forms very astutely observed how power worked through the production of
knowledge about social categories (Foucault 2007; Foucault 2008). This perspective has been
generative for understanding schemas of racial classification, and most relevant for my study, the
census in colonial India (Cohn 1984, Dirks 2001). Foucault’s elegant rendering of power as a process
that was imbricated with forms of care, which involved putting people into social categories, has
provided a bounty of critical analyses of control that are still with us today.
At the same time, processes of classification are distinct from processes of individuation.
Consider the difference between the census and voter rolls. Both are collections, and at present
databases, of large sets of individual data. Census workers collect meaningful statistical information
by enumerating race, gender and so on. But the census does not record a person’s social security
number, which would identify a person who is “Asian” as a discrete person with the name “Zehra.”
Dan Bouk (2015) examines how actuarial sciences, and the life insurance industry in particular,
developed the statistical individual as one that emerges as an aggregate. Yet, this statistical
knowledge does not individuate in terms of uniquely identifying any of its data points, as evidenced
by the fact that the US Census does not require respondents to provide a unique identifiers like a
Social Security Number. In contrast, the voter roll consists of individuals. For the purpose of voting,
a person’s race or gender (among other markers of social difference) ideally does not matter. What
does matter on the day an individual shows up to vote is that that particular individual is registered to
vote. The work of individuation—in the context of a unique form of ID recorded at the time of
voter registration—is absolutely crucial for administering a system that requires a functional
definition of individual integrity, such as for voting. This analytical distinction between classification
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and individuation allows us to follow how each process serves its own governance function.
Yet, scholars thinking through technologies, such as digital identification systems and
databases in particular, have deployed a Foucauldian framework to make sense of how these
relatively new technologies produce subjects.1 It is important to clarify that while individuation
systems can classify, classification systems (built only for classification) cannot individuate. In other
words, the classificatory system that subjectifies you (such as recommender algorithms on Netflix
suggesting Bollywood movies) does so through its classification, not individuation, capacities. Why
does this difference matter? In short, systems of individuation that identify unique individuals, as
opposed to systems of classification, produce distinct political claims and set new kinds of social and
political relations into motion—as the goal of this dissertation is to illustrate. Large-scale relational
databases, of course, have the capacity to collect statistical data. However, networked databases’
inimitable affordance lies in their ability to relate entities in order to uniquely identify them. Their
computational capacity—especially the ability to run matches across space and at high speeds—
enables relational databases to link and trace individuals across governmental and non-governmental
functions that include voting, banking, property transactions, welfare payments and so on.
NADRA, which is fundamentally a system that performs individuation, operates differently
from the classification-based colonial census and governance regime more broadly that was so
central to the history of social and political identity in South Asia. NADRA’s computational mode of
1 Evelyn Ruppert analyzes database devices that connect data across government agencies (from e-Border to child welfare) in the UK through the “fine grained individualization” (2003, 45, quoted in Ruppert 2012, 127) effects of such a process. She argues that beyond being disciplining, such database devices work primarily through inclusion. The ontology of the subject they produce is a monad made up of “complex, unique, dynamic and varying metrics” Ruppert 2012, 127). In this schema, the individual is impacted precisely because they are held, statistically, in relation to a population. Importantly, while these databases have implications for individuals, the processes of constructing an individual in this context is fundamentally statistical: knowledge about statistically aggregated individuals inform government policies that then impact singular individuals. Relatedly, Mark Poster proposes that we think about databases as discourse: “what is most important about discourses for Foucault is that they constitute their objects” (Poster 1990, 88). Poster brings into relief the stakes of large-scale, networked databases today, where the “individual” within the relational database comes to be even if they have not recognized it yet; Poster is speaking to how individuals are tracked as well as classified and turned into subjects without them knowing it.
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governance, as it relates to collecting and apprehending both individuals and groups, has
unprecedented capacities which are especially consequential for the post-9/11 security state.
Importantly, as a central argument of this dissertation asserts, the computational capacity to
apprehend individuals is only made possible through the database’s ability to relate two distinct
entities—in the case of Pakistan’s identity database, two individuals who are related by blood.
Importantly, these kinned connections are neither statistical nor are they aggregated to produce
statistical information. By this I mean, no one registering for a NADRA identity card is compelled to
check any boxes where they self-identify as “X” race or “Y” ethnicity—data is not being accrued to
produce population level statistical knowledge. Instead, NADRA connects people together with the
assumption that they are already (biologically) related, and it does so at the most basic level through
identity registration—by requiring applicants to bring parents’ ID cards and even parents themselves
at the moment of biometric ID registration. It is by intensifying “kinned” identification that
NADRA’s governance mechanisms are able to percolate into the domain of social relations. As I
will demonstrate in this dissertation, the technological quality of databased relatedness and the
functional capacity to create individuated identity vastly expands the role of a system such as
NADRA in the everyday lives of people in Pakistan in ways that should be of interest to both
anthropologists and historians.
The practical difficulties in fixing identity, social or individual, has plagued governance
regimes in South Asia from the precolonial era into the postcolonial (Guha 2003; Dirks 2001; Cohn
1984). At the same time, the slipperiness of identification is not solely a predicament of governance.
The problem of unknown identities, and their ability to blur hierarchical positioning, has defined the
stranger encounter in public life in South Asia (Hoek and Gandhi 2016). Innumerable tropes about
mistaken identity, particularly around caste, religion and status, proliferate in South Asian popular
culture (Chatterjee 2002). More often than not, fraught encounters surrounding the revelation of
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identity are connected to questions of status and entitlement—to a sense of social personhood.
Those familiar with Pakistan, and South Asia more generally, will recognize the caricature of a self-
important person, likely the relative of a politician or other government official, who, when stopped
by the police for a traffic violation or in an altercation in a public setting (likely provoked by the
absence of preferential treatment) will turn around and demand “do you know who I am?” (pata hai
mein kaun hoon).2 Relatedly, a common refrain that questions such a culture of entitlement,
importantly also located in a public setting, is: “is this your father’s road?” (tumhare baap ki sarak
hai?).3 Questioning someone’s sense of entitlement to a public good (the street) is not the only thing
such a refrain reveals; it also gestures to the common-sense of accessing something through a kin
relation and also identifying oneself (as an individual) through that relation. In turn, it is this relation
that can signal social standing. In outlining, albeit briefly, the dynamic between identity and
identification within a cultural register, I hope to situate (especially for the non-South Asianist
reader) NADRA’s identification practices within a broader social landscape where identifying
oneself as well as others through connections is a common place yet high stakes and contentious
endeavor. Yet, this dissertation investigates the diverse set of identification practices that exist in the
techno-social milieu of Pakistan through one particular angle: NADRA’s identity database and its
techno-social protocols for transcoding kin relations. I call this specific transcoding process
“datafied kinship,” and in turn follow how it intersects with lived and historical experiences of
migration, governance and securitization.
Datafied Kinship
2 Consider this video made by actor Ali Rehman to highlight the problems of this “VIP culture” at Media InsightPk, 23 November 2019: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JpSwiyCI-_Q. 3 This refrain has made its way into public service messaging for safe driving and been reconfigured as feminist slogan “this road is as much my mother’s as it is my father’s” (yeh sarak utni hi meri maa ki hai jitni tumhare baap ki hai). Also see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNejVGtdKCM
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This dissertation asks the question, “why kinship?” in multiple ways, in multiple settings and to
multiple actors. Why and how are technologies of individuation, including biometrics and databases,
“kinned” to generate and reinforce the relatedness between persons? How does data become a kin-
making or kin rupturing substance? How do databased forms of identification reconstitute kinship?
How and why do kinship practices—specifically of Pashtun migrants impacted by the Pakistani
state’s securitization and surveillance regime—in turn transform NADRA’s identification protocols?
How does the use of kinship as the basis of its identification method allow the identity database to
enact spatial controls? What is the significance of kin and genealogical relations to the history of
identification in South Asia and how has this transformed across the colonial/postcolonial divide?
Transcoding kinship is far from a straightforward process. The ontological status of kinship
as data, on one hand, and its status as lived practice, on the other hand, are inter-connected (as
Chapter 1 describes) but still remain distinct. It is the difference between the two that animates their
relationship and thus also the process of datafying kinship. As I discovered during fieldwork, the
tensions embedded in the process of collecting information about relations frequently centers on the
fraught nature of kinship itself, whether in the form of familial ties or scaled to tribal affiliation.
“Kinship” also means ruptures in relations, silences, years of being apart—voluntarily or
involuntarily. Moreover, identifying oneself to the state (“I am Zehra”), as well as identifying one’s
biological relations (“X is my biological mother”), can be a fraught and complex process: it can
come to shape the familial dynamics meant to be presented as evidence in the first place. Thus, even
as the process of articulating kin relations within NADRA’s database is abstracted from the world of
lived practices of kinship, the two domains do intersect and their entanglement can be observed
through bureaucratic interactions between NADRA officials and ordinary citizens.
In addition, when colonial, and subsequently postcolonial, states use primarily biological
kinship and genealogical data as the backbone of identification, this process involves including some
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individuals at the cost of excluding others. The long-debated interconnection between what is
understood as kinship and biological relations—not to mention cultural understandings of human
reproduction—has frequently been connected to racializing theories (Fritzsche 2008; Weston 2001).
This line of argumentation foregrounds the practices of exclusion and subordination often part and
parcel of kinned affinities (Edwards and Strathern 2000), where such a project of identification and
exclusion—and I would include NADRA in this project (indeed, they would include themselves)—
can mean discriminating amongst citizens as national/alien, verifiable/suspect to authenticate
identity. As Gillian Feeley-Harnik shows (1999; 2013), contentions surrounding citizenship involve
defining the status of persons for which ancestry and descent are far from irrelevant concerns.
Reckoning kinship, particularly along descent-based lines, takes on renewed significance when
descent-based connections become increasingly embedded within contractual relations including
citizenship, nationality and relations with the state at large.4 The relatedness of family members thus
becomes important—and importantly fraught—in new ways as they engage new kinds of
bureaucratic processes, such as NADRA’s.
Additionally, NADRA’s identification procedures unsettle the assumption that modern state
societies have moved in a linear way from status to contract, highlighting the mutual formation of
familial and governmental structures.5 While the use of kinship and genealogical relations by
NADRA has characteristics and implications that are specific to historical and social conditions in
postcolonial Pakistan, I emphasize that kinship’s role in governance operations should not be read
as a curious residue of an inadequately modernized society. Scholars outlining new approaches to
4 Feminist scholars (Franklin and McKinnon 2011) in the field of kinship studies have worked to dismantle the assumptions of nineteenth-century theorists such as Tönnies (1887), Maine (1861) and Spencer (1876). 5 Grossberg’s (1985) important work on the relationship between family and the law in 19th century America shows that the role of kinship in governance is not a question of “backwardness” or inability to modernize “properly.” The mutual formation (and transformation) of the domains of kinship and governance is not exceptional but part of a larger context of governance.
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kinship studies have criticized the assumption that kinship organized “simpler,” more “traditional”
pre-state societies but not modern state societies (Cannell and McKinnon 2013). Kinship clearly
continues to inform significant aspects of political and economic life, including inheritance, business
and electoral practices (Yanagisako 2015). Accordingly, kinship as an organizing force does not
disappear in the functions of the modern state. Instead, it often gets embedded within those
functions (Lambek 2011).
In short, it should not appear peculiar or quaint that NADRA deploys kinship to identify
individuals. While I focus on why and how kinship and kinned affiliations (in the form of tribe and
ethnicity) have been so essential to the relationship between identification and identity in South Asia,
I simultaneously argue that the South Asian case should not be considered exceptional. Rather,
NADRA’s reliance on kinship and genealogical relations should reconfigure our understanding of
modern identification technology more broadly: individual identity is produced and tracked through
relatedness, not unique bodily characteristics or biometrics alone. Moreover, the use of kin relations
by NADRA’s identity database highlights an intrinsic feature of all relational databases and their
identification practices: entities come to be identified through the ability of a database to relate
distinct entities, a technological analogue of the relational quality of identification itself.
The Limits of Biometric Technology
An ethno-historical approach to NADRA has to wrestle with a set of scholarly concerns that
biometric technology produces for the study of identity. Whereas most scholarship on biometric
technology analytically centers the individual body and its unique markings, this dissertation
examines how Pakistan’s state-run identification regime uses information about kinship to redefine
who counts as kin and, by extension, citizen. In so doing, it reveals how modern identification
practices, historically and at present, rely on relatedness to produce uniquely identifiable individuals.
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At its simplest, biometric technology deploys the body as a source of evidence for
determining individual identity. In When Biometrics Fail (2011), Shoshana Magnet borrows the notion
of “corporeal fetishism” from Donna Haraway (1997, 142) to show how biometric technology
approaches the body as an independent and isolatable unit. Scholars of biometric technology
(Magnet 2011; Gates 2011) emphasize how biometrics are designed to access what is imagined to be
biological essence through unique traces of the individual body such as fingerprints or irises. In this
schema, biometric technology binds identity to the body (Gates 2011) such that bodily identity can
then be transmitted as data across information networks.
With the introduction of Aadhar in India, a biometric identification system that issues a
unique identity number to all residents, discussions in South Asia on the ethics and politics of
centralized identity systems dramatically expanded. This collection of scholarship too centers the
role of the body by accounting for the way habituated postures and aged or deviant bodies resist
biometric technology (Rao 2013) and by demonstrating how biometrics in particular work to “fix”
identity (Rao and Nair 2019). Lawrence Cohen (2019) has described the affordances of biometric
technology by emphasizing its capacity for de-duplicating identity—that is, to create a singular
identifier that can unequivocally establish that “you are you” (2019, 2). I build upon this literature by
ethnographically examining how bodies are abstracted into data, in particular at the NADRA
“Mega” Registration Center in Islamabad, while refuting notions that biometrics are able to
authenticate a unique truth of identity (Abraham 2018). While biometrics are certainly crucial for
linking name to body during various stages of identification, as I will demonstrate, for NADRA it is
equally important to connect these biometrically identified persons to one another. A central
contention of this dissertation is thus that biometric technology is far from the ultimate tool of
identification. At present, biometrics, for NADRA, are the first step in figuring out whether an
individual is related to another individual.
12
Linking biometrically identified individuals through their kin relations serves the function of
securitization for the Pakistani state. NADRA and its history reveal how individual identity is put to
use for the purposes of verifying citizen and individual identity only by placing the uniquely
identified within a larger network of connected others. While rigorous comparative research of
contemporary biometric systems (not the focus of this dissertation) would be able establish this
more substantially, in my reading of the literature on biometric ID programs across the world, it is
clear that biometrics serve securitization functions to varying degrees. The scholarship on the
politics of biometric technology in the United States cites 9/11, and the ubiquitous prevalence of
surveillance in its aftermath, as a turning point. Kelly Gates’ opens Our Biometric Future (2011) with
an image of the two hijackers, Mohammad Atta and Abdulaziz Alomari, on a surveillance camera
passing through airport security at the Portland International Jetport in Maine. Gates notes the fact
that while it is difficult to discern the faces of the two men, the image is almost always referenced
with the regret that had the cameras been equipped with facial recognition technology they could
have been prevented from boarding the plane. Biometric identification is inextricably connected to
tactics for the so-called prevention of terror and to ensuring security, particularly across borders
(Amoore 2006). In turn, the United States has pushed for collecting biometric information in both
Iraq and Afghanistan (Jacobsen 2020). Yet, biometrics are known to be notoriously inaccurate as a
technology. While concerns about the collection of biometric data, particularly in relation to privacy
and surveillance, are supremely valid, the limitation of biometrics raises questions about how
security states imagine the sociology of influence within the populations they govern and its
implications for political relations.
The extent to which NADRA has built kinship networks within the biometric identity
database, and how significant NADRA considers this important to the function of security, is what
makes it distinct from other identity systems. The guarantee of a family relation as the foundation of
13
verifiable identity—the ability to first establish who someone is and then track them—is connected
to two histories. The first is the particular history of South Asia and the historical role of
genealogical and kin relations in identification practices. The second is a broader history of
identification technology, which frequently leads us to fingerprinting, anthropometry and identity
documentation. Importantly, these two histories intersect in the figure of William Herschel, a
magistrate in colonial Bengal and the “inventor” of fingerprinting. As Chandak Sengoopta (2003)
describes, fingerprinting in India originated in the everyday context of administrative work—
importantly, in contrast to the use of anthropometric tools by Alphonse Bertillion directed at
identifying criminals in Europe (Cole 2002).6
While ethnology and anthropometry were in use in colonial India, the most detailed
knowledge of the physical and cultural characteristics of each caste could still not unambiguously
determine whether an individual member of a caste was pretending to be another member of the
same caste (Sengoopta 2003). In other words, for the everyday business of the empire, how would a
colonial official obtain an easily retrievable and accurate record of the identity of an
individual? Sengoopta describes how “assigning names to individuals was central to the colonial
drive for knowledge” (Sengoopta 2003, 47). However, colonial officials were bewildered and
frustrated by how often the same things were called by different names and different things by the
same names. This frustration was connected to the assumption that deceit and lying amongst the
Indian population was prevalent and, in fact, this informs discussions about the need to develop
identification regimes (Chatterjee 2002; Raman 2012). While Europeans had anxieties about habitual
criminals in urban centers, these concerns were distinct from the problem of identification as an
everyday and continual concern confronting colonial administrators—not least because of
6 See Anderson (2004) for a discussion of how criminal bodies were marked by tattoos, dress, hair cutting and anthropometrics in colonial South Asia.
14
internalized racism. Thus, fingerprinting emerged alongside the hope for an indisputable signature.
We know this because Herschel’s “discovery” of fingerprints took place through a conflict over
contracts; Herschel kept records of fingerprints (in fact, entire handprints) of merchants he entered
into contracts with as a means of holding them accountable and true to their word (Sengoopta
2003).
Yet, the impact of Herschel’s innovation in India remained minimal and could not
dramatically transform the way people were identified. The reason: there was no effective way of
classifying fingerprints to repetitively match them to people. For instance, you could have books in a
library but in the absence of a system to catalogue them there would be no way of finding the
particular book you were looking for. Additionally, given that biometric technology remains highly
inaccurate in its ability to consistently record and match fingerprints, we can safely assume it was
even more unstable during Herschel and Galton’s time. Ultimately, it was the development of
classification systems, and most significantly computation, that made biometrics meaningful and
useful.
In this way, while much of this literature describes the patchy nature of nascent biometric
identification, it does not address what was being used to identify individuals on a daily basis and
how this process of identification changed. It is this question that the dissertation seeks to answer
through its historical inquiry. In particular, I show how the practice of identifying individuals in
South Asia has relied upon, and continues to rely upon, the relations between persons—as opposed
to the ability to produce indisputably unique characteristics locatable in the individual body—
because kinship and genealogical structures, and their documentation, were already fundamental to
colonial rule. The documentary infrastructure surrounding kinship—even as simple as the custom of
writing “s/o” (son of)—was transferred and reformatted by the postcolonial state as it sought to
15
settle questions of citizenship, belonging and governance. In short, individuals in South Asia were
imbricated within the identification structure of the family.
The reason I follow this particular historical trajectory of identification and its implications
for securitization is because of its direct links to the identification regime at present. It is also for this
reason that I primarily focus on localized documentary regimes that sought to identify those within
South Asia, as opposed to those traversing imperial borders. While it can be productive to think
through all the paths that biometric technology or identification regimes could have taken, especially
as they bring to light the incredible contingency of the history of such technologies (Mukharji 2015),
we see some aspects of the history of identification that may have remained obfuscated otherwise in
looking at the past to understand why NADRA operates the way it does. Quite simply, this is the
somewhat obvious role of genealogical records and kinship relations in shaping the development of
identification practices. It is this persistence of kinship in identity documentation that the historical
material of this dissertation seeks to answer. In doing so, I attempt to hold together the ways that
this is a story particular to Pakistan and one that has connections and implications for identification
systems at large.
Situating Pakistan
While identifying individuals serves a range of governance functions for all states, identification
practices in Pakistan, as mentioned above, have increasingly been purposed towards securitization
measures. Pakistan has been caught at the heart of the US-led War on Terror for two decades, and
the lives of ordinary Pakistanis have been transformed through technologies of securitization that
extend into domains of everyday social and political life. In large part, the capacity of these
technologies to extend into social life is a function of how securitization techniques deploy
relatedness itself as a means to track not only terror networks but also establish the identity of
16
persons based on their connections to others. In the words of a NADRA official, as we’ll read about
more in Chapter Two, “someone who does not have any family in Pakistan… they are automatically
suspicious.”
This dissertation approaches securitization as an ethnographic and archival object of study,
all the while writing against a security studies paradigm that flattens the complexities of social and
political into security problems (Lieven 2011). Through a historical and ethnographic approach, this
project seeks to represent Pakistan outside the paradigm of a “failed state.” It attends, alternatively,
to how state-run infrastructures such as NADRA do function. Additionally, it accounts for the
experiences and actions of those, such as Pashtun migrants in particular, who are subject to the
securitization that conditions everyday life in Pakistan today. Indeed, NADRA’s national
identification regime has become a central preoccupation for Pashtun migrants in Islamabad who
experience the direct effects of both new and residual forms of militarization.7 This dissertation
examines the reasons and implications for the disproportionate effects of securitized identification
practices on Pashtun migrants, especially as the system does not record group identity (ethnicity or
caste) when seeking to establish individual identity.
As preoccupations with terror “networks” and insecurity become widespread, the concern
with security as it takes shape in Pakistan has global resonance. In turn, an investigation into the
Pakistani context de-centers Euro-American studies of surveillance (Lyon 2003)—overwhelmingly
focused on individual privacy—to show how surveillance itself has been shaped by collective
identities (Browne 2015). Sahana Ghosh has argued that in the growing scholarship on security
(Maguire et al, 2014; Goldstein 2010), the focus on Euro-American borders “tends to occlude older
iterations that linked the region with security through projects of imperial conquest” (Ghosh 2019,
7 Ammara Maqsood discusses the difficulty in determining not only who the Taliban are but also who the Taliban are in relation to “real” tribal Pashtuns (2019, 105).
17
421). Pakistan’s present is wrought through its relationship with US imperial power in ways that are
impossible to ignore when studying securitization in Pakistan (Ahmad and Mehmood 2017).
However, regional South Asian dynamics have also played a key role in the history of securitization
in the country.
Tracing the highly contingent history of identification technologies, this dissertation
examines the role of securitization in justifying and rationalizing the process of inclusion and
exclusion in Pakistan. Building on scholarship that focuses on the long-lasting implications of the
Indian Subcontinent’s Partition in 1947 (Zamindar 2007; Ibrahim 2019; Raheja 2018), I examine
how questions about citizenship, frequently articulated in terms of security preoccupations, became
embedded in documentary technology and justified the use of familial information in order to verify
identity and securitize citizenship in post-Partition Pakistan.
This earlier history, which was not unsurprisingly driven by conflict between the newly
formed states of India and Pakistan, took another turn in 1971. This dissertation shows how the
history of the national identity registration scheme launched in 1973 by Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto was
directly borne out of security concerns in the aftermath of Bangladesh’s creation. This event, and the
initiation of identity registration in particular, had two significant implications. First, with the
introduction of a nation-wide system of registration, identity documentation and securitization
efforts were no longer overwhelmingly directed at Muslim refugees and migrants crossing the border
from India. Rather, after 1971, the internal territory and residents of Pakistan themselves became the
locus of securitization measures. Thus, I argue that, along with Partition in 1947, the events of 1971
constitute a pivotal moment that restructured socio-political dynamics (particularly in relation to
ethnicity) and the realm of identification and documentary technology.8 Second, and vital to the
8 While I have attempted to demonstrate how 1971 was a catalyst for national identity registration, I plan to undertake more in-depth archival research into the broader implications of Bangladesh for questions of ethnicity and identity by
18
argument of the dissertation as a whole, the securitization measures and policies adopted after 1971,
with identity registration technology as the central case, serve as the predecessor and foundation of
the post-9/11 securitization logic. The shape that post-9/11 securitization took, specifically in the
form of NADRA, was arguably a function of this earlier period, most prominently evidenced in the
continual use of kinship as verification.
Importantly, as I explore in Chapter Four, my argument about how securitized anxieties
reanimate the question of belonging is situated within a broader set of scholarship that examines the
notion of “foreignness within” as it was produced in Pakistan (Khan 2012). The period after 1971
has been understood as one where the Pakistani state, in direct responses to the “losses” of 1971,
engages more closely than before with Islam (Weiss 1986).9 This can perhaps be seen most clearly in
Bhutto’s declaration of Pakistan’s Ahmadi minority as non-Muslims (Ahmed 2012), as well as the
heightened sectarian violence of the 1980s. The problem of belonging in Pakistan extends beyond
the failure of Pakistan’s nationalist project, stemming from its “insufficiently imagined” origins
(Dhulipala 2011; Oldenburg 1985). It also extends to the inability to deploy Urdu as a sufficiently
unifying force, exemplified in the opposition to Urdu in East Pakistan (Dadi 2012), the changing
portrayal of the Urdu-speaking muhajir who was initially so closely attached to the Pakistan project
(Verkaaik 2004) as well as the failure of universalist emancipatory projects such as the labor
movement (Ali 2015; Toor 2011).
This dissertation examines the government’s structural response to the persistent anxieties
about foreignness through something as fundamental as registering and identifying all citizens. Even
examining broader discursive shifts through a closer analysis of newspaper reports, literature and oral histories given the paucity of official records in this regard. 9 Importantly, as Khan (2012) points out, this does overshadow the continual and longstanding engagement with the project of Islamic modernity since the inception of Pakistan. Muhammad Qasim Zaman (2018), relatedly, argues that this overt identification with Islam was coupled with a disengagement with a kind of Islamic literacy that characterized public education as well as culture during earlier periods in South Asia.
19
as many of the problematic questions of belonging that inform Pakistan today can be traced to 1947
(Jalal 1985), or even to the colonial period as studies of Muslim identity under colonial rule
exemplify (Gilmartin 1988), the question of citizenship and the “other within” takes on a different
tone in the post-1971 where, to put it bluntly, the Pakistani state redirects its emphasis (particularly
around security threats) to turn on those it had already established as its own citizens—or more
accurately, residents within its territory. In this context, national (internal) identity registration
techniques are used to disambiguate the ever-present, potential outsider. In the wake of a re-
territorialization where no new borders had to be drawn—given that West and East Pakistan were
already geographically separated—even the fiction of a clearly demarcated separation was
unavailable.
In Etienne Balibar’s formulation (1994), separating populations requires the production of
an “internal border,”10 as perpetual uncertainty about what constitutes the inside of a polity—in this
case, the attempt at reconstructing Pakistani identity in 1971—is always thwarted by the potential of
adulteration by that which is outside. We see this continually at work, most explicitly in Chapter
Two, where I describe how the database’s category of the “family intruder” is mobilized (in the
conspicuous absence of recording ethnic identity) to identify Afghans along with those individuals
who have Afghan family members. It is the undesirable element, the potential internal enemy that
produces a sense of discomfort, that leads the postcolonial state to create an internal frontier—this
time not as imperial borderland but as central to its practices of statecraft (Stoler 2020).
In this vein, in Chapter Three, I examine how NADRA’s database affordances produce
frontier spaces in the capital city itself by subjecting Pashtun migrants to the indeterminacy that
characterizes frontier modes of governance. Instead of reading this mode of governance through
Agamben’s notion of exception, I follow recent scholarshop on the frontier (Medhi 2020), which
10 Or “internal frontier” in Ann Stoler’s translation (2018).
20
intricately traces the interconnections between the centrality of the frontier to colonial capitalist
expansion and the incomplete nature of settlement on the frontier that produced the very
ambiguities so characteristic of frontier governance. I draw upon this work to follow the
connections between the ambiguities of colonial governance at the North-West Frontier and the
indeterminacy experienced by Pashtun migrants as they are rendered “frontier residents” by
NADRA’s identification regime when it places them under citizenship reverification by “blocking”
their identity cards. During this period, which can last between six months to five years (and
ongoing), these “blocked” persons are neither citizens nor aliens, and instead they occupy a murky
space between insider and outsider.
Furthermore, I argue that this co-constitutive interplay between the internal and the external,
especially as it manifests in securitized anxieties about identification and identity, suggests that
NADRA’s story is also a story about regional interconnections and dynamics. The region is a good
category to think with for a multitude of reasons (Sinha 2013). Most concretely, for the case at hand,
identity documentation itself in South Asia was borne out of territorial divisions in the region that
produced massive displacements. This led both India and Pakistan to gradually produce citizenship
and documentary regimes to identity and establish who would belong where (Zamindar 2007). This
process continued through the 1971 war, which not only led to a planned migration this time (of
Bengalis in Pakistan) but also rendered Biharis (or Urdu speaking minority) within Bangladesh as
stateless citizens (Mookherjee 2019). Other than contentions between and over specific groups, we
can also observe that ethnic conflict and the production of minorities proliferates across South Asia
regardless of secular state models or not (Thiranagama 2011; Pandey 1999). In pointing to these
comparative cases, I caution against portrayals of Pakistan as exceptionally chaotic and crisis-ridden
within the broader South Asian context. This is not to give Pakistan a pass (on the contrary!), but it
is to situate it within shared historical dynamics where many of the crises are co-produced, even as
21
they have distinct effects throughout postcolonial history and the present. Yet, where do narratives
about Pakistan fit within South Asia, both as spatial category and concept (Dirks 2004; Ludden
2003)? Is it exceptional or is it representative? While a comparative, regional study would be the only
way to fully answer these questions, the discussion above demonstrates that many of the tensions
that emerge within Pakistan—particularly in terms of minorities, Muslim identity, ethnicity, language,
nationalism and citizenship—are interconnected and inseparable from regional dynamics. In other
words, not only are similar kinds of tensions (particularly around identity) unfolding in other South
Asian countries, to varying degrees, but these tensions are also interlinked.
Historical Approaches/ID Histories
While NADRA’s scale, technological capacity and its implications are certainly unprecedented, I
argue that the history of identification and securitization is rooted in earlier postcolonial and colonial
governance practices. In examining the history of an identity database, I have remained attuned to
the continuities and transformations that have developed into Pakistan’s identification regime in its
current form. My central historical argument centers on illustrating how, even as automated
biometric identification takes on new significance and concerns in the post-9/11 period in Pakistan,
it was preceded by and draws upon earlier securitization logics. In particular, as I show in Chapter
Four, it draws directly on an identity registration scheme, which was motivated by securitized
anxieties about Pakistani citizens in the aftermath of territorial reconfiguration and Bangladesh’s
creation in 1971. I arrived at this conclusion through an examination of the first identity registration
scheme, launched by Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto’s government in 1972. For this component of my research,
I conducted oral history interviews with officials who worked at the earlier Directorate General of
Registration, archival research at the National Documentation Center in Islamabad and the National
Archives of Pakistan where the Ministry of Interior records are located. I analyzed correspondences
22
between government departments, policy reports and discussions of legislative changes, in addition
to National Assembly debates, the Pakistan Gazette and relevant court records.
The questions guiding my analysis of archival material in relation to the first identity
registration scheme of the 1970s centered on the following: why did Pakistan’s first democratically
elected government, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto’s regime, decide to launch a national identity registration
scheme at this particular historical juncture? What were the paper-based registration system’s salient
protocols and procedures? What did the government officials developing this system see themselves
building upon? While I am able to answer most of these questions, I hoped to closely read
correspondences on individual cases of identity registration which would provide me first-hand
accounts of how specific problems around identification and registration were dealt with. However,
I was unable to locate this record with the Directorate General of Registration, which claimed that
the Ministry of Interior (Secretariat) should have it, who claimed that it had been transferred to the
Shaheed-i-Millat building. The staff at Shaheed-i-Millat did their best at trying to find this record but
ultimately established that it had likely been burnt in a 2002 fire in the building. As a result, I focus
on the summary reports and the correspondence that was enclosed within these reports to the
Cabinet Division. I also closely analyze how the registration forms were designed and re-designed
for the purpose of recording family relations to verify identity.
Examining these materials from the 1970s, I had further questions about the documentary
landscape and practices (particularly in relation to identity documents) that they were building on—
especially as officials continually claimed (in these records) that identity registration had to be started
from scratch. This led me to earlier material from the 1950s and early 1960s in the Interior
Ministry’s “Citizenship Section.” Using these materials, I examine the landscape of documentary
infrastructure that set the precedent for identification practices during the very early years in the
aftermath of Partition 1947. I decided to do a close reading of cases where individuals (both Muslim
23
refugees from India and Hindus domiciled in Pakistan) were applying for identity documents in the
context of attempting to access citizenship in the early years of Pakistan’s creation. My decision to
look at specific cases—in an attempt to analyze how documentary practices were being formed in
the postcolonial period—was informed by the existing historical literature on Partition in 1947 and
the early post-Partition period. This literature (Ibrahim 2019; Mookherjee 2019) establishes the
centrality of policing and ultimately closing the border, as well as controlling the flow of migrants
through documentary technologies (Zamindar 2007; Chatterji 2007).
Moreover, in comparing these two sets of archival materials from the 1950s and the 1970s, I
was struck by both the continual concern with security from the outset, the use of kinship to
establish both individual and citizen identity and the shift from security concerns about migrants
crossing the border with India (in the early 50s period) to anxieties about the “threat” being internal
to Pakistani citizens themselves in the aftermath of Bangladesh’s creation. This shift is reflected in
the development of new documentary technology—the identity registration scheme—the direct
predecessor of NADRA.
The comparison between earlier and later periods reflects dynamic changes within the
postcolonial period—as opposed to between the colonial and postcolonial period alone. In many
ways, given my attention to technological processes, there were a number of colonial infrastructural
elements that NADRA, and the postcolonial identification regimes before it, were compelled to
draw upon—for instance, documentary technologies as basic as stamp paper. Yet, the colonial
regime in India never created a registry of individual identity in colonial India, and the pervasiveness
of enumerative and classificatory practices that defined colonial governance was not directed at the
identification of particular individuals (Gopinath 2012; Breckenridge 2014). To underline: on one
hand, classificatory schemas were central to colonial rule. Critical debates in South Asian
historiography (Dirks 2001; Cohn 1996; Guha 2003) have detailed how identity categories like caste
24
were built through the census and delineated their implications for governance and ideas about
social difference in Indian society. On the other hand, even as this historiography delves into the
creation of identity categories, these authors do not detail the actual process of identification itself. It
is this distinction that provoked my investigation into colonial systems of “identification” and the
skepticism about their motivations and capacities for identifying individuals.
In the vast colonial archive in the India Office Records, I examined diverse set of records,
including police archives that focused on criminal identification (Sengoopta 2003), certificates of
identity issued for travel or as character attestations as well as passports and ration cards (Singha
2013; Sriraman 2018), which were all issued in circumstances relating to the identification of
criminals or constraining mobility. While this is certainly one background in the history of
identification, it presents a distinct governmental logic from the system of registration that I was
interested in investigating. Quite simply, a few key questions remained: why was the traceable
individual not a concern, at scale (beyond the criminal), for colonial governance? Was it because of
technical difficulties or something more fundamental to governance concerns? In turn, what served
as a proxy for identification in daily governance procedures? In search of answers to these questions,
I turned to records around vital statistics (and the decisions not to collect these) and the records of
kinship and genealogy, particularly in colonial Punjab, that served to authenticate identity in relation
to property regimes of ownership as well as tenancy.
My focus on kinship and genealogical records was motivated by what could be read as a
presentist question: the fact that NADRA continues to center descent-based (lineal) kinship as the
basis for authenticating identity. Further, as I examined colonial records on frontier tribes,
particularly in relation to collective responsibility and spatial practices that made use of “the tribe” as
a political form, I saw a comparison with the use of kinship and genealogy in colonial Punjab,
particularly for the governance of property relations. I see this discrepancy in governance procedures
25
and documentary production as one that is salient for thinking through the colonial logics that
refract into the present. In short, it was in the deployment of kinship in the domain of governance
that I found to be the most salient continuity between the colonial and postcolonial period—as
opposed to census and registration, for the latter were directed at groups and were unable to
effectively produce robust technologies for tracking the individual at the level of everyday
transactions and interactions.
While historians have accepted and indeed even embraced that their questions of the past are
motivated by current political, social and cultural circumstances, anthro-historical inquiry generates a
mode of questioning the past that can perhaps be unsettling to the conventional historian’s practice.
My inquiry into the colonial period serves as a good example: there are many ways to go about a
history of identification technology. We have excellent, rigorous and compelling examples in the
work of scholars such as Chandak Sengoopta (2003), Radhika Singha (2013) and Taringini Sriraman
(2018), among others. This body of work can only partially answer how and why historical factors
led to NADRA in its current form, especially with its current political implications. This literature
did not for me, most importantly, account for the central function of kinship and genealogical
records. Further, how did the divergent ways in which genealogical documents were collected across
regions produce residues of frontier governance in the present that I was observing during my
ethnographic fieldwork? Was this a change or innovation that NADRA initiated, or did it have
historical roots? In case of the latter, what were these historical predecessors and how did they come
to be mobilized? Moreover, the task I set out with was to trace an identification technology before it
became a discrete object (such as an identity card), and thus much of what I investigate historically is
in the realm of technological practices as opposed to distinct objects, although these objects begin to
congeal in the form of identity documents in the postcolonial period. An advantage of doing an
anthro-history of technological phenomena, as opposed to bounded or unbounded places or
26
peoples (Ho 2006), is that it can shed light on those aspects of the past that would otherwise be
obfuscated—for instance, the fact that the colonial state deliberately did not engage in certain
practices of control such as individuation on a mass scale.
Further, an engagement with the ethnographic present can facilitate critical readings of
historiography. Accounts of Pakistan’s origins as well as narratives about colonial rule can appear
disengaged from the historical questions that animates social and political relations in Pakistan today.
For instance, scholars have noted the silence around 1971 in Pakistan studies (Mookherjee 2019;
Zakaria 2019) and have also pointed to how the events of 1971 were addressed through a return to
1947 and the colonial period as the formative period for Muslim identity (Khan 2012). While these
histories have generated important and compelling insights into the “meaning” of Pakistan and its
contradictions, there is a paucity of scholarship that provides a way for understanding the events of
1971 impacted socio-political dynamics in Pakistan and the structure of the state, particularly as it
further entrenched an ongoing process of minoritization. This is but one example of the ways that
political questions at present (around land, environment, gender, the list goes on) can benefit from
postcolonial and colonial histories that rigorously engage with how such questions are articulated at
present.
This critique has also informed my decision to follow a reverse chronology in the
dissertation. I start with the present, at the NADRA Mega Registration Center in Islamabad and
then move backwards to the postcolonial past and, ultimately, reach the colonial period. The
rationale for this structure, which in fact also goes against the convention of anthropological works,
is twofold. First, the questions I ask of the past will make much more sense if the workings of
NADRA are clear. Second, the present is not self-evident and to assume so would be an insult to the
whole enterprise of ethnographic inquiry. Hence, if one’s questions to the past are motivated by the
27
present, for instance in the mode of histories of the present, then I believe in approaching what the
present is and its socio-political dynamics with the rigor they deserve.
My long-term ethnographic research investigated the ramifications of NADRA’s
identification processes through multi-sited fieldwork in Islamabad—Pakistan’s fortified, planned
capital city and major site of internal Pashtun migration. In order to understand NADRA and its
place in ordinary life, I carried out an ethnographic inquiry into the daily production, use and
contestation of identification at NADRA institutional sites. My primary site at NADRA was the
Mega Registration Center in Blue Area, Islamabad where I observed the identity registration process,
spent time with data entry operators, assistant managers as well as the applicants who came in to
register for identity cards. In addition, I spent time with and carried out structured and semi-
structured interviews with NADRA officials in the Technology & Development department, the
Projects Division and the Operations Department. Simultaneously, I conducted fieldwork in three
predominantly Pashtun neighborhoods in Islamabad to understand how identification, inhabitation
and ethical-political life are co-constituted. I returned to the Mega Registration Center with the
people in these neighborhoods when they had reason to go and so had the opportunity to observe
the identification process and bureaucratic interactions from both perspectives. In addition, I
conducted oral history interviews to produce a holistic view of migrant Pashtun life-worlds and their
broader experiences of ethnic identity, transition to urban life and the lived experiences of
securitization. Methodologically, by tracking governance and identification processes inside and
outside NADRA offices, an ethnography of a database offers insights into the practices of security
and biometric identification, as well as how they shape the contours of everyday life in the context
of migration, displacement and securitization. To illustrate what such a methodology looks like, I
will turn to an example.
28
Ethnography of a Database
Hamida Bibi is a woman who lives in Alipur Farash, a neighborhood in Islamabad where residents
of an informal settlement (katchi abadi) were resettled more than twenty years ago. She received a
notice from NADRA stating that she was under “citizenship re-verification.” In describing the
events that had provoked this, she said “my eldest son had a motorcycle repair shop, which he ran
with a Kabuli (Afghan refugee) called Nabeel. They were renewing the lease on their shop, and in
that context, Nabeel asked my son for his identity card as well as our (the parent’s) cards too. We
gave them. What did we know? Later, Nabeel and his family took the (repatriation) packages they
were giving at the time to Afghan refugees (muhajirs) to go back to Afghanistan. It was just after a
few months after this that I received this notice from NADRA.”11 Hamida Bibi was sure that Nabeel
had used Hamida’s and her husband’s identity cards—claiming they were his parents—to get his
own identity card.
Over subsequent conversations, I learned that there was a relation (rishtidari), albeit
circuitous, between Nabeel and Hamida Bibi’s family. Bear with me: Nabeel was Hamida’s daughter-
in-law’s sister’s husband’s sister’s husband. It was for this reason, Hamida explained, that they
trusted him with their identity cards. “Now we have learnt our lesson, and we would never give any
document even to our closest relative.” This sentiment, of withholding (blocking access to)
documents, in the context of blocked identities, was one that was echoed during my fieldwork by
many others in a similar situation. Hamida’s daughter-in-law, Gulmina, present at this time,
explained “this situation has caused such problems in my own family. I can’t go to my sister’s house
anymore because Nabeel’s side of the family might be there!” In addition, Gulmina explained that
11 It is possible, and a few NADRA officials mentioned this to me, that NADRA worked with the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) and the Afghan government to make a database of refugees who had taken the repatriation packages. This would confirm that they were refugees, as operating through the databases’ network capacities, and specifically the ability two cross-check identities across two databases, they were able to identify those who were duplicated in both.
29
her daughter had a heart condition and so had to regularly go for appointments to the Military
Hospital in Rawalpindi. “It is an army hospital, so they always ask for an identity card. Every time
we go, I have to ask my brother—whose identity card isn’t blocked—to go with us. If an emergency
happens, I have to be dependent on my brothers? Is this why they married me into this family?!”
Not only did blocked identities proliferate across extended relations, but they also produced a
complex series of resentments, dependences and pressures amongst relations: Hamida’s distrust of
sharing her documents with her relations, Gulmina’s restricted access to her own sister’s home, as
well as an increased inter-dependency with some kin (Gulmina’s brothers) over others.
Since Pakistan’s identification regime heavily relies on kin relations to determine citizen
identity, kinned connections become a dangerous, even contagious, source of “blockage” in the
identity database. As Chapter Three describes, those who have been “blocked” by NADRA are
placed under “citizenship re-verification” and must re-authenticate their identity as Pakistani
nationals. Perhaps counter-intuitively, such national exclusion brought on by blockage does not
equate to an expulsion from the national identity database. Frequently, the record of the “blocked”
person remains within the database, precisely so they cannot register in the identity database again at
a later stage. Additionally, while the blocked card holder may continue to physically possess the
identity card, NADRA’s capacity for “digital impounding”—blocking the identity in the database
but not physically confiscating it—limits how the card can be used for a range of activities, from
buying a cell-phone chip to voting or property transactions. In fact, as NADRA’s identity card has
become ubiquitous in daily life, it is only when people try to use the card that they find out that it
has been blocked.
My ethnographic research design approached NADRA as both a techno-bureaucracy and an
information infrastructure. The quality of invisibility has long been understood as central to studies
of infrastructure (Star 1999; Anand, Gupta and Appel 2018). Breakdown or interruption makes
30
infrastructure visible. Like how breakdown or interruptions reveal socio-political dynamics, I
centered the role of “blockage” for following the implications of an identity database in social,
political and spatial relations. The decision to follow blockages, beyond NADRA’s institutional sites
(where I was not given access to citizenship verification proceedings colloquially called “board”)
emerged from the experience of fieldwork, as I realized, early on that it was Pashtun migrants who
were most impacted by blocked cards. I propose that following blockages generated from a
databased system as they ripple outwards into social life offers one way of doing an ethnography of
databases.
The blocking of national identity cards in Pakistan functions as a kind of sifting, where
verification processes work like a sieve to differentiate between desirable and undesirable entities
(Kockleman 2017). We can thus follow how the design of the database builds into it the qualities it
seeks to sift. NADRA is not only concerned with cyber-security and an “enemy” (Shannon 1949,
quoted in Kockelman 2010) intercepting its highly securitized system. The day-to-day functioning of
NADRA also reflects a preoccupation with “matter out of place” in the anthropological sense
(Douglas 1966). Misfits in the database manifest as isolated identities who lack relatedness with
others in the database or are perhaps related to the “wrong” people, such as Afghan refugees.
NADRA, as an information infrastructure, communicates the identity of persons to other
organizations, institutions and businesses in Pakistan—as they go about their business, banking,
voting, enrolling their children in school or even getting on a bus. Thus, an obstruction in this
channel—when an ID card does not work for someone—is just as important as when it does (Serres
[1980]2007). The structure of the database as the structure of kin relations is what allows blockages
and flows to do their work: even when NADRA blocks “genuine Pakistanis,” in the words of the
former Interior Minister, such a blockage ultimately produces a verifiable citizen as one who is
31
connected to someone else. An authenticated individual can only ever be a composite of their
authenticated kin relations; they never stand alone in the database, or at least not for too long.
Yet, to do an ethnography of a database, I had to continually think beyond the technical and
institutional infrastructures that produced the database system in all its complexity and multiplicity.
The database extends into domains that may not, at first glance, appear “databased,” so to speak.
Studies of socio-technical systems have long emphasized the central role of cultural norms, social
structures and political motivations in technological and scientific thought and practice (Bijker,
Hughes and Pinch 1987; Jasanoff 2004; Hecht 2011). I build on this scholarship to ask: how do we
study a socio-technical system that is not only built upon assumptions about social life—particularly
deeply cultural notions about how kinship can authenticate citizen identity within a database—but
also builds itself into emergent social, political and spatial relations precisely through its
infrastructural, and more specifically computational capacities?
The role of relations in producing blockage is mirrored in attempts at generating flow again,
that is, in order to “unblock” identities. In her discussion of phatic labor, Julia Elyachar (2010)
describes how the everyday communicative channels serve an infrastructural function for political
economy—just as train tracks, bridges or telephone lines might. An ethnographer of databases can
follow this insight to track how social practices, along with technological protocols, produce
infrastructural outcomes in their own right.
This can be seen in how Hamida Bibi eventually got her identity card unblocked.12 In
addition to deploying her sons for various trips to the NADRA offices, as well as using her sister-in-
law as mediator to convince her husband that this was necessary (since he told Hamida to give up on
it), she also got her brothers and a neighbors who worked at NADRA involved. “My brothers’ cards
12 Chapter Three deals with reverification processes, and what is required, in detail. Here, I focus not on what happens at NADRA’s end and instead how Hamida deals with it.
32
were never blocked. I am so fortunate, they have said to me multiple times, let us know what you
need, and we will even go with you. Only one of my brothers, who is paranoid and weak (kamzor)
said he was too afraid that my blocked card would get his blocked too.”13 In contrast, Hamida had
many grievances (gila) about her neighbor, Shazia, who worked at NADRA. When Hamida went to
the NADRA office and saw Shazia there, she complained, “Shazia’s eyes were ‘up here’ on her
forehead. She wouldn’t meet my gaze and pretended as if we hadn’t known each other for years!”
Hamida told me that going through the unblocking process, she recognized who was truly
supportive and loyal and who would abandon you the second you need anything from them.
While joyous celebrations are not commonly associated with bureaucratic interactions, when
Hamida Bibi’s card was finally unblocked in 2019 (after close to five years), she threw a party. When
she called me she said, “I am inviting everyone who has helped and supported me through this
whole process.” This was pointed at the fact that there were some people who had not been very
helpful, and that “they would not be getting any biryani” at the celebration.
While NADRA deploys kin relatedness as the basis of identification, it reflects the capacity
of databases in general to relate entities in general; this particular identity database is good to think
about the many relational databases increasingly part of our everyday lives. Moreover, by
foregrounding blockage—generated from an intersection and interaction between social and
technological practices—the database ethnographer must attend to the strategies, negotiations and
relational channels of communication, exemplified here by Hamida as well as Gulmina, in their
attempts to deal with the movement of identifying information. In designing an ethnography of a
database, I was compelled to think beyond database design and structure—in part because some
aspects of technological design would always remain inaccessible to me, as they do for many
13 Ultimately, as Chapter Three of my dissertation discusses in detail, it was Hamida’s brothers’ documents and guarantee that allowed her identity to be unblocked.
33
researchers (Seaver 2017). By spending time with Hamida Bibi and many others in her situation, the
parameters of my ethnography expanded as I was compelled to consider how experiences and
connections between kin, or social relations more generally, become central to blockages and flows
in an identity database.
Chapter Outlines
Chapter 1
Kinning Biometrics and Biometric Kinmaking at the Identity Registration Center
The dissertation’s first chapter closely examines various social and technical dimensions of the
registration process at the NADRA Mega Center in Islamabad, focusing on the interactions between
applicants who come to register for the identity card and NADRA employees. I extend the scope of
analysis beyond biometric technology to the broader socio-political phenomena of identification to
examine how the salient unit of identification is neither the individual nor the group, and instead the
relation. I demonstrate that biometric technologies—along with the software, screens, and databases
they rely on and produce—are necessarily “kinned”—that is, entangled in kinship practices to
perform the function of identification.
Drawing on a detailed analysis of encounters at this field site, I argue that NADRA’s
“kinning” logic is not marginal to identification practices as a whole but central for apprehending the
role of relations and linkages in shaping large-scale and networked databases. In particular, this
chapter delves into NADRA’s attestation procedures, specifically the option of using a next of kin’s
thumbprint as the source of attestation itself, to illustrate how being rooted within one’s kin serves
as a source of authentication, both biometrically and otherwise. In this chapter, I introduce the
concept of “datafied kinship” to describe the co-constitution of data and relations through the
interface of the database, as it is accessed and navigated by families and NADRA employees at the
registration center. Drawing on in-depth interviews with both citizen-applicants, data entry
34
operators and assistant directors at the registration centers, this chapter reveals that in relying upon
relatedness, NADRA officials are themselves compelled to move across registers (moral, legal,
religious) and thus identification practices are continually contested and transformed. In other
words, I demonstrate how securitized identification practices do not impact the lives of citizens in a
unidirectional fashion, but NADRA too is shaped by the encounters of those who pass through it.
Chapter 2
Coding Kinship: Structure and Relations in the Identity Database
This chapter explores how NADRA’s database technology evolved in ways that allowed for kinship
relationships to be mapped, recorded and eventually become the base for identification. This chapter
answers the question of how the techno-bureaucracy of NADRA transforms complex kinship
relations into data that can be stored in its databases. I ask, what is involved in the process of
“datafication” and what are its implications? In this vein, I trace the technical shifts in NADRA’s
two decades-long year history as they were understood and described by NADRA officials.
Accordingly, I turn to detail database design, following both technical and institutional
dimensions, to demonstrate how kinship networks, mapped across the database, serve as a means to
understand the structure of an identity database. By examining how NADRA produces individual
identity within and through the database, such as by categories like “family intruders,” I hope to
move away from the notion that the database is a warped “representation” of an actually existing
reality and towards an approach that illustrates the co-constituted nature of data and persons—
furthermore, I argue that datafied identification does not necessarily condense identity from it
multiple forms and meanings into a singular entity. Rather, the case of Pakistan, where a state-run
digital identification project has been extraordinarily successful in registering 96% of the country’s
population, has the potential to suggest that the creation of databases recording individual identity do
not necessarily entail that social relations, within which individual identities are imbricated, are
35
flattened or erased. Instead, it is precisely the complexity of relatedness that can enable the
identification of an individual.
Chapter 3
Bird’s Milk: “Blocked” From Tribal to Urban Pakistan
The neighborhood of Tarnol, an environment with mixed rural and urban characteristics, borders
the Grand Trunk Road on the western periphery between Rawalpindi and Islamabad. This
settlement is majority Pashtun, comprised of Afghan refugees as well as migrants from the tribal
areas of Bajaur, Waziristan and Mohmand. This chapter, drawing upon survey data, participant
observation, in-depth interviews and oral histories, investigates the complaint of unjustly “blocked”
cards widespread amongst households in this neighborhood, delving into prevalent local hypotheses
of how blocking happened and how unblocking might be achieved.
This chapter further discusses the implications of the identity card for urban spatial
imaginaries and practices of Pashtun residents, specifically in the context of internal displacement in
the wake of military operations in the frontier tribal areas. In this vein, I describe how
marginalization and bureaucratic violence is expressed, understood and navigated by Tarnol’s
inhabitants. Centrally, this chapter follows the databased capacities of NADRA’s identification to
illuminate the ways that the frontier and frontier modes of governance emerge and operate within
Islamabad, reshaping the lives of Pashtun migrants within new urban forms in the planned capital
city.
Chapter 4
Internalizing Security: Postcolonial Identification and Documentary Technology
Drawing on archival material and oral histories, this chapter examines NADRA’s recent history by
examining Pakistan’s paper-based identity card produced by the Directorate General of Registration
(DGR), which was set up in the wake of the creation of Bangladesh. This chapter examines why
36
national identity took on renewed significance in the form of documentary technology at this time,
approximately two decades after Pakistan’s formation. To this end, I first historicize this
unprecedented identity registration scheme within the landscape of existing identity documentation
in the aftermath of the Indian Subcontinent’s Partition, and the creation of the independent nation-
states of India and Pakistan, in 1947. I then show how security concerns moved away from Muslim
migrants and refugees entering in from the border with India. Instead, in the aftermath of another
territorial configuration, namely Bangladesh’s independence, securitization manifested itself in
techniques for managing the population internally through identity registration. For this purpose,
familial information remained crucial for establishing and verifying both individual and national
identity. However, this information collection was now directed towards the population within the
newly reconfigured territory. Such an approach is significant for how we understand NADRA’s
identification protocols at present: NADRA not only identifies an individual but does so in such a
way that any individual’s identity can be verified through their kin relations.
This chapter also shows, as a the first part of a larger argument (distributed across this
chapter and the following one) that registration, and particularly the use of information about
kinship, has been central to the development of what we now understand to be identification itself.
In preparing the reader for the next chapter, I open the question of what shifted in the 1970s period
in relation to both the colonial and the present. In conclusion, this chapter will reflect on how
Pakistan’s first national identity registration regime helps us conceptualize the shift between the past
and present in ways that trouble the category of the “postcolonial” itself.
Chapter 5
Finding the Individual in Colonial Registers: Classification, Registration and Identification
This chapter seeks to answer the following set of empirical and conceptual questions: What is the
pre-history of individual identification (before we had identity registries)? What does the absence of
37
individual identification tell us about colonial governance? How is classification, something the
colonial state engaged in abundantly in South Asia, distinct from the process of individuation, that
is, identifying the individual? How can the absence of individual identification procedures lead us to
rethink the colonial/postcolonial divide, and the ways we imagine either continuity or rupture?
This chapter begins with the historiography on classification in colonial India. It will show
how this process was distinct from identifying individuals (instruments of classification identified
groups) and intersected with colonial technologies of identification such as fingerprinting,
anthropometry and photography—but cannot be collapsed into them. This chapter uses primary
sources relating to vital records registration in the late 19th century, legal acts detailing the
procedures for registration (the Indian Registration Act 1908), the Punjab Registration Manual that
further explicates rules and regulations surrounding the registration of documents, and revenue
settlement reports from the canal colonies in Punjab and the frontier regions. I first describe how
and why the colonial state was ambivalent about identifying individuals, for instance, through the
process of collecting vital records. Instead, I argue, we need to look to the registration of documents
to find nascent practices of identification (of individuals). Focusing on colonial Punjab, this chapter
shows how individuals were identified by using local channels of information, their relations and
documents of their genealogical relations.
This chapter reveals how identification protocols, as they developed, were embedded within
the colonial governance function of producing documentary evidence, especially in the context of
managing property relations (for the purpose of revenue collection) on the basis of genealogical ties
to land. This chapter also demonstrates how classification and identification are not only distinct
processes, conceptually, but also historically. In particular, it argues that identifying kin has always
been crucial for governing populations, and that identification technologies were historically
embedded within broader documentary processes of recording kinship and genealogy. Thus, this
38
chapter traces the lines of continuities and points of rupture between the colonial past and Pakistan’s
present, particularly as they map onto distinctions in governance regimes between Punjab and the
North-West Frontier.
39
CHAPTER 1
Kinning Biometrics and Biometric Kinmaking
Identity Registration at the NADRA’s ‘Mega’ Registration Center
Introduction
Pakistan’s National Database and Registration Authority’s (NADRA) “Mega” Registration Center in
Islamabad is unlike many bureaucratic spaces in the city. While most bureaucratic work takes place
during “first time,” as government officers usually refer to the morning, or “second time” after
lunch but not always past 3 or 4 pm, this Registration Center—where people go to deal with all
matters related to their biometric-based identity card—is open to the public twenty-four hours a day,
seven days a week.1 Shiny granite-tiled floors lead to two entrances: one into the basement and the
other to the first floor. Both entrances require individuals to walk through a metal detector that
beeps constantly. One hopes it is fulfilling its function. The building’s facade is covered by glass
windows, a fenestrated glimpse into the life of the Registration Center that sets the scene for
NADRA’s claims to transparency and efficiency.
I was one of the few people walking into the NADRA office alone. Most came with at least
one other family member, and more often than not multiple family members were present. At the
beginning of my fieldwork, in the late June heat, yet to be broken by the monsoon rains, the air
conditioning was welcome. Children ran around the waiting area, energized by the lower
temperature and families lounged on the lime green, faux leather furniture, making inquiries about
reasons for visiting and consulting each other about the required documentation. Juxtaposed against
1 See Nayanika Mathur’s Paper Tiger (2016) on sarkari (bureaucratic/official) culture in South Asia, and office routines in particular.
40
this chaotic but manageable social scene, the modern steel, glass and technology-saturated
environment lent the Registration Center a certain corporate air.
The case of NADRA demonstrates an increasing reliance on the use of technology to claim
transparency and efficiency for the purposes of establishing and asserting bureaucratic authority. For
example, the NADRA insignia, emblazoned in various locations around the Mega Registration
Center, represents a juxtaposition between the administrative and technological. Under an image of
the crescent moon and star, symbolizing Pakistan, is a shield with zeros and ones (Figure 1). This
visual depiction of binary code communicates NADRA’s claim to competency in matters of
governance, and specifically identification, through its computational capabilities.
Figure 1: NADRA's Insignia (source: www.nadra.gov.pk)
The very first step of NADRA’s identity registration process reflects a desire to govern
through technologies that evoke transparency and produce efficiency in the bureaucratic process.
Upon entering the Registration Center, you collect a ticket number (on a piece of paper) from the
main reception area. This analog technology allows individuals to gauge their place in line according
to the queue-matic display—a screen displaying numbers in red, not very different from what a
digital clock would look like. When your number shows up on the queue-matic display, it also
flashes on a similar screen at the Data Entry Station to which you are to proceed. A recorded audio
41
announcement communicates this fact through the speakers. This seemingly simple technology,
generating order by making queues, is an important tool in managing the crowd at the Registration
Center, an example of how complex technologies of governance often rely on simple systems to
operate smoothly. This point was emphasized to me by a NADRA official, Abdul Rehman, who had
spent many years in the Operations Department and worked at Registration Centers during the
earlier part of his career at NADRA.
Rehman expressed that NADRA had realized itself “as an idea.” This idea was reflected in
the fact that 96 percent of the adult Pakistani population now possessed a NADRA biometric
identity card. NADRA has other “Mega” Registration Centers in major cities including Lahore,
Karachi, Quetta, Faisalabad and Peshawar. It also has non-Mega registration renters in district
headquarters, allowing individuals relatively easy access to the center itself. By 2012, the registration
rate for Azad Jammu and Kashmir and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa was at 99.9 per cent, Punjab at 99 per
cent, Gilgit-Baltistan at 89 per cent, and Sindh and Fata 88 per cent and Balochistan 76 per cent.2
There are approximately 12 million more men than women with identity cards.
However, the Benazir Income Support Programme (now renamed Ehsaas), initiated by the
Pakistan People’s Party government in 2008, provides cash transfers to “ever married” women who
meet a set criteria allocated through a “poverty score” by the government organization.
Subsequently, NADRA saw a significant increase in women registering for identity cards, as one of
the conditions of welfare payments was that it had to be linked to an identity card number. In
addition, the need for individuals to obtain an identity card has gradually increased, particularly for
those in urban areas, as it has become necessary for a range of daily activities such as banking,
getting a drivers’ license, enrolling in public schools and universities, buying property as well as
voting. In what follows, it will become apparent that the particular reasons that lead people to
2 “96 percent adults registered in Pakistan: NADRA,” Dawn News, August 18, 2012.
42
register for an identity card also shape the registration process—for instance, I observed how the
request to change an address could be connected to wanting to vote in a particular district, and an
attempt to change the date of birth listed on their identity card could be motivated by the desire to
meet the requirements for a specific job.
Despite the pervasive use and need for the identity card across Pakistan, in Rehman’s
opinion, the greatest challenge to NADRA’s operations remained: “the public” (awaam) in Pakistan
did not like to stand in line. According to Rehman, a “cultural” problem persisted: the deep-seated
habit, embedded in Pakistan’s structure of social relations, which he referred to as the habit of
getting “your bureaucratic work done” (kaam karwanay wali aadat) through references, acquaintances
or family. In his opinion, the only one way to deal with this problem was through technologies of
transparency. The queue-matic system embodied this deliberate deployment of transparency. “You
see what number is on the screen. If somebody is given a favor and jumps ahead of you in line,
everybody sees. And inevitably, someone will object. This creates accountability. But this has been a
Figure 2: NADRA van “Catalyst for Change” outside the Registration Center in Blue Area, Islamabad (source: photo by author)
43
long journey.” This was a journey where technology played a significant role in producing
transparency but not over and above socially ingrained “habits.”
I begin this chapter with reference to the queue-matic because it draws attention to how a
simple screen display can become a tool for transparency. These technologies are directed at
controlling applicants’ desires to cut the queue. In so doing, the queue-matic manages the flows of
applicants and their behavior at the Islamabad Registration Center. This illustrates the screened
infrastructure’s simple function as a technology that regulates social behavior; it makes the act of
overstepping the stated ordinal sequence a public and awkward act.3
The queue-matic is the first in a series of screened interfaces that will face the citizen-
applicant with both data entry operators and other NADRA officials at the Registration Center.
Across this chapter’s sections, I will reflect on the interconnected uses of screen interfaces in distinct
stages of the identity registration process. In addition, I foreground the term “interface” at this early
stage to open the question of whom this screen-saturated environment is for and how its overt
projection of transparency impacts the identification process. Alexander Galloway, in The Interface
Effect (2012), describes the interface not as an object or a boundary but as multiple processes that
produce effects. It is not a thing but a technique of mediation or interaction, “for the interface
becomes the point of transition between different mediatic layers within any nested system”
(Galloway 2012, 31). At the NADRA Islamabad Registration Center, the interface mediates layers
that are technological, material and social. In the set-up of the data entry process, the interface
brings into its ambit not only screens but also mundane objects, such as furniture, as well as the
bodies and subjectivities of the citizen-applicants who are being identified. Through such
3 I follow the critique that focusing on a single medium produces a certain parochialism surrounding screens (Galloway, 2012; Manovich, 2013). For this reason, I foreground the ways that screens as already situated objects within a set of interactions, processes and infrastructural capacities, both social and material.
44
affordances of the interface, NADRA seeks to enhance accuracy and transparency by displaying to
the citizen-applicant the data it has collected.
NADRA aims at producing transparency, especially during the data entry process when
personal details are inputted into the system, as well as visualizing identity with increasing control
and accuracy during the identity registration process. As mentioned above, NADRA apprehends
individual identity through relatedness, and specifically kin-based connections, not biometrics and
bodily characteristics alone. As a result, multiple members of a family frequently engage together
with screens, challenging the dyadic interaction (Lemon 2018) between the fetishized individual
“user” and a technology of governance. Through the protocols of this identification regime that
relies on kin units for identifying data, it is the citizen-family, as opposed to the individual, that is the
subject of NADRA’s digital identification.
This chapter ethnographically analyses the social and technical dimensions of interactions
between NADRA officials and ordinary citizens as they strategize and navigate this relatively new
techno-bureaucracy. I examine the role of identity registration software and individualizing
technologies, including biometric readers, cameras and facial recognition software, which function to
record and verify identifying information from citizens at the Registration Center. I demonstrate that
biometric technologies—along with the software, screens, and databases they rely on and produce—
are “kinned”: they are entangled in kinship practices to perform the very function of identification.
This chapter also shows how identification data and kin relations come to be co-constituted through
the protocols of identity registration software to produce what I term “datafied kinship.” This is
evidenced by NADRA’s departure from regular attestation procedures, where NADRA offers the
option of using a next of kin’s thumbprint as the source of attestation itself. This adapted procedure
illustrates how being rooted within one’s kin network serves as a source of authentication, both
biometrically and beyond. Along with biometrics, the individualizing technology of photographs
45
(used for facial recognition) are also “kinned” when they are used to verify and confirm the
recognition of family members. As a result, I extend the scope of analysis beyond biometric
technology to the broader socio-political phenomena of identification to examine how the salient
unit of identification is neither the individual nor the group but is rather the relation.
In addition, this chapter centers how NADRA mobilizes technologies of visualization to
recruit identifying information from a “user”: the screen interface prompts and compels the user to
share information required to successfully complete the process of identity registration. At the same
time, following how the process of data entry plays out at the Registration Center, I de-center the
individual user to explore the complexity of citizen-families’ collective engagement with the
identification process to illustrate NADRA’s modes of asserting technological control over complex
social, and particularly familial, relations. While attending to the specific affordances of screen and
software technology, I also show how forms of datafied and documentary kinship are
interconnected in ways that are essential to establishing unique identity—for instance, in something
as simple as simple as requiring marriage certificates to update marital status and subsequently
register a child who can be connected to their parents in the database.
Drawing on interviews with both citizen-applicants, data entry operators and assistant
directors at the registration centers, this chapter reveals that in relying upon relatedness, NADRA
officials are themselves compelled to move across registers (moral, legal and religious), and thus
identification practices are continually contested and transformed through their interactions with
applicants and their needs. In so doing, I ultimately demonstrate how securitized identification
practices do not impact the lives of citizens in a unidirectional fashion—NADRA’s officials and
protocols, too, are shaped by those who interact with it. I follow Lucy Suchman’s concept of
“situated action” as a guiding analytic to think through the interactions at the Registration Center.
Centering situated action means attending to how people “produce and find evidence for plans in
46
the course of situated action” (Suchman 2007, 70). The instructions that data entry operators receive
are put to use in relation to the specific, multi-varied situations as they arise through each
interaction. For Suchman, plans are produced through the course of situated activity. In the case of
identity registration at NADRA, the electronic data entry form and its registration software provide
the resources that allow for the data entry process to be executed through interactions with the
applicants. The plan emerges as a dynamic between the two sets of actors: applicants and NADRA
officials.
The Electronic Identity Registration Process
This section offers an outline of the identity registration process, itself a “plan,” to guide the reader
for the rest of the chapter. This sketch is an abstraction because in practice, as the rest of this
chapter will describe, the process of establishing identity is messy and, in Suchman terms, a product
of situated action. In the words of data entry operators, “something or the other always happens”
(kuch na kuch ho hi jata hai) to make the process more complicated. The complexity of identity
registration is in part a function of NADRA’s legacy system and the diverse ecology of documentary
infrastructure, such as those required to establish proof of divorce, marriage or birth. In turn, the
system’s kinship logic brings the lived experiences and interpersonal dynamics between family
members into the registration process. I will delve into the various issues identity registration raises
for the production of datafied kinship, the particular role of screen interfaces, as well as the use of
documents in this process in subsequent sections of the chapter.
For now, after your number appears on the queue-matic and is also pronounced over the
loudspeaker, you finally arrive at a data entry station to begin the registration process. At the data
entry station, applicants are seated in front of a monitor screen, a camera and a biometric reader.
This screen is a mirror of another that faces the Data Entry Operator (henceforth DEO).
47
The DEO will commonly ask the applicant why they have come to the Registration Center.
While registration for an identity card (for a “fresh” or first identity card) is a common response,
many people also come for family registration certificates, a document that draws on data from
either one’s natal or affinal family. In this document, all family members’ identity card numbers and
their photographs are displayed on a single page (see Figure 3). In addition to acquiring these
documents, people also come to the Registration Center to update details connected to their own
identification data or that of their family members.
These changes primarily include a change in marital status (marriage or divorce), the
registration of a child which produces a document called the child registration certificate, or b-form
(the b-form includes a list of nuclear family members) and change in address (permanent or
temporary). Lastly, a frequent reason drawing citizens to NADRA’s Registration Center is errors in
their existing identification data. The most common errors, according to my fieldwork data, are
spelling mistakes in names and errors in age. At times, people return almost immediately upon
finding an error but more commonly, as one DEO complained, “they only care about the mistake
once it becomes a problem for them, for example, when they need to apply for a job, a visa or to
university.”
Figure 3: Family Registration Certificate (source: nadra.gov.pk)
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Once the DEO establishes what it is that the applicant wants, they pull up an electronic
registration form on their screen. This form, a central component of the registration process and the
software—commonly just called “the exi” (the registration software application) around the
Registration Center—has sections for information such as name, age, address, occupation and
parents’ names. An identical form is displayed on the applicants’ screen, and the applicant can read
this as the DEO asks them questions and fills it out on the basis of information they receive.
The first chairman and chief architect of NADRA expressed to me his frustration at how
paper forms, filled out by the applicants themselves, simply led to the collection of “unclean data.”
He complained about how the illiterate poor would pay others to fill out their forms while the rich
made their “peons” do it—proliferating errors in the data of both. The solution the chairman and
his team devised was for trained DEOs to fill out the forms electronically, directly feeding them into
their system (verified later at the back end, as this data do not enter the data warehouse directly)
such that a paper form never even made its way into the applicants’ hands. Through electronic data
entry, the applicant orally relays the information to the DEO. The DEO then is the one to input this
information into the form and into the system.
Along with the two screens, there is also a camera and a biometric reader on the DEO’s
desk. Both of these devices are facing the applicant. After the identity registration form has been
filled out, the data entry operator asks the applicant, and if a family member is accompanying them,
to press their four fingers and thumb onto the biometric reader.4 There is a box of tissues by the
biometric reader so that applicants can wipe their hands for easier recognition. The fingerprints are
displayed on both screens, with green markings indicating when a readable print has been captured.
Beyond this stage, the applicant is asked (if this is a fresh identity card or a renewal) to look at the
4 The following section on “attestation” will detail when and why family members are asked for biometric prints.
49
camera for a photograph. Here, too, the photograph is displayed on the screen with the outline of a
face, subdivided into quadrants, guiding the DEO as well as the applicant on how they should
position themselves towards the camera. This photograph, taken through a particular frame, will
enable NADRA’s facial recognition technology to appropriately capture the applicant’s face. To
underline, this photograph is displayed to the applicant as well as the DEO on the dual screens. As I
will argue in more detail later in the chapter, this mirrored set of screens, the camera, biometric
technologies and another seat (aside from the DEO’s) are all brought together into a singular
screen(s) interface.5
The next stage involves printing out the identity registration form. The applicant is asked to
take this form to the Assistant Manager (henceforth AM) who sits in a separate office cubicle.
Unlike the Data Entry Operator stations that were located on an open floor plan, the AM had a
frosted glass pane that obstructed the full view of his or her office. The AMs gave the final approval
to each case of identity registration by signing onto a printed version of the application form that
had the applicants’ information which was collected during data entry. The AM was also able to view
the applicants’ “file” through the identity registration software. In fact, as will be discussed in more
detail below, AMs have a slightly different set of permissions and can access more information
about the applicant than the data entry operator. On the basis of an electronic “check list,” AMs
make an assessment and either approve or reject the application for an identity card. At the same
time, the AMs were also a source of information and clarification for the DEOs when questions
arose.
However, prior to the stage of approval when the applicant is at the data entry station—in
addition to the photograph and the biometric prints—the DEO would scan the signature or thumb
5 I follow the critique that focusing on a single medium produces a certain parochialism surrounding screens (Galloway 2012; Manovich 2013). For this reason, I foreground how screens as already situated objects within a set of interactions, processes and infrastructural capacities, both social and material.
50
print (if the applicant cannot write) on the electronic registration form. I found that this seemingly
minor detail involving paper and pen was in fact essential to the smooth running of the data entry
operation.
In the morning shift at the Registration Center, I often sat with Ayesha, a DEO who had
won the best employee of the month award multiple times. Her photo was up on the wall this
month, too. Her efficiency was a large part of the reason for her success. Last month, she had
processed the highest number of applicants in a shift, averaging around thirty-five during one shift
in the past few weeks. This week, though, the scanner was slowing her down. Towards the end of
the registration process, DEOs would ask the applicant to sign or provide a thumb print on a piece
of paper. This would be printed as a part of the form they would take with them to the AM at the
approvals desk. In order to print this as a part of the rest of their form—which had been filled out
electronically with a screen facing the applicant—they had to scan the signed or thumb printed piece
of paper and upload it electronically into the form. Ayesha was having continual trouble with “the
exi” data entry application was not capturing the signed portion of the paper. The manner in which
this fairly simple problem, eventually resolved through a software update, slowed down the process
illuminates how digital technology and paper documents consistently interacted through identity
registration. Moreover, the interplay and continual conversion between the two forms—paper and
digital—was significant to moving the identity registration process forward.
It is only after the scanned signature is uploaded to the electronic registration form and
printed out that it can be taken for approval to the AM. Once approved by the AM, it is deposited at
a third window located in the identity card collection area. The applicant simply walks up and slips
the approved form through a glass window. Once deposited, the applicant then receives a receipt
that lists the date that they should expect their identity card. After the identity card has been printed
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and is ready for collection, applicants will receive it next to the window where they deposited their
form.
In total, including the time spent waiting to be called by the queue-matic—which can vary
depending on the number of the people at the Registration Center—the entire process (according to
an average I calculated from my first month at the Registration Center) usually takes between forty-
five minutes to two hours. DEOs, AMs and the applicants at the Center are the major actors I focus
on in my analysis of the identity registration process, and I examine their distinct roles by examining
specific cases. In addition, there are employees who hand out tokens to applicants when they first
arrive, the helpers (madadgar) who are there to answer questions and the Director of the NADRA
Registration Center who oversees the operations and can make changes to ensure the smooth
running of the Center. Importantly, the identification process does not end at the registration stage.
As the following chapter will describe, the identifying information recruited from the applicant at
this stage is then sent to the headquarters where it is further verified and ultimately approved,
leading to a printed identity card.
Datafied Kinship
Having provided an outline of the full identity registration process, I now turn to the specific ways
that protocols of identification at the Registration Center produce what I term “datafied kinship.”
By datafied kinship, I refer to the technological and social means through which NADRA
establishes unique identity by re-directing individualizing technologies towards the goal of verifying
and expanding the digital record of kin relations. In this section, I will look at four primary ways in
which datafied kinship is produced at the Registration Center. Here, I focus on elements of system
design as well as how data entry operators and assistant managers interact with the design during the
process of identity registration. First, I examine the spatial set-up of the data entry process itself, as
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well as the ways it is adapted to the kinship logic of identity registration, particularly through
mirrored interfaces that allow kin to share information. Second, I look at the operation of attestation
procedures in this context, what purpose they serve and how they incorporate biometric data from
family members as a means to produce individual identity. Third, I analyze the role of an
individualizing technology, the photograph, and how it is reformatted by asking individuals to
recognize their kin as a means of verification. Fourth, I investigate the role of “updates” as the
system provokes the need to record vital events—birth, marriage and death—and thus keeps on
kinning the information in the database. I begin with mirroring interfaces, as it not only sheds light
on the interaction between system design and social practice but also offers details into the
mechanics of identity registration that will prove useful to the reader going forward.
Mirroring Interfaces: Kinning Information
Figure 4: Data Entry Stations (source: architecture firm for NADRA's Mega Registration Center in Islamabad, www.ejad.com)
First, the mirroring of screens explicitly symbolizes an atmosphere of transparency by producing a
sense of symmetry between DEO and citizen-applicant (at least on the level of the screen facing
each). This positioning sets the tone of the interaction: the applicant can see what is going on at the
end of the DEO, an instance of technological visualization that symbolically equalizes the
relationship between individual and operator. Indeed, this symbolic value appears to be as important
53
as its practical functions. The mirrored screens facilitate a requirement central, according to what I
had been told by various NADRA officials, to the organization’s very creation: heightened accuracy
during this data acquisition process.
On a practical level, I observed that DEOs at the Registration Center would ask citizen-
applicants to look at the mirrored screen facing the applicant in order to check and correct any
mistakes made during the data entry process, offloading much of their own responsibility for
accuracy. The actual process of reading and correcting this information often happens collectively,
with family members accompanying the applicant—especially as it might be a family member’s
information requested, or information that kin are likely to have in common. Consider the following
instance from my fieldwork:
A newly married couple came in to register the change in their marital status. As they had both taken individual ticket numbers, they were placed at separate data entry stations. The woman was accompanied by her brother. Although she was currently living abroad in the United Kingdom, she informed the DEO (at the station I was sitting) that she wished to keep her permanent address in Pakistan. As she was called over by her husband at another window to confirm some information, the DEO complained to me that they should have been processed at the same counter. The wife’s brother was left at the counter, seated in front of us. The DEO asked him to verify her data entry details, specifically her permanent address (which the brother likely shared) while she was away. The DEO selected the district name from the drop-down menu of the registration software. The woman’s brother then moved over to face the mirrored screen and pulled out his own card from his wallet. He compared the format of address on his own card, squinting at the address, his sister’s, on the screen in front of him, and proceeded to continue the registration process on her behalf until she was able to return. (Author’s field notes, August 2017)
Instead of a one-to-one, individual-screen relation, a scene that occurred frequently at the
Registration Center was one where multiple individuals belonging to a family would all be pointing
at the screen, discussing the information being shared with the DEO—physically embodying the
multiple-user, spread out across various individuals but acting collectively towards the end of a single
individual’s identity registration. Similar to how biometric technology foregrounds the link between
54
the uniqueness of the bodily mark and a singular individual identity (Magnet 2011; Gates 2011), the
screen monitor appears to be situated, on a desk and in front of a simple chair, as if to engage with
only a single individual body. However, due to the content of NADRA’s registration form, which
requires significant information about family members from the applicant, the screen prompts
accompanying relatives to engage and respond to information on the screen collectively.
The human-screen interface is thus a set of multiple, intertwined relations: it mediates and
connects distinct screens at the Registration Center, the identifying data collected at the Center and
the already existing identity records in the data warehouse, and more generally between citizen-
families and the state. Theorists have long discussed the “surveillant assemblage” (Haggerty and
Ericson 2000), a multiplicity of technologies, databanks and flows that are abstracted from human
bodies and then reassembled to produce a “data double” (Nichols 2004). We can consider the
experience of the citizen-applicant at NADRA’s Registration Center as the surveillant assemblage’s
obverse: the user assemblage. In this case, the citizen-applicant becomes multiple, connected to
family members and mediated through technologies such as mirrored screens to ultimately produce
a single unique identity. The user has to be connected to others to fulfil NADRA’s core function,
which is to ultimately establish unique identity but through the process of collecting connections
(both between family members and the identifying attributes of individuals) under a single identifier
(the unique ID number) within the database.
NADRA’s mirrored interface reflects a “dyadic illusion” where the interaction between the
DEO and citizen-applicant is presented as one between “pair units” (Lemon 2018, 136-138). Yet, it
is precisely in its non-dyadic operations that the mirrored interface expands NADRA’s capacity to
collect identifying data from citizens to varying degrees of accuracy. The relationships and
interactions around the screen—as opposed to design alone—shape the use of the screen. If
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NADRA's identification practices are directed at producing a unique individual, it can only do so by
deploying the user assemblage, specifically as they cluster in front of mirrored interfaces.
The screen in an e-governance context is thus not dissimilar from how digital media is
assumed to work more generally, a context where the user is also conceived as participant,
particularly in the context of social media and the advent of “Web 2.0” and the production of
commodifiable content for a platform or other corporate entity (Terranova 2004; Scholz 2013). For
NADRA, citizens create content when they are called to participate; they do not passively read what
is on the screen but actively produce it. Citizen-applicants are then expected to review and edit that
information for accuracy. NADRA’s presentation of transparency thus interpolates the citizen-
applicant and their user assemblage into providing identifying data.
Yet, this process of “editing” information can unfold in many ways, and what “accuracy”
means is far from straightforward. For instance, during fieldwork at the Registration Center, as often
happened, two family members were called up to the data entry station. In one case, they were two
brothers and one of them was applying for a position in the police. While I was already aware that
Pakistanis frequently list their age as a year younger or two younger—commonly in order to be able
to retire a year later than they would be required to otherwise due to the rules of governmental
organizations—I became aware of the full extent of this practice while at NADRA. The two
brothers I mentioned, whom I will call Ali and Usman, were showing up as the same age in
NADRA’s system. They informed the DEO that in fact Ali’s age was correct and Usman’s was off
by a year. Simultaneously, they told the DEO that they could not change Usman’s age because he
had sent a job application to the police department, which commonly did a background check with
NADRA’s records. So, it was Ali’s age, whose data was currently accurate in the system, that must
be changed now. As this was a family of five brothers in total, this process required some
calculation. It was important to ensure that none of the brothers ended up less than nine months in
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age to the other one. The DEO switched back and forth between multiple windows on his screen.
He showed each of the five brothers’ individual forms to the two individuals in front of him (on
their mirrored screen) to see which date of birth would work best according to this collected data.
Interface technologies, in particular mirrored screens and their visual capacities, allowed the
DEO and the two brothers’ ability to collaboratively find a solution.6 My experience with this
particular DEO was that he was fairly vigilant towards identity fraud but willing to work with people
around these smaller inaccuracies and find solutions within and through the protocols of the
registration system. We can see how the visualizing technology did not necessarily work against the
goal of transparency: the DEO and the brothers were able to openly share information through this
medium, even as it assisted in the obfuscation of smaller inaccuracies, specifically the age of one of
the brothers. While the identity registration is not fully “participatory”—an equal exchange between
NADRA and citizen-applicants—this particular instance highlights the possibility and even
prevalence of human intervention in technologies of governance. The citizen-applicant does not
emerge as an agentive hero through all this. Rather, this instance reveals that the preferences of
individuals and families can be incorporated within the protocols of the identification process. This
possibility is available precisely because the system relies on citizen-applicants to provide their
identification data, and so in moments like the one described above, they are able to intervene in
minor ways to make it work to their advantage. However, the capacity for interventions and
changes, that is, the DEO’s “situated actions,” should not be taken to mean that the unique identity
of the citizen-applicant is anything they want it to be. On the contrary, the system is designed to
spot identity fraud in the form of duplicate identities or the falsification of parental relations, as we
will shortly see below.
6 In this case, the DEO accepted a certain degree of inaccuracy to accommodate the needs of the citizen-applicants. However, this may have played out differently based on the ethnicity or class of the applicants.
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This section has demonstrated how the spatial set-up of data entry, particularly of the screen
interface, is readily reconfigured towards collecting information from a set of relations, as opposed
to single individuals alone. Kinship thus comes to be recorded digitally by re-working how families
are able to move around the material space of data-entry and the ways they are able to collectively
share and verify information. I will now show how this practice is not an aberration in the design of
the system. Rather, the system’s protocols are designed to record information about relations, a
point that comes across most clearly in the process of biometric-based attestation procedures.
Attestation: Kinning Biometrics
A young man had just turned eighteen and arrived at the NADRA’s Mega Registration Center to
register for his identity card for the first time. His mother accompanied him. The DEO immediately
asked for the mother’s card and, before he took any information from the son, pulled up the
mother’s data. He clicked through other familial relations, jumping between various family members
as they showed up in relation to the mother. The data entry operator then pulled up a digital form
on his computer. A mirror of this form, as described above, was visible to the mother and son on
another screen facing them, and he began to take down basic information such as name, age and
address. When he had typed in these basic details, he looked over to the mother and asked her
“Aunty, you don’t have henna on your fingers, do you?” She replied that she didn’t. He scanned her
hands to assess their fitness for biometric prints, as she was not too old but old enough that the
years of household work—washing dishes, scrubbing floors and so on—might have taken their toll
on her fingers.
But why should her fingerprints matter? “Aren’t you registering her son?” I asked the DEO.
He responded that taking the mother’s—the applicant’s next of kin—fingerprints would get them
out of the process of attestation and thus save them time, hassle and potentially money. He turned
to them, handing over a form with the son’s photograph printed on it as well as all of his personal
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information. He then said “Aunty, if I can get your biometrics, your process will be finished. You
just need to get this form signed by that person (the floor manager/assistant director) at that
window over there. If your biometrics don’t go through, then you will have to get this attested by an
18 grade or higher officer.”
Anybody employed in the Pakistani government has a rank, or “grade” in local parlance.
Officials have the authority to “attest”—or vouch for—the authenticity of a given document.
Importantly, they do this through paper, by signing and stamping it with their specific official seal.
Such a practice of governmental attestation is commonplace, a consistent fact of life in Pakistan.7
The replacement of this process with a family member’s fingerprint, verified by a biometric reader, is
not. The ability of a mother’s body to vouch for her son’s authenticity originally took me by
surprise. I began to take note of the frequency with which corporeal substitution, based on kinship,
occurred at NADRA’s Registration Centers. Later, when I conducted interviews with NADRA
officials, I asked many questions around this policy and procedure. In this case and many others, I
was told that for NADRA’s purposes what would work better as proof of citizenship—and
authenticity of a person as a whole—than a verified link to a parent? At the same time, using
parents’ biometric prints for attestation was dependent on the age of the applicant and on whether
the family member providing the attestation (through biometrics) had an identity record in
NADRA’s database. One DEO explained “if the applicant is older than eighteen—and usually if
they are older they are a woman—and they have their parents’ identity cards, but those parents are
deceased, we then prefer to link them with their brother, sister or husband’s identity cards because it
is much more likely that the siblings’ or husband’s biometrics will be in the system.”8
7 As Chapter Four will show, the problem of false attestations by government officials on identity registration forms for the earlier “manual,” paper-based identity registration system was one of the primary problems that led to inaccuracies in the registration data, forged identity cards and even acquisition of identity cards by so-called foreigners. As Raman (2012) shows, the problem of fraudulent attestation was also a concern for colonial authorities in South Asia. 8 Importantly, biometric information in and of itself cannot establish paternity or any other kind of blood relation. Thus,
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The logic of attestation is overtly tied to authenticity, verifiability and reliability. However,
the interplay between verification by attestation, involving a bureaucrat and paper-paraphernalia, as
opposed to through kinship involving a family member, is dynamic and less clearly delineated in
NADRA’s practices. I repeatedly questioned officials at NADRA, both at the Registration Center
and in administrative departments, about how they assured verification and why the family played
such an important role in this. The response from officials was often that the very existence of a
familial record in NADRA’s database was evidence that an individual was in fact a citizen of
Pakistan, for there was evidence of their connections to other citizens.9
Biometric technology is the most recent step in a long trajectory of identification through
other unique identifying marks, including fingerprints (Cole 2001) as well as signatures or seals
(Caplan and Torpey 2000). The uses of biometric technology are often accompanied by the
suggestion that unique, bodily characteristics can most accurately determine singular individual
identity, namely the idea that “you are you” (Cohen 2019). By deploying the body as a means to not
just authenticate identity but also to speak over and against persons (Abraham 2018), biometrics are
considered absolute in that as long as the body is present, nothing else is needed. Biometric
decision-making is considered the final arbiter of identity. However, in biometrics’ univocal claim to
identification, other non-biometric practices and processes of identification might be obscured. In
other words, what produces identification or unique identity? Do individuals have to be isolated from
others in order to be identified? Or do their very ties to other persons, such as their kin, reveal who
they are? While biometrics are indeed significant, as reflected in the simple fact that they are
incorporated in the attestation process, at the NADRA Registration Center they are also “kinned.”
the biometric information serves to verify the vouching family member through an existing identity record as well as a relation (such as between mother and son in this case) already present in NADRA’s records. 9 The next chapter will explain how the technological category of a “system independent,” a person without familial links within the database, was created to automatically flag those unconnected to others for verification within the system.
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As a result of this, biometric technology is used for not only authenticating the individual providing
the biometric information but also their kin relations.
It is important for the Pakistani state that any next of kin’s biometric record, as long as it
exists, be matched in NADRA’s database, evidenced by the centrality of “blood relatives” in the
requirements as stated in Figure 5. This allows the attestation by a family member to be officially
processed. Hence, it is the co-constitutive effect of biometric technology and kinship that produces
an authenticated citizen. Rather than assuming the transformative effect of biometric technology—
in particular its ability to abstract or reduce bodies into code—NADRA’s dependence on datafied
kinship leads me to reconsider the role and ramifications of biometrics on statecraft (Breckenridge
2014; Gates 2004). The role of biometrics is not insignificant. However, it is only after biometric
technology undergoes what can best be understood as “kinning” that the technology is able
Figure 5: List of Requirements for the ID card (source: www.nadra.gov.pk/identity-requirements)10
10 This is the list of requirements for registering for a “Smart” NADRA Identity Card, which has a chip with biometric data but in terms of the information collected, is functionally the same as the Computerized National Identity Card (CNIC).
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to fully perform their function for NADRA.11 In other words, even as biometrics underscore the
identification of an individual body, they cannot operate in isolation from other persons, and thus
relationships, in the database.
Nonetheless, the fact that “kinned” biometrics can in effect substitute, or at the very least
stand alongside, attested documents is significant. In this substitution, a series of interactions and
objects are bypassed by a technologically facilitated process. Without this, applicants would have to
find an officer who fits the rank requirement, take the physical form to them, have it stamped (with
an official stamp from the particular governmental department), signed and then returned back to
the NADRA office.12 Given the historical significance of not only verified but verifiable documents, it
is intriguing that kin-based authentication replaces an infrastructure of bureaucratic offices spread
across the country throughout both colonial and postcolonial regimes.13 In what ways does
biometric verification, specifically by one’s family members, perform an equivalent function to
paper-based attestation?
To understand this is to consider what attestation entails. Perhaps the process of finding a
state official to attest one’s documents is not all that different from getting one’s kin to do so. In my
observations at the Registration Center, those who did not have family members with them—
frequently younger students away from home studying at university or migrant men whose families
were still in rural areas—would rely on their employers’ contacts, their local union council members,
neighbors or most often contacts in government positions found through family members. In one
11 I am using “kinning” here to refer to the process by which a previously unconnected entity may be brought into a relation that is expressed through a kin idiom. I find “kinning” to be the appropriate term for NADRA’s practices, as it is only when biometric technology is brought into the domain of kinship that it can maintain its salience within the broader practice of identification. See Howell (2013). 12 According to my observations at the Islamabad Registration Center, those who did not have family members with them—frequently younger students away from home studying at university or migrant men whose families were still in rural areas—would rely on their employers’ contacts or their local union council members who could attest such documents. Occasionally, the AM would also recommend such officials to applicants if they inquired. 13 Chapter Five delineates the historical role attestation and registration played in identification practices in colonial South Asia.
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way or another, the government officials people turn to for attestation may very likely be their
relatives, or relatives of relatives—they will be a jannay wala, an “acquaintance” or more literally “a
known person.” With this angle, the state comes to look a bit different. It is not always an other,
different from oneself, to be entered into a relation with as a citizen. The pervasive need for
attestation means that the state is interacted with frequently and through one’s already “known”
networks. However, this should not be taken to mean that the state is a friendly and comforting
entity.14 When are one’s family or friends a source of comfort or convenience, at least in this
domain, as opposed to a burden or simply a favor that will have to be returned? In short, as we will
shortly see, intimacy or proximity of relations does not always translate into facilitated bureaucratic
interactions. The expectation of connectedness between kin produces tensions and a sense of
burdensome contagion amongst kin. Further, I hope to show that NADRA’s identification practices
do not have one-sided effects on kinship. The ambiguity of kinship practices, especially in terms of
how they interface with the state, also act to shape NADRA itself.
Photographic Recognition
The presumed proximity of kin appears consistently throughout the identity registration process. In
the interaction described above, while it was the mother that came to the Registration Center with
her son and authenticated him through her biometrics, the son’s father also briefly appeared on
screen. When the DEO entered the mother’s identity card number and began looking through the
mother’s familial connections, he paused at her husband’s photo. At that moment the mother
gestured to her son, pointing at the boy’s father’s photograph. As they laughed and looked
surprised—a common response to the first-time people saw their family members on the DEO’s
14 In what Susan Gal terms a fractal mode, distinctions between the private and the public are experienced as “stable and continuous” (2002, 91). Gal’s proposition that public and private operate as indexical signs, as opposed to fixed categories, allows us to see how fractal splits reframe when the state can become part of one’s social and political context and when it is markedly separate.
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screen in this way—there was a moment of recognition of their relation and also of the fact that the
relationship could be, and in fact was, being datafied and visualized.
Recognition of family members’ photographs served the important function of verification
during the identity registration stage. To clarify, photographs were not only used by DEOs to
identify the individuals in front of them. Additionally, applicants who had come into the Registration
Center would be asked to identify their familial relations as a way to prove that they were in fact
related to the person they claimed a relation to.
While photographs, specifically in the context of identity documents such as passports
(Kumar 2000; Torpey 2000), have been understood as central to the process of individualization
(Werner 2001; Strassler 2010), in the context of the NADRA Registration Center these photographs
are deployed in practice for establishing connections between photographed individuals. Sohini Kar
describes how the “joint photo,” of a borrower and a guarantor, became the norm in micro-finance
practices in ways that required the photographed subjects to be aware “not of their individuality but
of some sense of their mutuality” (2017, 5). She argues that the photograph serves less as proof of
identity and more as evidence of kinship and ultimately of obligation. In a similar manner, given that
biometrics already serve as the primary individualizing technology (and a photograph might
supplement this), in practice photographs of one’s family members serve to authenticate the relation.
More specifically, by successfully recognizing one’s family members, an individual can prove that
they truly belong to the official kin unit that NADRA has on record for them. In turn, this
establishes the individual as someone who is entitled to state-authorized identity.
The significance of family members’ photographs for the identity registration became
most apparent to me during one particular instance, early on in my time at the NADRA Registration
Center in Islamabad. In August 2017, between seventy-five to a hundred orphans from the
orphanage “Pakistan Sweet Home” arrived at the Registration Center to register for Child
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Registration Certificates (CRC) over the period of a week. The Pakistan Sweet Home orphanage was
originally set up to house children whose parents (mostly fathers) had died during the “war on
terror,” either through terrorist attacks by the Taliban or during the military operations in the
Federally Administered Tribal Areas.
The third floor was cleared out for the purpose of registering orphans, and I was encouraged
to observe this process as a part of my fieldwork. The orphans were being registered for CRCs,
which was also the basis of a “juvenile card.” The unique identity number they would be assigned as
a part of this process would remain the same once they turned eighteen and could get an adult
identity card.
When I arrived at the third floor, I greeted a somewhat disgruntled bunch of DEOs. They
considered the registration an important exercise but were also facing unusual difficulties. Each case
took about two or three times longer than the average registration time because there were many
missing pieces of information, documentation and most importantly, the absence of family members
who would ordinarily provide the details the children were not able to. In this case, the child was
given a printed version of a data entry form, and these forms were to be attested and returned to the
NADRA office since there was no family member present to provide biometric attestation then and
there. Despite the fact that such details had been worked out in advance, the DEO whose desk I sat
on that day did have to leave his desk regularly to check with his superior, the AM, about various
aspects of the registration process to make sure he was proceeding correctly.
For instance, even though many of the children had parents who had been registered in
NADRA’s database, not all the parents (who had since died) were showing up as deceased in
NADRA’s records. If the parent was not dead in the database, then that was a problem. Usually,
NADRA required a death certificate to indicate that the person was deceased. What should they do
in the absence of one? The DEO would check with the AM to make sure he could proceed with
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registering the child. Further, some children had their deceased parents’ ID cards but no b-forms15
or birth certificates, which would establish their relationship with a parent. Since a deceased parent
remained the “head of the family” even after his death, it was important to establish this link. The
children had to continue to be linked with their biological parents, dead or alive. The DEOs thus
had to figure out ways of working with registration software such that it would allow them to
proceed with the children’s registration while also not violating any of the registration protocols.
The DEO I was accompanying that day regularly clicked the link for “digital impounding”
after entering a child’s parent’s identity card number into the system. He explained that many of the
orphans were from a “war area,” and their parents’ had registered for identity cards in these regions.
As a result, many of the children’s parents might show up as “aliens” in the system, that is, those
who had been declared non-nationals. For one child, when nothing showed up under digital
impounding, he typed in the child’s b-form number. He turned to me and explained that he
suspected a “fake card” because the b-form did not list either of the parents’ ID numbers. It was
close to impossible to make a b-form for a child without the parents’ ID cards. The child was from
Dera Bugti in Balochistan. The DEO found an assistant director (AD) from another NADRA office
whom the DEO knew from before and who happened to be on the floor that day. The
infrastructure of the office is such that it allows the employees to easily talk to each other through
the cubicle or walk over. This AD came over to assist with the case and pulled up another tab with
“additional documents” connected to the child’s b-form. He explained that the child’s eldest brother
had applied for the child’s b-form on this behalf. The AD was able to pull up a high court order
(which was scanned and included in the digital file), which showed that the elder brother, an adult,
was the child’s legal guardian. When the AD left, the DEO explained to me “he has a lot of
15 As mentioned in an earlier (second) section of this chapter, the b-form is a document that lists the two parents and their children. The b-form is frequently made out in the name of the child and has all their immediate family members, and their identity card numbers (if they were adults) on it.
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experience, he is an expert with the registration system (system ka keera hai woh).” Then, as an aside,
he told me that his cousin, who had been posted in Balochistan as an army officer, had told him that
“there” they hated Pakistanis and wanted to kill them. “Regardless, our job is to make all of the
people from such areas into better citizens… NADRA is doing its best for this to happen.”
In the absence of documents, a common technique the DEOs used to verify the familial
connections for the children was to show them photos of their family members. Even if the child
had an adult’s identity card with them, the DEOs wanted to confirm that it was in fact a parent and
not an uncle or another relative. In one case, a child had his mother’s (who was still living) identity
card copy and so the DEO typed the number into the system and pulled up two of the mother’s
family trees, one through marriage (affinal) and the other through birth (natal). The DEO then
showed the child three men’s photos. The child recognized one but not the other two. One of these
was his father, one a maternal uncle and another a grandfather. The photo the child said “papa” in
response to was actually one of his maternal uncles. When he said “baba,” his maternal grandfather
was on the screen. The one he did not recognize at all, said he did not know him, was his biological
father. The only person he recognized with certainty was his mother. The DEO also showed the
child multiple photos of the same individual, the grandfather, at different ages. The child called the
younger photo of his grandfather “papa” again.
After this interaction, I asked the DEO what the purpose of using photographs was. He
answered that the purpose was to verify that the child was in fact connected to his mother’s family. I
questioned that he had not been able to recognize his father. The DEO squared this discrepancy
with the fact that the child had lost his father when he was very young. The important thing was he
recognized his mother’s family and could definitively be connected to them through his mother’s
identity card. The use of photographs in this case, and the many others that followed, showed that
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the recognition of kin was by no means simple or straightforward. Yet, in these situations, a bare
minimum of recognition (such as of the mother) would suffice.
This use of photographic verification sheds light on the complexity involved in naming kin
as well as recognizing them. The DEO hypothesized that the child had called his maternal uncle
(mamoo) “papa” because his cousins, whose father this man was, must call him that. The use of
photographs for confirming that a person was in fact connected to the family they claimed extended
beyond orphan registration. Photographs were used in other instances too when the DEO wanted
to confirm where precisely an applicant fit within their family tree. The kinds of mistakes that were
made in assigning familial relations were not always deliberate, or the product of deceptive attempts
at identity fraud. DEOs would question applicants claiming to be siblings whether they were truly
siblings, asking “is he your ‘blood’ brother/sister or just a cousin?” (sakha bhai/bhen hai, ke cousin?).
Occasionally, they would be convinced if the person responded in the affirmative, confirming that
the person accompanying them was a next of kin. However, at other times, they would pull up a
photograph of the parent from the family list and ask the accompanying family member, “is this
your mother?” This kind of a confirmation served to reinforce the accuracy of the nuclear family for
each family’s household list. At the same time, given that any individual had two family lists (by birth
and by marriage), the extended family trees were also linked, as will be described later in this chapter.
Thus, in these cases, instead of naming, which could also be awkward as people would hesitate to
call their relatives by name, reference (literally pointing) to a photograph and naming the relation or
responding in the affirmative or negative was easier for the applicant. It revealed that NADRA did
not deploy photographic records for facial recognition in order to solely establish the unique identity
of an individual. Rather, in practice, photographs were purposed towards establishing and verifying
the specific relation between two individuals. In short, photographs were one tool of producing
datafied kinship—establishing and authenticating relations—at the Registration Center.
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Importantly, DEOs’ use of photographs as prompts for recognizing and establishing kin
relations can have unintended effects. Photographs can bring forth reactions towards particular
family members, produce awkwardness around fraught family dynamics and in many cases, trigger
memories about experiences of loss. At the Islamabad Registration Center, I frequently found
myself in the middle of complex and emotionally charged explanations of how and why a document
was missing, often in relation to a husband that could not be brought to the Center or a father who
had never registered for an identity card.16 In part, as the following section details, in addition to
registering identity and kin relations, NADRA also recorded “vital events” in an individual’s life.
Recording vital events, specifically births, deaths and marriages were essential to keep the database
updated. Significantly, these vital events also made and broke kin ties. Such circumstances thus made
a bureaucratic office the unlikely site for venting about problematic or even traumatic events, such
as a disappeared husband (and thus an absence of a definitive death certificate) or an elopement that
cut off access to particular family members. However, it was when an applicant was exceptionally
reticent about a given family member and seemed avoidant in their recognition that led the DEO to
conclude, often on the basis of past experiences, that “something was up” (kuch garh barh hai) with
their family situation (ghar ke maamalat).
Vital Events and Vital Relations
The complex nature of living kin relations came to the fore during instances when applicants came
to the Center to update a “vital” event in their identification. I am drawing the term “vital” from
“vital statistics,” which are composed of “life” events—a term also used by NADRA officials—
including births, marriages, divorce and death. This section will explore how vital events become
16 While the DEOs had a screen between them and applicants, I often sat at an angle to the table so that I could observe both sides of the interaction. The DEOs focused on the screen and would engage with the applicants when directing them towards the camera or the biometric reader, or to ask them questions. I believe my physical position and attentive approach, in contrast to the DEO, may have encouraged applicants to express their concerns about how certain missing documents or absence of family members would affect their identity registration.
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central to establishing kin relations, as well as how they reveal both the bonds and the fractures in
kin ties. Using composites, I will explore the recording of birth, marriage and divorce to trace how
these life-cycle events illuminate distinct aspects of the identification process.
A man, who I will call Ahmed, walked in with an elderly father and a baby. Ahmed worked
and lived in Kuwait but had been back with his family in Pakistan for the past few months. His wife
had been at her parents’ home, who also lived in Islamabad, to deliver their first baby. The baby was
about a month old when Ahmed and his father came to the Registration Center. The primary reason
for their visit was to acquire a b-form for the baby, so they could subsequently apply for the baby’s
passport and travel back to Kuwait. The use of NADRA documents for visa purposes was
commonplace, and DEOs understood the process as well as the need for urgency.
While either parent can register a child for a b-form, that parent does need to be registered
as married within NADRA’s system. Ahmed was not registered, and so the DEO informed him that
first his marital status would need to be changed and they would need the requisite document, a
nikahnama, for that. However, the DEO offered, Ahmed’s wife did show up as married to him even
though Ahmed was not married to her in the database. “Wonderful (zabardast), let’s make the b-form
through her identity card then,” Ahmed was prematurely relieved. The DEO had to explain that it
was necessary for his wife, the mother of the child, to be physically present. Further, he added, “if
we make the b-form without changing the father’s marital status, we can only put your (father’s)
name and not your identity card number. Once we change your marital status too, it will take three
days for the expedited smart card to be ready. This way, your b-form will have your identity card
number as well—which you will likely need for the embassy.”
Ahmed’s father intervened at this stage, and questioned why they couldn’t just make the
change in marital status “in the system” (system ke andar hi andar)? That way, there would be no need
for the new identity card, and they could just proceed straight to making the b-form. The data entry
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operator says they can only make the change as a smart card modification. The DEO spoke slowly
to reiterate how the process was supposed to work. He emphasized that the father’s link to the child
is only through the child’s mother’s marriage to the father. His (father) marriage to her (mother) does
not exist as yet. In other words, the connecting work to produce datafied kinship between the
married couple had yet to be done.
In half an hour, Ahmed returned with his wife and baby. The DEO explained that she was
trying to help them find the fastest way of getting a b-form, and it was a matter of getting all the
information they required to be on the b-form itself. She thus simultaneously updated the marital
status and started the b-form process but asked them to come back directly to her in three days. The
couple asked what address would be listed on the child’s b-form, and whether the DEO knew if
“the b-form address needs to be in Islamabad to get a passport from Islamabad?” The DEO
explained that since the b-form was on the basis of the mother (even as it was now to be connected
to the father), it would have the same address as the mother. In this way, information including
address was passed down from the parent who was the source of the child’s identification.
The need to change marital status for acquiring a child’s passport reflects how NADRA
operates as an information infrastructure, generating and indeed requiring connections between
distinct identity documents as well as persons. In order to get a passport for their child (for the
purpose of a visa), the couple needed to get a b-form, and for that they had to be “married” not just
in real life, according to societal norms, but also in NADRA’s database. While everything appeared
fairly smooth in terms of their familial dynamics—although it is curious that the wife was “married”
but the husband did not feel the need to register himself as married until this point—it is useful to
note how and when one-sided connections prove limited in their capacity. After the couple left, the
DEO complained to me that people “left their (bureaucratic) work halfway,” referring to the fact
that the wife had changed her marital status, but the husband had not. If one family member
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updates and the other does not, both are not automatically connected. In this way, the database
works somewhat like the anthropologists’ kinship chart in as much as the unique identity number
operates as the “ego.” From the perspective of one ego, the wife, a link to another identity card
number (as husband) did appear. However, from the perspective of the other, the husband, one
would not even realize that he was married. NADRA encourages the updating of relations,
particularly through its infrastructural effects (such as the requirements of b-forms for passports),
and so DEOs encourage reciprocity once they notice a one-sided connection. Vital events were thus
excellent opportunities for NADRA to update a discrete event as well as establish an existing
relation to concretize the web of datafied kinship.
While divorce proceedings are notoriously obstacle-ridden in Pakistan for women asking for
divorce,17 even with a divorce certificate, updating this on NADRA’s end could also be complicated
for a number of social and technical reasons. “These days, women come in with divorce certificates,
and just like that, throw it in our face (aaj kal tau larkian…divorce certificate la ke mun pe marti hain),”
explained Imran, a DEO. I questioned if he thought this meant there was a changing attitude
towards divorce and whether that affected the way NADRA functioned. Imran explained “Don’t get
me wrong, I think that for a divorce to happen, both sides have to be at fault. You know 50-50%…
okay, 70-30… man’s fault, woman’s fault. But it is true that earlier, women had a higher tolerance.
Now the girls won’t take it. They just say, ‘I want a divorce.’ I can tell because I see so many divorce
cases come in.” Despite Imran’s perception that women were much more open about their divorcee
status, it could still take a few steps to process this. For one, as Imran explained, if the husband and
wife were not married within the database in the first place, then how could the status be updated to
divorced? In such a situation, Imran said he normally advised women to wait for their next marriage
17 Sarah Khan, “Why Malala’s British Vogue interview put Pakistan in a marriage panic: Here’s the research on marriage, divorce and women’s bargaining power in Pakistan,” The Washington Post, June 17, 2021.
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and just show up as “first time married” at that stage.
The question of divorce or separated couples does not only emerge when updating marital
status. This particular relationship, or rather its absence, also impacts other processes of identity
registration. For instance, in one case an eighteen-year-old had come to the NADRA center to get
his first identity card. While the mother had her identity card, and was able to provide biometric
prints, the DEO did want to connect the applicant to his father. When the DEO asked for the
father’s identity card, the mother and son said he was “far away” in an admittedly unconvincing and
somewhat sheepish tone. The DEO directly asked the mother if they were divorced or separated,
but she simply looked to the side, clearly avoiding the question. When they left, the DEO said,
“most people lie about their data and don’t give us the whole truth… there are like other situations.”
The messiness of divorce, particularly in the way that it complicates women’s lives, often
extends into the lives of NADRA employees when these complex social and familial dynamics are
brought into the Registration Center. As part of my fieldwork, I spent time in the AM office. As
mentioned above, the AMs approved the identity registration form and were also a source of
information and clarification for the DEOs when questions arose.
One day when I was in Ammar Sahib’s (an AM) office, a DEO popped his head in and said
“this woman has come in to renew her identity card, which is about to expire, and she says she is
unmarried. But when I put her unique ID number in, it’s showing up that she actually is married.”
He also told Ammar Sahib that this woman, who we can call Fatima, had come in with her father’s
identity card as well as her parents so that they could provide their biometrics. Fatima had requested
the DEO that her renewed card be linked to her father’s family tree and thus denote her marital
status as single. Ammar Sahib hardly looked away from his screen and said in a bored voice “then
obviously she is married… leave her married.” The DEO paused a moment and then begrudgingly
walked away.
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I was intrigued and immediately asked Ammar Sahib what he thought their situation was
about. He responded that it was likely that she wanted to get married a second time, but the first
husband was delaying the divorce proceedings. Shrugging, he said “it is quite common.” In a few
hours, Fatima and her parents had returned. The DEO escorted them to Ammar Sahib’s office and
asked them to give Ammar Sahib their documents. Fatima handed over an affidavit (bayan-i-halfi),
which stated that she was divorced. Ammar Sahib looked at her and said, “this is not a divorce
certificate or a divorce decree from the court.” Fatima looked down and then looked at her parents.
At this point, Ammar Sahib asked her if she was getting married a second time and she responded,
“I am engaged.” He suggested that they discuss their options as a family but that there was little that
NADRA would be able to do for them given the constraints of documentation.
When the family left Ammar Sahib’s office, he said to me that he had known that something
was off because he had already noticed them on the floor and at the DEO’s desk. “They had been
whispering (khusar phusar kar rahe thay), calling people (idhar udhar phone laga rahe thay) and sure
enough, this whole marriage situation finally came out… I knew it.” He explained that having spent
the last three years at NADRA, he had learned from experience to recognize when something is off.
In some cases, the experience had been more personal than he would like. Ammar Sahib explained
that one day he had gotten a call from an old school friend who was living in Australia. The friend
requested Ammar Sahib that “my wife will come in; can you facilitate her for changing her marital
status and linking it to my identity card so she can apply for her visa to come here?” Ammar Sahib
readily agreed and gave his friend the time of his shift so that once his wife was through the data
entry process, he would be at the approvals desk. “The wife comes in, she is sitting in front of me,
and I have turned my screen towards her… very stupid… to show her the process, and I type in my
identity card number, and then pull up his family tree. The first thing that pops up in his family list is
this other woman’s face and it shows right there that she is his wife.” Ammar Sahib’s friend had two
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wives who were clearly not aware of one another. “As soon as she saw this, she took her phone out
of her bag, called Australia and started shouting in my office (khub hungama machaya). I was stuck in
the middle of this domestic issue (gharailu mamala).”
Ammar Sahib laughed and suggested that if his friend had just given him advance warning of
this situation, it might even have been possible to figure something out. Regardless, he had learned
his lesson. He explained that if Fatima were to get married again and return to NADRA with the
new husband to change the marital status (to married) and the existing marriage showed up, “a
second divorce would have happened right here and all of us would have had to deal with
that.” Ammar had thus become accustomed to thinking through the social repercussions of
approving an update, and the absence of requisite documentation allowed him to avoid a potentially
ugly situation in the future. While NADRA officials are not in the position to make legal decisions
about the validity of citizenship, marriage or divorce claims, similar to what Miriam Ticktin (2005,
363) describes in the case of asylum decisions, the nature of the interaction as it unfolds and
effectively articulating one’s dilemma plays a significant role in how the officials at the NADRA
center respond to applicants’ specific problems—in other words, when a women appears deserving
of help as opposed to when she appears duplicitous depends on a contingent set of interactions, as
illustrated by Ammar’s perspective.18 Thus, the circumstances that impact how fraught or estranged
relations can be brought into the world of communication shape how NADRA conducts its
identification operations, especially as NADRA employees struggle to both maintain the accuracy of
data and “facilitate” the applicant. Even in the absence of these complications, when everything
seems to be “normal,” such as in Ahmed’s case, we can see how kin need to be appropriately linked
to then proceed with further updates, such as connecting a child to its parents. It is these protocols
18 Indeed, parallel to Ticktin’s (2005) argument that policing and humanitarianism are in fact intertwined, interactions at the NADRA Center reveal the inextricable link between securitization, specifically in the form of securitized identification, and governmental services (in this case the provision of authenticated identity).
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that are central to producing and maintaining datafied kinship.
Hierarchy and Obfuscation
The interaction between Ammar Sahib and his friend’s second wife brings to light the centrality of
visualization for how the process of producing a kinship relation within NADRA’s database through
identity registration unfolds. In illustrating the kin network, visualization functions as a device of
“social envisioning” (Peters 1997, 79). Yet, this kind of representation is not unique to new media
and has long been presented in a visual format such as genealogical charts and family trees. But what
is new is how officials can access information about kin networks—in NADRA offices across the
country and indeed even by texting from one’s cell phone an ID card number to a government
number—in ways that is in fact distinct from paper registries of names, relations, dates of birth and
so on.
NADRA’s method of visualizing kin relatedness reveals an “anticipatory logic” characteristic
of a vigilant mode of visuality (Amoore 2007, 231). During my time at the Registration Center, as
well as through conversations with those who were more involved in the design of NADRA’s
database, I learned that one of NADRA’s primary goals was to constantly “cleanse” data by
acquiring more “accurate” and up to date information. This is made possible through NADRA’s
overt visualization. As described above, when the screen faces the applicant, individuals are
encouraged to make corrections in relation to address, marriage, births and such, especially as such
dynamic information might have changed. One aspect of anticipation involves making note, as soon
as possible, of a change—in other words, being a watchful subject that ensures the information is
most up to date.
However, visualizing in and of itself is never enough to authenticate identity within
NADRA’s system. Information on a screen alone does not allow identification to proceed with
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accuracy and efficiency. The trained eye—in this case, the eye that can quite literally read and
write—is necessary for the user to confirm or correct information on the screen. The links between
individual family members, which are made at the level of the database, are not only visualized but
ultimately also compel recognition by family members, who operate as user-assemblage, and
NADRA employees.19 Wendy Hui Kyong Chun argues that interfaces combine visibility and
invisibility: “most strongly, they induce the user to map constantly so that the user in turn can be
mapped” (2011, 60). Such a dynamic is abundantly clear in the visualizing burdens NADRA places
on citizens at the Registration Center, demanding that they respond appropriately to the set of
kinship relations that have been displayed in front of them on the screen. To speak to this
concretely, it is not enough to simply have your relatives be linked to you in NADRA’s datafied
genealogical network. It is equally as important to be able to recognize them on the screen at the
Registration Center.
In many ways, the use of visuality is premised on an intimate relationship assumed between
recognition, misrecognition and identity. This relationship is anticipatory and suggestive but yet
never quite concrete. My focus on the use of technologies of visualization—as opposed to the
much-discussed idea of the “black box” (Pasquale 2015; Latour 1999; Bucher 2018)—is intended to
foreground how citizens are subjected to and intervene in the identification of Pakistan’s security
state. At the same time, screens at NADRA’s office—while overtly mirrored to suggest transparency
in the data-entry process—are not windows into identification technology and, paradoxically, also
play a role in obfuscating securitized practices of e-governance.
Spending time with Ammar Sahib, an AM, allowed me to see another side of the
Registration Center and the registration software itself. In particular, Ammar Sahib’s comment that
19 To clarify, such a visualization of kin could extend beyond what a family member might know, or remember at the time, thus surpassing social knowledge but not beyond the point of human knowability. Family members could pursue this knowledge and figure out who is in their family tree or not, as the concluding section of this chapter suggests.
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he may even have been able to do something about his friend’s situation suggests that he had a
different set of capacities than the DEOs. Moving beyond the data entry stage—beyond both the
DEO and the citizen-applicant—to a “behind the scenes” position offers yet another perspective on
how visual technologies authenticate identity at the NADRA Registration Center.
Obscuring certain kinds of information, particularly code, allows for software itself to
function and for people such as the DEOs to use its features without having to think through all the
details of the system (Galloway 2004). But beyond obfuscation in the design of software, there
remains an interplay between visibility, invisibility and obfuscation within visual technologies
themselves (Chun 2011; Seaver 2019). At NADRA, the technological and bureaucratic process of
authenticating identity can be obfuscated by the screen itself.
As mentioned above, AMs are the final step in the registration process: they approve identity
registration applications, which are then sent to the NADRA Headquarters to undergo further
scrutiny. Applicants would walk into the AMs partitioned office, set apart from the open floor of
DEO stations with a division but no door, and hand over a piece of paper, a printout of the digital
form they had filled in with the DEO. As applicants sat in front of Ammar Sahib, they could only
see his screen if he turned it towards them—an active reversal of interface visibility and interaction
in the earlier stages. Where the previous mirrored screens at the DEO’s stations prompted
applicants to participate in the registration, their absence marks a stage in the identification process
where both the implied transparency of the state’s internal actions and citizen-applicant involvement
come to a lull, if not a halt. The absence of the mirrored screen is not merely symbolic in gesturing
to this difference. The configuration of the registration interface at this stage allows for the official
nature of the AM’s authority to be operationalized. The position of both persons and the single
screen—not to mention the office furniture and the location of the office itself—like at the data
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entry stage, transforms the use of the interface and the ability of the citizen-applicant to engage with
it.
Importantly, the AMs use the same registration software as the DEOs. However, there are
notable differences in the information accessible to the DEO as opposed to the AM. For the AM,
the function of the interface is to curate the glut of information received during the data entry stage.
Another AM, Maria, further explained that the registration software was intended to support the
NADRA employees at the Center—not the citizen-applicants. “When we put in the number, their
family history shows up and all of this helps us especially with fresh applicants. We are able to
understand their case much better and figure out our needs from them.” She described how
somebody in her position, one who gives approvals, is able to “track” the applicants. AM can also
upload the data to the central server for the NADRA Headquarters to take a look, which would
ultimately lead to the printing of a physical identity card. In addition, they can “track” where the
applicant is within the identity registration process if they have, for instance, been waiting for an
identity card but it has not arrived for pick-up. DEOs cannot do this directly from their stations.
Maria was quick to add that this is highly secure as it is an internal system—only people who are
NADRA employees and have passwords on the computers can use them. “It is only intranet
communication, there is no external access,” she emphasized.
The question of access and permission is decisive in how hierarchies and power relations are
managed in the techno-bureaucratic space of the Registration Center. It is here that the technology
of the screen and the technology of the registration software split, serving different groups in
divergent ways. Applicants do not have access to the larger system, and this is reflected in how they
engage or do not engage with the screen. In underlining this, I do not want to dismiss how citizen-
applicants choose to engage, disengage or make a wide variety of choices in relation to the screen
interfaces that do or do not appear in front of them.
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On the contrary: while NADRA’s registration infrastructure is a complex socio-technical
system—with multiple programs running through the registration software alone (aside from the
“backend” at the Headquarters and the Data Warehouse)—its modes of operation and obfuscation
are not all unknowable. Heeding Langdon Winner’s critique (1993) of social constructivism and the
dangers of focusing on black boxes over people, attending to the human and non-human actors
involved can allow us to see how parts of the system are obfuscated (or visualized), often through
intentional choices. Visual technologies allow us to see that the identification process is not black
boxed—impenetrable or immutable—but is carefully controlled in regard to the flow of information
while recruiting citizens to produce identification itself, without which it would not be possible.
Despite NADRA’s claims to transparency and the interventions that citizen-applicants can perform
during identity registration, the opacity of other parts of the process also reveal how NADRA
operates.
For instance, on one hand, among many other aspects of the identity registration process,
mirrored interfaces suggest that applicants have to participate at multiple stages in order for
NADRA to identify them. On the other hand, a discrete moment of obfuscation emerges when the
DEOs or AM will place a verification “mark” on an application before sending it to the backend.
This means that the citizen-applicant might not receive a printed identity card when they were
supposed to, and instead they might be called in for further information and cross-checking. In my
observations, the citizen-applicant would hardly ever notice this, as they were not trained to read the
symbols of the interface in the DEO’s specialized manner.
Another significant element of obfuscation is knowing, in full detail, the protocols of the
NADRA registration process itself. When I asked DEOs as well as AMs about how well versed the
ordinary citizen might have become with NADRA’s use of technology, in particular, they responded
that while the Pakistani public was “sharp” (taiz), and everyone had some familiarity with digital
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technology given the ubiquity of smartphones, NADRA was still unusual in term so of its
advancements in e-governance. In my observations, it was not only the technology (such as
biometrics or cameras) that citizen-applicants found obscure. They also found it difficult to keep
track of the intersection between digital technologies and the complex ecology of documents that
connected NADRA to other government departments, and citizen-applicants to their relatives.
Documentary Kinship
While this chapter has thus far underlined how NADRA produces, and in turn uses, datafied kinship
for the purpose of identity registration, NADRA is only able to do so with the assistance of
documents. However, paper documents are more important for some processes over others at the
Registration Center, and they ultimately work towards the goal of establishing and verifying familial
relations so that they can be inputted as data into the database. For instance, consider the case of
attestation that was discussed as a primary form of kinning biometrics. The b-form, the
aforementioned child registration document, is a digital document in so much as it can be pulled up
from NADRA’s database by DEOs, yet it is frequently brought in by families in paper form. This
form is a requirement for registering fresh identity cards if a parent is physically present with the
child seeking to make a new identity card.
I was repeatedly told, both by data entry operators as well as NADRA officials who work on
the “backend” of the database (the subject of the following chapter) that the most solid proof of a
parent-child link is the co-presence of both. This does not mean that the b-form is at all an
insignificant document—unlike the birth certificate, which multiple NADRA officials recognized
was a weak “breeder” document as most parents would overlook making this and that it could be
produced by the local union council, which has less stringent protocols than NADRA. The b-form
is significant in its ability to establish the links between parents and children, and by extension also
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siblings. However, an ID-card holding parent, accompanying a child, was considered sufficient at the
point of registration. In contrast, if an applicant requests a b-form, then the marital link between
parents was crucial to establish a connection to both parents. This was abundantly evidenced in the
case of Ahmed who had to first be married to his wife (in the database) and then he could link his ID
card number (as opposed to just his name) to his child.
In a parallel fashion, divorce certificates, while not produced by NADRA, were necessary to
update marital status. Importantly, marriage certificates (nikahnama) and divorce deeds are both
documents that are not produced by NADRA. They are produced by civil registration departments
such as the union council and signed by local officials. Their significance is likely connected to the
fact that marriage is a connection that has to be socially (and legally) produced and is not biological
in the same way that other kin relations, which NADRA records at least, are. The centrality of
documents, occasionally produced by state departments other than NADRA, has also been
evidenced in the previous sections: from the requirement for parents’ identity cards to the use of
divorce certificates for changing marital status. Considering the ways datafied kin relations and paper
documents are fundamentally interconnected, I argue that datafied and documentary forms of
kinship are interlinked and even mutually constituted. To underline: one fundamental way this takes
place is when information from specific documents, such as the unique ID number from a parents’
identity card during orphan registration, was inputted into the registration system. In other words,
evidentiary paper documents are integrated into digital identification from the outset.
Yet, a salient characteristic of NADRA’s digital identity registration system is that it can
closely monitor and control how information flows—both within government departments and
officials, as well as between governmental and non-governmental actors.20 Even as multiple copies
20 NADRA officials, particularly a cyber-security official I spoke to, emphasized how their data is heavily secured against cyber-attacks and hacking. However, according to Privacy International, there have been at least four data breaches,
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of an identity card can be in circulation in both paper and digital form—for instance, attached to a
job application form, a petition or application (darkhast) to the government, or as scanned image on
a digital visa application forms—there should, ideally, only be one unique identity number within
NADRA’s database. The varying capacity of paper and digital documents to reproduce themselves
(Gitelman 2014; Prentice 2015) have profound effects on the production of both de-duplicated
identity and the linkages between kin in NADRA’s database. Paper documents play a crucial role,
albeit in varying degrees depending on the document, for both datafying kin and being the
representation of datafied kin. Given their materiality and the fact that they can be possessed in hard
copy form in ways that NADRA’s digital records cannot (one cannot login into NADRA’s portal
and access their parents’ identity cards for instance), they become the site of contestation between
family members in the domain of datafied kinship.
The early part of my fieldwork was largely centered at the NADRA Mega Registration
Center, but as I moved to other sites over the course of almost two years, to Pashtun neighborhoods
in particular, I occasionally returned to the Center with some of the people I met outside. Returning
to the identity registration process from the perspective of the applicant enabled deeper insights into
their perception, strategies and approaches. I will now turn to a complex case of acquiring an
identity card that illustrates first, how digital biometric information as well as the imaginary around
their potential play into how people interact with paper documents. Second, I will analyze this case
to examine how withholding documents from other family members is itself motivated by the way
NADRA operates, but then in turn comes to shape how the database is structured.
Khaista was a young woman about twenty-five years old who lived in the I-10 squatter
settlement (katchi abadi) in Islamabad. Around six to seven years ago, an Afghan man, Rasheed who
leaking identifying information including NADRA family tree data. See “State of Privacy in Pakistan,” report in Privacy International, 26 January, 2019.
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was a taxi-driver and lived in the same settlement, had fallen in love with Khaista. Rasheed had
convinced Khaista’s mother, Gulnar Bibi, that despite his precarious refugee status he was a
hardworking man who would provide for Khaista without condition. When Gulnar Bibi told me this
story, she said that Rasheed had proven true to his word. He treated Khaista and their two children
with love and care, did not leave any need unmet and most importantly, was very respectful towards
his mother-in-law. Importantly, this was in sharp contrast to her other son-in-law, her older daughter
Rukhmina’s husband who was “abusive, drug-addicted and generally a good for nothing (bekaar).”
Khaista’s daughter was now four years old, old enough to go to school, but she did not have
a b-form, which was required for enrolment in public schools. Khaista did have a Pakistani identity
card, but it had expired, and so now she needed to renew it in order to then apply for her daughter’s
b-form. Even if Rasheed was an Afghan, Khaista was entitled to a Pakistani identity card because
Gulnar Bibi was from Peshawar and had a functioning identity card. Early on in their marriage,
Khaista and Rasheed had accompanied Rasheed’s family to a wedding in Kabul. Gulnar Bibi
explained “my jaw grew tired telling Khaista, ‘don’t go to this wedding, don’t go to Afghanistan.’
Her in-laws had promised me when they were married that she would always live here, not go back
to Afghanistan, even though at that time so many Afghans were going back. While Khaista was
there, there was some trouble (haalat kharab ho gaye) so they could not come back. She got stuck there
for months.” She eventually had to return through the Torkham border crossing, but this required
applying for an Afghan passport with a Pakistani visa in order to do so. When Khaista crossed
Torkham, border officials took a photograph and all ten fingerprints, Gulnar Bibi told me in an
exasperated tone with her head in her hands. Khaista protested that she had ripped up that passport
as soon as she had crossed so there was no sign of it. Regardless, the whole family was terrified that
NADRA will find the record of her crossing with an Afghan passport and assume she is an Afghan
national.
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Gulnar Bibi and Khaista were afraid that if she went to get an identity card, NADRA would
discover—on the basis of fingerprints recorded at the border now digitally transmittable—that she
had travelled back from Afghanistan and was married to an Afghan. They were convinced that on
this basis they would deny her an identity card. While NADRA has developed an integrated border
management system, this does not mean that biometric and photographic information from border
crossings is integrated into the central server hosting data. Biometrics, and perhaps more
importantly their imaginary, take on a unique significance in this context. Had Khaista crossed the
border and ripped up her passport, there would still be a paper record of her presence. However, the
possibility for that record to simultaneously exist in Islamabad would be a more distant possibility. A
digital, additionally biometric record changed the likelihood of being tracked. There was a distinct
contrast between how Gulnar Bibi understood paper moving between Torkham and Islamabad and
the possibility of instantaneous digital transfer. The imaginary of biometric control and traceability
was what produced fear and trepidation despite Khaista’s legitimate Pakistani status, as evidenced by
her already existing identity card. In this way, ordinary citizens with cross-border familial networks
speculated about the digital affordances of databases as well as biometrics, which trumped existing
identity documentation and entitlements.
Gulnar Bibi’s hesitation and concern for her own identity card, which came up repeatedly
during our conversation about Khaista’s card, emerged from a combination of unknowability (not
knowing what NADRA knows) and anxieties about a chain of kin relations: her own to Khaista’s,
Khaista’s to her husband and his to his Afghan kin. Thus, Khaista’s identification by NADRA was
not hers alone but connected to her husband as well as her mother. In this way, the user assemblage
emerges again; the identity-card holder or applicant engages with NADRA’s identification protocols
collectively (as a family) as opposed to as a single individual.
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As Gulnar Bibi strategized on how to deal with this dilemma, she kept repeating that this—
Khaista’s marriage—was the girl’s kismat, her fate. Even ending up across a closed border was
another iteration of ill-luck. She was quick to clarify: Khaista’s husband is a good man, he drives a
taxi, leaves no need unfulfilled and is a caring father. The fact that he happens to be Afghan… that
was up to God. She intended to go into NADRA and tell them this quite honestly. How could they
dispute that this was a matter of kismat and no fault of her or her daughter’s?
Months later, I was visiting Gulnar Bibi at her home and she mentioned that she had just
returned from the NADRA Center. She had accompanied her other daughter and her daughter-in-
law, who were both registering for fresh ID cards. It had all gone smoothly. The DEO they were
assigned turned out to be a former neighbor (jannay wala). He used to live in one of the “constructed
homes” (kothis) behind her street in the formal part of the sector her squatter settlement was located
in. It had taken her a while to place him. “Did you live behind Azhar Mahmood’s (a well-known
Pakistani cricketer, now retired) house,” she asked him. He looked surprised and said yes. She
described his gate, so he would know she wasn’t making this up for a favor. Then he recognized her
as well “Aunty, I think I’ve seen you around too!” He had since bought a house and moved out of
the neighborhood. Once this familiarity was established, Gulnar Bibi felt more comfortable, now
that he was a “jannay wala” and so told him about Khaista’s problem. He told her to come the
following morning, with Khaista, straight to his desk. He said he would only be able to tell if they
had a record of Khaista’s border crossing after he put her biometrics in the system. He did not know
for sure, as he had not experienced this before. If the records didn’t show up, he would be able to
make the card.
“I think this is the right moment for me to be entirely honest with NADRA,” Gulnar Bibi
said and proceeded to narrate the speech I had heard a few times. It was an opportunity to rehearse
the truth. She added though that she had set a condition for their marriage: Khaista’s husband would
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never take her to Afghanistan permanently, as she didn’t want her to be so far from home. Even
when Khaista went for a brief period, like the wedding, Gulnar Bibi had a terrible, sinking feeling in
her heart that lasted two weeks. She would tell NADRA everything, Gulnar Bibi reiterated. I offered
to accompany them if they thought that would help, and they insisted I come.
The following day, we showed up to NADRA at eight o’clock in the morning to avoid a
long line. Gulnar Bibi’s former neighbor, DEO, had asked her to not get a ticket number and come
to his desk directly. When we went downstairs near his station, he was nowhere in sight. The AM,
dealing with approvals on that floor, happened to be near us while we searched, likely looking a bit
lost. He asked us to take a ticket. Out of nervousness, Gulnar Bibi took a number and we went to
the central waiting area, partly to buy time, hoping the former neighbor would show up. Gulnar Bibi
called his number, but he did not answer. Gulnar Bibi’s number in line came and passed by.
At this point, I went upstairs to look for an AM I had gotten to know well but found that his
shift had been changed from morning to afternoon. We then asked the lady at the ticket counter
whether she knew when the man we were looking for usually arrived, or if she had his number. The
woman made a comment about how she does not know of everyone’s comings and goings. Also, he
did not have his number, either. Gulnar Bibi thought she was lying. Gulnar Bibi then went to the
other data entry station, near her former neighbor’s, to inquire if the other DEO knew him. He
questioned her a bit about why she was waiting, and she explained Khaista’s issue, in some detail, to
him. He suggested that she get an affidavit on a stamp paper. There were no real details on what this
should say or what purpose it would serve. In order to confirm that this would be the right decision,
Gulnar Bibi decided to go ask the “in charge.” This was the same man who had directed us to get
the ticket number. As she was talking to him (explaining the situation starting from Brekhna’s
marriage and then moving on to the question of fate), I saw another DEO waving to catch my
attention.
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I had spent time, daily, at the Registration Center during the first part of my fieldwork.
During this time, the man now waving at me, Khurshid, had been employed as a helper (madadgar).
Today, Khurshid was sitting at a data entry station. As we exchanged greetings, he mentioned he had
gotten a “promotion,” and that his experience in dealing with people’s concerns and confusions was
proving quite useful for his current position. He asked me why I was there today, and I explained
Gulnar Bibi’s situation to Rashid. He responded that they only needed one parent to make the card
and so could make Khaista’s card “through” her mother, Gulnar Bibi. In Urdu, the phrase is un ke
card ke uper banana, which roughly translates to make the card “through” or “on the basis” of
someone else’s. This phrasing is insightful as it suggests connectedness of people and even cards
themselves. I rushed over to find that the AM had given Gulnar Bibi a similarly affirmative answer,
or so I gleaned from Gulnar Bibi’s recitation of well-wishing prayers at him. Apparently, her
explanation of the marriage circumstances had been sufficiently persuasive. The AM was joking with
his colleague about the logic, saying that he would like to meet Gulnar Bibi’s son-in-law to identify
reasons for his success, given that most of his own marital proposals had been rejected. Gulnar Bibi
did not fully follow this and was now dragging Khaista’s husband towards the two men, instructing
him, in Pashto, to thank the “officers.”
Khaista’s registration process began smoothly. However, after Khurshid put in Gulnar Bibi’s
card number, he saw that her brother (Khaista’s maternal uncle) had two cards. In other words, he
was duplicated within the database.21 He questioned Khaista about this, and she said she vaguely
remembered that one of his cards had gotten lost but was unaware of anything else. Gulnar Bibi was
away from the station at the time. Khurshid did not pursue this further. I did not want to create
additional problems for Khaista, and so did not ask as many questions as I would have liked, but I
21 Technically, given that each individual’s biometrics are unique to them, there should be no duplications at all. However, this can and does happen, likely through either the system not being able to make a match or through its circumvention. See Cohen (2019).
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did ask him how a duplication was even possible. I did not receive a direct answer, just that “there
will always be ways” (jahan jor wahan tor) for people to exploit some loopholes.
Here, the question of de-duplication, due to its ability to prevent identity duplicates through
the singularity and uniqueness of any individual’s biometric prints, raises questions about the need
for the interpersonal and messy complexities of datafying kinship. Yet datafied kinship performs its
own de-duplicating work. By recording parental links in the database at the time of registration,
datafied kinship works to establish a unique relation between parent and child. This unique descent-
based relation cannot be duplicated; every individual only has one mother and one father in the
database. De-duplicating relations works to establish a unique identity in its own way. This
biological, descent-based link serves the function of identity de-duplication in the context of the
multiple relations recorded during the registration process, including marital and sibling relations.
As soon as we left, with Gulnar Bibi and Khaista in high spirits, they told me that a few years
ago this particular uncle had been in possession of Gulnar Bibi’s parents’ original identity cards and
had withheld them from her in a time of need. Gulnar Bibi’s husband was alive at that time but was
uninterested in making an identity card, and without him Gulnar Bibi could only get one through
her natal family. Yet, this brother would not give her any of their parents’ identity documents. This
deeply angered Gulnar Bibi. As a result, through means she would not disclose to me—she simply
said, “I have my ways” (meray bhi tariqay hain)—she got a hold of his card and refused to give it up.
He thus was forced into making a new one. This incident revealed how first, duplication within
NADRA, and potentially other such database-level concerns, can be intimately connected to kinship
conflicts. Second, it reflects how paper documents could be withheld to produce effects within the
database.
Such a conflict, not coincidentally, is entangled with tensions built through NADRA’s
identification practices themselves. NADRA is by no means at the origins of fraught kin relations.
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However, the manner in which vindictiveness and strategies for revenge surface in the context of
identification is closely tied to the element of mutual need. This need is heightened by kinship-based
bureaucratic work. Family members frequently share documentation requirements—such as the
identity cards or other documents from parents—but only one or two members, likely their male
children, possess the originals, creating inequities in terms of access and favors. In turn, the mode in
which vengeance is enacted can also be through documentation. Relatedly, given her experience with
her own brother, Gulnar Bibi harbored intense fear of her other daughter, Rekhmina Gul’s in-laws.
As a result, she refused to share any of her documents with them, keeping them under lock and key.
In other cases, the willingness of kin to provide documents, or to accompany family members to
vouch for them in person, were seen as proof of loyalty and care.
Registration Failures
This chapter has demonstrated how the prevalence of “datafied kinship” alongside the desire to
continue datafying kin relations—a motivation that involves significant documents as the previous
section as shown—produce interactions where the infrastructure of the Registration Center itself is
repurposed for datafying kinship. This infrastructure, continually reworked through social practices
and interactions, in turn produces heightened expectation upon kin to show up and assist one
another. As Gulnar Bibi and Khaista’s experiences illustrate, an intensive data mesh of
interconnected identities can produce new kinds of pressures emerge—both within the database (as
we will see in the following chapter) and beyond in the domain of social and family relations. In
addition, this chapter has dealt with the various kinds of obstacles that constitute the everyday
practices of identity registration. In conclusion, I will address how the absence, particularly death, of
kin can, albeit rarely, prevent identity registration. In this vein, I will now turn what happens when
someone is entirely unable to register for an identity card and what might produce such a situation.
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Such circumstances may appear to be “outside” of datafied kinship in as much as it represents a
failure to encode kin, but it is in fact another facet of it.
Zainab is a young woman whose life is organized around her kin—her children, as well as
her affinal relations she shares a house with, alongside of course her natal family—these kin relations
are not able to transform themselves into documentary proof that could identify her as a discrete
individual. I was introduced to Zainab at one of my other field sites in the context of my research on
identification. Meeting her outside the Registration Center allowed me to see how the density of her
kinship networks, which enclose her entire being in the house she lives in, fail to extend into state
authenticated identification. This is primarily because Zainab’s parents and her husband are all dead.
In addition, both her father and her husband had two wives each, and the other set of relatives, in a
case of somewhat astonishing symmetry, have full control over the sources of documentary kinship.
In the absence of any living next of kin and any verifiable links to those who are now dead, Zainab’s
circumstances reveal a paradox embedded in how modern biometric identification functions. On the
one hand, biometric technology, which makes use of unique bodily information to determine
individual identity, is not enough to determine who an individual is. Hence, as described above,
NADRA uses kinship relations to create a network within which individuals can be located as
discrete and unique. And yet, Zainab’s life and experience with NADRA, specifically her inability to
be turned into an “identifier,” demonstrates that a web of kinship relations does not always translate
into state-authenticated identity. The relationship between identity—in this case, an identity
thoroughly shaped by kin relations—and identification—a state authorized process of authenticating
individual identity—breaks down.
But why did Zainab need such a form of state-produced and verified identity in the first
place? Zainab said she did not care much for an identity card for herself, and she clearly had not
needed identifying documents prior to this moment. Why did the need arise now? Her children,
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Fatima, age seven, and Khalid, age four, needed b-forms, the document that verifies the identity of
children still under eighteen years so that they could enroll in the public elementary schools.
Currently, they were in a private school that was becoming too expensive for Zainab to afford. Her
in-laws did not consider it necessary to continue the children’s education (especially her daughter’s)
beyond middle school. Zainab feared that without her in-laws’ financial assistance, her children
would have to leave school. To produce these b-forms, the children had to be connected to a
properly identified next of kin. In the absence of their father, the only option left was for Zainab to
make an identity card.
During one of our initial visits to the NADRA office, in a hopeful search for official
authentication of Zainab’s identity, we went first to see Ammar Sahib (an AM mentioned above) and
explained Zainab’s situation. He asked if Zainab’s natal kin, such as her sister, might have an identity
card? Zainab could potentially use her sister’s identity card to vouch for herself. If Zainab had a next
of kin in the database, she too could gain access. Zainab said one of her three sister’s might have a
card. She remembered when her sister and her sister’s husband had visited many years ago, they
were discussing the identity card. I asked if she had their cell phone number? Her sister did not own
a cell phone, but her husband did. I was amazed at Zainab’s ability to recall his number, after a few
tries, entirely from memory. When Zainab’s husband was alive, she would be able to call her sister,
and so had memorized it from back then. She was reluctant to call now even though there was an
urgent need. “My sister’s husband is very strange. He had a dream that he was listening to music,
laying on his bed, when a fire started in one corner of the room. It soon enveloped the entire room
and burnt him alive. Since then, he had become very religious. He took this as a sign from God that
he needed to change his ways. Now, if anybody plays a song at a wedding, he loses his mind. I am a
little afraid of him. When you’ll call him, you’ll see, he has these religious sermons playing. Oh, that’s
how we will know if we got the right number!”
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Sure enough, I tried the number on my cell phone (Zainab did not have one) and heard vivid
details of a Day of Judgment (qaiyamat) scene. I handed the phone to Zainab, and she spoke to him.
It turned out that while he did have a card, Zainab’s sister did not. NADRA had changed their rules,
and now required all women to be photographed. He did not agree to this as it would break the
rules of pardah. Zainab and I collectively face-palmed. As long as Zainab’s next of kin, her sister, did
not have an identity card, she could not either. While NADRA allows for women to draw upon their
natal relations as the source of authentication, the lived reality of women such as Zainab—whose
connection with their natal kin has been fractured through experiences of marriage and the
separation, even displacement, it entails—does not further their ability to successfully identify
themselves according to NADRA’s requirements. Moreover, Zainab’s everyday life is intertwined
with those of her affines but in the absence of her husband, relatives such as her mother-in-law, are
unable to connect them to their family tree without a “living” link.
The death of the husband led to the death of documentary potential; Zainab only has copies
of his identity documents and is unable to produce more of her own. Additionally, Zainab
complained that her late husband, as a man, could do the running around required for bureaucratic
work, which Zainab’s gendered position does not allow. It is in this way that identity records, paper
or digital, are never about individuals alone. They inevitably involve a complex set of relations, dead
or alive. To extend this further, Zainab’s exclusion from the process of biometric identification—we
could not even get the data entry process started—reveals the inherently relational nature of identity
that implicates much more than a set of fingerprints, and instead interpolates a whole host of
complex kinship connections.
During our next visits (and we went twice more) to the NADRA Registration Center, we
had decided we would try to get the b-form for Zainab’s children through their paternal
grandmother who did have an identity card. In addition to Zainab, her children and their
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grandmother, we were accompanied by Zainab’s neighbor-friend and this friend’s mother. They
were very close with Zainab, and at some point, as we were waiting for our turn, the mother offered
that she would claim that Zainab was her daughter. As she did this, she said “she is like my
daughter.” Of course, we knew this would not work because first, there would be need for some
kind of proof (as discussed above) and second, because Zainab was worried that her nervousness
about the lie would surely reveal it. We went up to the data entry operator—it was someone new
and I was not familiar with them through my earlier fieldwork—and explained our proposal for
registering the children for b-forms through their grandmother. We were promptly told that this
would only be possible if she (grandmother) was the children’s legal guardian. I immediately called a
lawyer friend to see what this process looked like, and they explained that if the children’s parent
was living, this was possible but a bit complicated. In addition, Zainab and her mother-in-law (the
children’s grandmother) looked nervous and said that the men in their family would likely not
approve, because why were they, as males, not given the guardianship? We drove home somewhat
dejected.
Zainab’s neighbor had told her that getting birth certificates for her children might help their
case, and even as I knew that this would likely not work for NADRA’s requirements, I did not want
to advise Zainab against it just in case it did work. During our very last trip to NADRA, after having
acquired these birth certificates from their local union council, we went up to an assistant manager
that I recognized but was less familiar with. He immediately took me to the side, and said “how do
you know this woman is not Afghan? You must not be so trusting.” Interestingly enough, Zainab
had borrowed her neighbor-friend’s burqa for precisely this reason: Zainab and her family wore
pleated frock shirts that were considered typical of Afghan women. I explained that I knew Zainab
well, and that she was younger than me, and was born in Chakwal (Punjab) until she had gotten
married. I explained that, in fact, Zainab spoke better Punjabi than I did! Zainab promptly started
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telling the AM in Punjabi that she was indeed born in Chakwal, narrating the dates and how her
parents had died there. She also explained all the other options we had attempted and exhausted.
The AM explained that the only way he saw out was if there was a birth certificate record, for Zainab
from Chakwal. In addition, she would need to bring her parents’ death certificates too. “So, we
would have to go to Chakwal?” I asked in clarification. When the AM responded in the affirmative,
Zainab snorted and whispered to me “Great! Let’s go to Chakwal… then my brother-in-law will
murder us… and someone else can try to make our death certificates.” Zainab was joking about the
proximity of patriarchal violence that frequently centers around the mobility of women, which
rendered the AM’s proposition appear entirely absurd to her reality. The last time I met Zainab, we
continued to joke about our Chakwal road trip, and made detailed plans about the parathas we would
take, the places we would stop at along the way.
Conclusion
In conclusion, the obstacles in Zainab’s life, specifically concerning her kin relations, demonstrate
how identity registration can become an impossibility for some. Zainab was admittedly one of the
few people I met who had such a hard time. Yet, it is for this reason that I have outlined how each
option that was made available to her ultimately became impossible, largely because of male
relatives. In addition, while I met Zainab outside the Center, which allowed me to see the
complexities of this process from her perspective, it was during our time at the Islamabad
Registration Center that I saw how relations were recruited during attempts at registration. In short,
between the phone calls and Zainab’s neighbor’s mother offering her access into another fictive kin
unit, new and alternative communication channels were tried and tested. While these failed, for the
most part, due to the gendered social world that Zainab inhabits, these failures also speak to the
protocols of database structure and what it sees as viable kin and a reliable record of viable kin.
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Moreover, Zainab’s failed registration process shares a central element with all registration
processes: given the complexity of what is being encoded, the data inputted is never “raw”
(Gitelman 2013). To underscore, datafied kinship is constituted through the complex and frequently
tense interpersonal dynamics between kin relations, non-digital (paper) sources of information and
the situated routines of data entry operators, assistant managers and applicants. Datafication, of kin
relations in particular, is thus not clean or simple by any means, and it is through a multimedia
interactional process that identification data comes to be lodged within NADRA’s database.
While this chapter has shown the “front end” of how datafied kinship is recorded, constructed and
enacted at the Registration Center. But there is another dimension of NADRA’s institutional
environment that generates many of these protocols: the “back end” where this data is processed,
organized and made useful for purposes of governance and security. This is an institutional and
social domain which both precedes the registration process and extends beyond it. We will now turn
to the protocols that, in many ways, have structured the techno-social world of Islamabad’s Mega
Registration Center.
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CHAPTER 2
Coding Kinship
Structure and Relations in an Identity Database
Introduction
Driving over to my first meeting with the ex-chairman of the National Database and Registration
Authority, I took little notice of the substantial number of check posts on my route. It was a hot
afternoon and everybody, including those tasked with ensuring the “security” of the capital city of
Islamabad, was a bit sluggish. It was only after I arrived and took the elevator up to the former
NADRA chairman Brigadier (retired) Moin’s privately-run tech security firm that the checkpoints I
had just been waved through flashed in my mind. Connections between the seemingly disparate
phenomena of digital security for securitizing identification infrastructures and national security—a
nebulous concern about the “terrorists” that might walk amongst us—concretized for me during
that afternoon.
In particular, Brigadier Moin emphasized the importance, for purposes of securitization, to
track uniquely identified individuals. In the interview that followed, Brigadier Moin told me that
what held primacy for NADRA’s process of identifying individuals was not the link between body
and name alone, a connection established through biometric technology that records unique bodily
characteristics. Instead, NADRA relies on the unique ID number on the computerized national
identity card to consolidate an array of various, non-biometric types of data recorded in its database.
This is a significant difference by which digital identification systems operate. Frequently, as we see
in the case of government databases for social welfare, individuals are assigned a unique ID that
connects their personal data to this unique ID (which can then be easily authenticated by biometric
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technology such as a fingerprint scanner). For NADRA’s database, all of this is true, in addition to
the fact that NADRA employs kinship as the central method by which individuals are identified.
Individuals are understood to be who they are through their relation to others.
Before we return to Brigadier Moin, let us consider the significance of relatedness for the
process of identification through the example of a single individual. Zehra has a driver’s license
which has her driver’s license number on it, her gender, her address and a (bad) photograph. Zehra
additionally has a NADRA card that has a single number on its face, gender, address and her father’s
name. The NADRA card also, through this unique identifier, connects Zehra’s unique identifier to
her mother’s, sister’s and father’s unique identifiers. For Zehra’s driver’s license, Zehra is to be
understood as an individual who lives in a house and is authorized to drive a car through that
identification. For Zehra’s NADRA card, Zehra is understood as an individual who is connected to
her mother, sister and father—as well as, potentially, her mother’s father and mother, her sister’s
husband and her father’s brothers. This interlinked circuit of connections means, too, that Zehra will
be understood in the future through any new kin she might become connected to, such as children,
grandchildren, etc. This is because NADRA’s identification protocol relies on networked
identification practices, not singular instances of connecting individuals to their unique identifiers
and their personal data alone. And here we encounter a logic central to NADRA—it uses existing
familial networks to uniquely individuate a person, not a single ID that authenticates itself.
Despite having a NADRA card my entire adult life, I only realized the full capacity for
relationality when Brigadier Moin described how each card has a unique number on the “front end”
(quite literally printed on the card) and there are at least two other numbers that are on the “back
end”—not on the card but in NADRA’s data warehouse. These unique identifiers are linked to
other identity card holders’ unique numbers in the database, connecting together two sets of family
trees: affinal and consanguineous, one with the spouse and the other with the natal family. The
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connections between these numbers, in Brigadier Moin’s words, created a “global family.”
Relatedness is the foundation of NADRA’s identification practices. Biometric identification
technology establishes a relation between bodily features (such as fingerprints) and a unique
individual—which is embodied in an ID number. NADRA uses this biometric technique not just to
connect a body and a name, but to link uniquely identified kin with one another in the backend of
the database.
The purpose of this chapter is to analyze the technics of NADRA’s identification system as
it not only records the relations between persons but also, ultimately, shapes the social world of
these relations—the latter being the focus of the next chapter. A central and related goal is to
illustrate how NADRA operates as a technology of individuation as opposed to an instrument of
classification. To this end, I examine how NADRA constructs a unique individual through their
relations, and thus intensifies the network of kin relatedness for the purpose of individuation. I first
provide a brief overview of digital identification systems, their motivations and their uses, and situate
NADRA within a broad comparative framework. I then interpret how NADRA officials apprehend
social relations in Pakistan specifically, refracted through kin-based thinking as well as a logic of
database and national security—as is reflected in technological categories of “family intruder” and
“system independent” that flag unverified identities in the database. In this vein, this chapter focuses
on the technologies and practices that NADRA uses to encode into data the complexity and
multiplicity of relatedness to make its identification procedures more robust. I investigate how this
process reconstructs individual identity without explicitly recording already-existing social identity
markers, such as ethnicity or nationality. Thus, this chapter follows the intersecting institutional and
technological cultures that informed fundamental shifts and continuities in the development of
NADRA’s database. Through the perspective of those who construct it, I explore how this database
logic intersects with kin relations, thus mutually constituting both data and identities.
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Emerging from these logics of databased identification and national security, NADRA
shares certain features with other contemporary biometric-based digital identification systems, yet it
also differs in other distinctive ways. In order to contextualize NADRA within the broader arena of
increasingly pervasive digital identification systems, I will outline the primary similarities and
differences between NADRA and other ID systems. A survey of the social science and humanities
literature on digital identification shows that, overwhelmingly, the primary function of these
identification systems is social welfare provision. While biometrics have been associated in the
broader field of surveillance studies with privacy and securitization in our post-9/11 past (Gates
2011, Magnet 2011, Lyon 2009), most digital identity registration programs are generally directed at
aid, welfare, ration and social security schemes.
In fact, the use of biometrics for welfare services such as cash transfers has provoked a
debate on what has most recently been termed the dialectic of surveillance and recognition, which
identifies surveillance and humanitarian aid work as “mutually compatible” as opposed to “two sides
of a binary debate” (Weitzberg et. al. 2021, 2). While some have critiqued the use of digital ID in the
context of aid by calling it “surveillance humanitarianism” (Latonero 2019), others have suggested
that the use of biometrics is not always oppressive since digital ID can also serve as a valued token
of membership (Ferguson 2015). In contrast to these digital ID programs that are catered to welfare
provision, as I hope to show below and further in Chapter Four when analyzing Pakistan’s “manual”
identity registry, securitization—as a system for most recently addressing security concerns in the
form of terror attacks and the presence of terrorist networks post-9/11—was always embedded in
the design of Pakistan’s identification system. Ultimately, NADRA did provide verification services
for cash transfers for a welfare program for women (the Benazir Income Support Programme, now
known as Ehsaas), but its original function was not welfare provision. This is significant because
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NADRA’s design was not as a “platform” for identification that could facilitate auxiliary state social
services, which is how the world’s largest biometric database, Aadhar, was conceptualized.
Aadhar is India’s unique ID platform (Singh 2019), which also happens to be the point of
immediate regional comparison for both scholars and my NADRA interlocutors who immediately
insist on radical differences between the two, as I will discuss in more detail below. Aadhar was
conceived by Nandan Nilekani, co-founder of one of the largest Indian tech companies Infosys, as a
“universal ID gateway” (Singh 2019) whose sole function is to confirm that an individual is who
they say they are (Cohen 2019). Aadhar literally means “foundation” in Hindi and was designed to
offer interoperability with a number of other state and corporate bodies (Baxi 2019). Most
importantly, and perhaps what makes it most different from NADRA, Aadhar decided to separate
rights or entitlements from identity, and in so doing, unlike NADRA, its enrollment is not restricted
to Indian nationals alone. Rao and Nair (2019) contextualize the importance of Aadhar within the
concerns about “leakages” in the welfare system. While India spends one sixth of its GDP on
welfare, its welfare system is “riddled with ‘ghost’, ‘duplicate’ and ‘fake’ identities” (Rao and Nair
2019, 5). As a result, given its affordance of de-duplicating identity, specifically in the context of
welfare provision, Aadhar was designed to deal more efficiently with India’s massive poverty
problem.
Beyond the Global South, readers are most likely aware of the United States’ use of Social
Security Numbers for allocating benefits as well as serving as a unique identifier for non-
governmental services. Yet distinct from cases like NADRA, while the Social Security Number
(SSN) in the United States was created in 1937 for tracking earning histories so as to calculate
benefit entitlements, the United States’ Social Security Administration intentionally restricted the
collection of information where it was not directly related to benefit—most importantly, for our
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purpose, the SSN cannot collate information about marriage, citizenship status or parentage.1 In
addition, the SSN is not linked to any biometric data, primarily due to privacy concerns by citizens.
Similarly, in the United Kingdom, there have been selective registration schemes including
the registration of pensioners which did deploy fingerprinting (Higgs 2010), however the effort to
create a national identity register did not arise until 2006, a direct response to 9/11 and concerns
about terrorism. However, this attempt produced significant national controversy about what such a
database would include, especially worries about the inclusion of individuals’ biometric data.
Subsequently, the Identity Card Act of 2006 was repealed in 2011 due to concerns about civil
liberties and state intrusion.2
While countries like the US and the UK have controlled the role of biometric identification
due to privacy concerns, biometric-based civil registration systems linked to cash transfers for the
poor are being developed in Brazil and Mexico and are already widespread in Asian and African
countries (Breckenridge 2014). Further, while biometric-based documents and identity systems are
limited in the US and Europe—as evidenced in the efforts by legislative bodies to curtail such
efforts, and the surveillance capacity of European and American passports which do use biometrics
are in fact limited by these same protections of civil liberties—foreign migrants or visitors entering
the Schengen Area, for instance, are required to provide all ten fingerprints.3
1 The history of the Social Security Number, and why the number was used instead of names and particularly instead of fingerprints, is worth taking a closer look: “Why didn't the Social Security Board just use an individual's name and address as the identifier? The deficiency of such a scheme was already well known. A 1937 publication recounts, a recent news account states that the Fred Smiths of New York City have had so much trouble in being identified by their creditors, the courts, and even their friends, that they have joined together in forming the 'Fred Smiths, Incorporated,' to serve as a clearing house for their identification problems.’ Some government agencies, such as the U.S. War and Navy Departments, the Veterans Administration (for paying pensions and for adjusted compensation certificates), and the Post Office Department (for Postal Savings depositors) used fingerprints for identification. However, the use of fingerprints was associated in the public mind with criminal activity, making this approach undesirable (Wyatt and Wandel 1937, 45–47). A numbering scheme was seen as the practical alternative. Thus, the employer identification number (EIN) and the SSN were created” (Puckett 2009, 56). 2 “ID cards scheme to be scrapped within 100 days,” The Guardian, May 27, 2010. 3 “Citizenship Pathways and Border Protection: EU Schengen Area,” The Library of Congress, Legal Reports, accessed June 28, 2021, https://www.loc.gov/law/help/citizenship-pathways/euschengen.php.
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Where does NADRA stand in the midst of its contemporaries? Even as identification
technologies in contemporary Pakistan were not designed with the goal of welfare provision,
NADRA is part of a broader turn to the “biometric state.” (Breckenridge 2014). Breckenridge posits
that biometric “technologies and architecture of identification are very different from older forms of
written identification that have produced the modern state” (2014, 8). I will delve into the question
of transformation in this chapter through NADRA officials and how they understand the changes as
well in Chapter Four which discusses an earlier shift in the 1970s. For now, following Breckenridge,
I situate NADRA within a history of biometrics that is certainly connected to concerns about the
registration of Indian families in colonial South Africa.
As Breckenridge argues, the South African story is crucial to the South Asian story because
Indian migrants to South Africa were asked to record their fingerprints by the colonial state
(Breckenridge 2014). This early use of biometrics occurred at the beginning of Gandhi’s political
career in South Africa, and he organized the Indian community in South Africa against what he saw
as a “criminalizing” policy of the colonial government. Gandhi’s primary argument against
registration was that it violated the sanctity of the Indian family and, somehow, also the masculinity
of Indian men. The colonial fingerprinting regime was directed not only at Indian men but also
women and children, and thus entire families were to be recorded and registered as a means to
manage mobility and migration. However, at this stage registration was not universal: Breckenridge
traces how biometric registration first targeted Indians in the Transvaal and was then directed at
racial segregation and the registration of Africans for the apartheid state. Ultimately, when biometric
registration became universally adopted within South African society, it came to be directed at
welfare provision—and this is how South Africa’s biometric identification system still stands today.
Despite this contemporary difference, I believe the shared history of South Asian and South
African biometric identification, particularly given the registration of families, points us in a useful
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direction. The collective registration at the level of the family in the case of South Africa has
resonance with how NADRA is structured today. In addition, family registers were not limited to
the colonies. Germany had the “familienbuch” that was introduced in 1938 and discontinued in
2009 (Caplan 2014). In Japan, the “koseki” dually functions as a family and citizenship registry, and
many household registries in East Asia date back to the sixth century (Chapman and Krogness
2014).
NADRA can also be understood as a family registry but with one absolutely crucial
difference: NADRA (and the manual registration system before it) also uniquely identifies
individuals. In fact, unlike German and Japanese examples, it centers the individual’s identity card as
the primary “product,” in the words of interlocutors at NADRA’s project division. In this mode,
NADRA is a digital ID system that brings biometric technology and the family registry together.
Moreover, in terms of process, the distinctive feature of NADRA is that it both uniquely identifies
individuals and then links these unique individuals to their family members. As a database, NADRA
functions as distinct from a simple family registry, which has a closed set of family units, since
NADRA is able to generate links between individuals in order to produce a kin network—as opposed
to a simple list of related family members. NADRA creates family networks by both birth and
marriage, and in doing so can produce a “global family” instead of a mere localized family registry. It
is the trajectory of such a design that this chapter investigates.
As I show below, NADRA’s kinship-based identification illuminates how a security state like
Pakistan builds its capacity to act upon the everyday life of its citizens. While much of the literature
discussed above on biometric identification focuses on the context of welfare distribution,
NADRA's identification architecture is purposed towards security.4 By connecting individuals with
one another, no one can stand alone, or independent, in the database, as I will describe below. As a
4 This is the case across regions from South Africa to India, see Donavan (2015), Rao and Nair (2019).
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result, if any individual is without a “family,” they are identified as suspicious and thus requiring
identity and citizenship reverification. It is in this identificatory process that NADRA enables a
system of securitization that is linked to the family. Being unconnected to your kin provokes
suspicion and draws an individual, already uniquely identified within NADRA’s database, further
into NADRA’s securitized gaze.
For NADRA, the persistence of such a security logic based on connection is evidenced in
the fact that when the database individuates, it asks “who are you linked to?” as opposed to “what
are you?” In fact, the two questions are integrated into one. The database design, based on descent-
based kin links, shows how the very relations between persons are deployed to refine security
measures—not through overt control over the population but through a gradual process where a
security logic permeates the very fabric of social relations—shaping the domain of kin relations,
neighborhood dynamics as well as people’s understanding of the implications (positive and negative)
of their connections with others. I illustrate this more fully in the following chapter that details
navigations of Pashtun migrants in Islamabad and their encounters with NADRA’s identification
practices to show how NADRA’s practices impact possibilities for collective contestation and
participation in everyday life in the securitized capital city.
While security logics impact certain groups over others, as we see in Pakistan with Pashtuns,
interestingly, a system like NADRA does not actually record individuals’ ethnicity in any of its data
collection. This mode of identification maps onto an important difference central to this
dissertation: the difference between classification and individuation. In order to classify an object or
person, one has to create a set of parameters or rules in order to define the limits, and thus identity,
of that classification. For example, in order to classify an individual like Zehra according to a gender
category, Zehra must be evaluated according to the definitional qualities of “woman,” which is
precisely why gender and racialized schemas have endured extraordinary political controversies.
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Ultimately, the purpose of classificatory systems is to group individuals together according to a set
of assigned parameters. Accordingly, there is no ability (or motivation) for a system of classification,
in its design, to understand an individual as an individual; one cannot go into a group of women and
find Zehra. Herein lies a central distinction between such a classificatory instrument and what is
called individuation.
While classification works to put all things of the same type into one box, individuation
works to differentiate between each of those entities of the same type. It is a way of constructing
unique difference in the face of problematic sameness. Technologies that facilitate this kind of
differentiation include facial recognition cameras, assigning unique numbers, using indexicals like
“that” and face-to-face recognition. In social life, we can rely upon our well-developed linguistic and
other sign-based systems such as the aforementioned pointing to fulfill our individuating needs
(“‘that’ knife needs sharpening”). For NADRA, individuation happens through relations to others.
Pakistan’s identity database shows how the act of identification involves much more than
merely affixing a body to a name. Instead, NADRA relies heavily on the encoding of kinship, i.e.,
the “transcoding” of one’s network of relations into a database. In Lev Manovich’s formulation,
transcoding is the process of transforming one phenomenon, such as biological (which are also
cultural) notions of kinship into a digitized phenomenon, such as the computerized notions of
kinship when incorporated into a database (2001, 45-65). NADRA identifies individuals by
transcoding and constituting them through their kin relations, and it is this process that produces a
form of databased identity.5 I argue that this databased identity is fundamentally relational and yet
distinct from the social identities (race, class, nationality, religion) we use to describe individuals with
reference to their social group.
5 For Ricoeur, individuation refers to the process of producing individual persons through technological processes of identification (1992, 27). However, following Gilbert Simondon (1992), individuation also extends to entities (not always humans) within information systems.
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Identification as it occurs within the framework of security and databases is distinct from
identification in the domain of traditional identity markers such as ethnicity, gender, race and
religion. “Identity” in a cultural sense (I identify as “x”), in the way that the social sciences and
humanities are usually concerned with, is conspicuously and deliberately absent from the data
NADRA collects.6 As previously mentioned, NADRA does not record ethnicity or caste.7 Instead,
an individual “databased identity” in NADRA is comprised of a number of attributes, including
address, bodily characteristics and relations between individual family members—which are the
most fundamental of all attributes. Kin relations, even if they can be suggestive of cultural or social
status, are, in the form of the database, strictly purposed into identifying attributes. At the same
time, I argue that since data from individuals and their relatives is constantly updated into NADRA’s
database, information about relations is maintained as a dynamic record (and thus not fixed into
category schemes) to sharply define and hence individuate persons. Furthermore, the transcoding of
kinship into data affects, then, not just database domains but social life, as these realms are distinct
but interconnected and mutually defining.8 In so doing, NADRA’s evolution and structure that
6 Much of the scholarship on the concept of identity has focused on the process of subject formation, performativity of the self and a critique of the idea of a self-sustaining subject at the center of Western metaphysics (Hall 1996). This body of literature is not concerned with how the individual comes to be in the first place. While questions of misrecognition, interpellation and subjectification (Fanon 1967; Althusser 1971; Foucault 1983) resulting from process of identification, are relevant to scholars concerned with “identity” in this sense, the formal process by which a particular individual comes to be identified, specifically from others in its class, is not central to the questions outlined above. Instead, it is in the philosophy of logic and language, such as Ricoeur (1992) and Strawson (1959), that we see a concern with the formal processes of identification, which also underlines the significance of relations to this process. 7 As Chapter Five will explain in more detail, various technologies of governance, from earlier technologies such as the colonial census (Dirks 2001) to relatively newer ones such as photography in a policing context, have been understood to generate legibility (Scott 1998) for the purposes of managing and classifying populations. Classification, particularly of social, religious and cultural identities, has also been understood to reify and render static otherwise dynamic and shifting forms of identification. NADRA’s mode of encoding relations in its database marks a shift in logic and socio-political motivations from earlier classification systems. Classification systems such as the census sought to designate individuals as members of a class such as race, caste or income groups. At present, instead of collecting individuals under a shared tag, identification technologies employed by NADRA seek to individuate: rather than assign individuals a tag, they pick out a discrete individual from others they are connected to but is not the same as. 8 This was demonstrated by what we saw in action in Chapter One, which demonstrated how the messiness of lived kin relations—their fraught, ambiguous and sensitive nature—contributes to all sorts of drama at the time of identity registration. At the earlier stage of recording (not processing) identifying information that both citizen-applicants, data entry operators and assistant managers work together or against one another to deal with the inconsistencies that arise
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maintains, records and converts relatedness into data reveals that it is precisely the complexity of
connection that is key for purposes of governance, namely securitization.
Kin Relations and Database Design
NADRA’s descent-based and kinship oriented technological structure was most clearly articulated to
me by a NADRA employee, Ehsan. Ehsan was a senior NADRA official who was one of NADRA’s
first ten employees. He worked at the NADRA headquarters in Islamabad, had experience in
multiple departments (Operations, Technology & Development as well as the Cards Division) and a
keen interest in software and database technology. When I asked Ehsan about the significance of kin
relations to NADRA’s identification practices, he unequivocally declared that “nobody in this part
of the world (Pakistan) can just be an individual. He or she has to be part of a family.” Ehsan
combined the idea of a family with a technical formation, a system. He alerted me to how two
distinct notions, one social and the other technical, were co-constituted in the form of the database.
An individual’s identifying attributes are generated through their relations—these relations
can be familial ones (a mother for instance), but an identifying attribute can also be an address to
which an individual is connected. In fact, attributes are technically relations. In everyday social
situations, proper names work to identify individuals uniquely, as speakers use indexical words to
disambiguate, reduce confusions and provide specificity to produce a relatively stable identification.
However, in a database, what we rely upon in our human-to-human interlocutions—the
aforementioned proper names or even signs such as pointing—is conspicuously absent. This ability
to identify a particular member from the class of things it belongs to must be generated through
other means.
with recording kinship—especially as questions of gender, migration and even vital events such as death and divorce come into the picture.
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In NADRA’s schema, it is not only a name (or unique ID number, date, place of birth and
so on) but an individual’s set of familial relations (including their parents, siblings, spouses or
children) that are coded as their attributes. The greater the number of relations encoded, the more
attributes an individual has, and so the more identifiable he or she becomes. Since kin relations are
so vital to the system of verifying identifying information, the kin network can be one way of
conceptualizing the design of NADRA’s relational database itself.
NADRA’s data collection process for identity registration always involved recording familial
relations, but as one NADRA employee told me these relations were not “formatted” before 2011.
The links between family members were established first when people would come into a
registration center and declare another person to be their parent or sibling. It would then be possible
to see if that information was accurate by cross-checking other familial data. For instance, if two
people claimed to be siblings their parents’ names and card numbers should match. Even if they
were extended family, it would be possible to trace their ties by matching the names of grandparents.
The collection of kinship data in this mode reveals two crucial aspects about the process of
identification. First, it shows how the process of individuating entails articulating an entity’s place
within a set of other entities.9 While Ricoeur is working within the context of philosophy of
language, he outlines a fundamental aspect of identification as a process: “to identify something is to
be able to make apparent others, amid a range of particular things of the same type, of which one we
intend to speak.” (1992, 27). Second, individuating through familial relations in particular reveals
NADRA’s engineers and bureaucrats’ notions, socially and technologically, of what constitutes a
unique individual.
9 Iliadis (2013) discusses Simondon’s concept of individuation and concretization as formal processes, detailing how entities (not only individual humans) enter into states of stability or metastability in order to then be individuated. Also, see Ricoeur’s definition of identification: “to identify something is to be able to make apparent others, amid a range of particular things of the same type, of which one we intend to speak.” (1992, 27)
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As Ehsan explained, the universal fact that everyone had to have some kind of biological
link to another was a handy way of organizing entities within a database that was relational. In a
relational database, any type of relation between two entities (such as between a number and an
address) can serve as an entity’s attribute. For instance, my home address and my relation with my
mother (as her daughter) would function as my identifying attributes within NADRA’s database.
However, the links between next of kin, given their relative stability and durability (at least in the
informational realm) are useful for building the bush-like structure of a relational database, which
can spread out while connecting discrete uniquely identified entities. Furthermore, given the fairly
widespread practice of cousin intermarriages in Pakistan—which link individuals across affinal and
consanguineous units—such a database structure is well adapted to mapping existing kin relations.
In general, certain kin relations—as information, not lived experience—emerge as relatively
stable over the course of a lifetime in NADRA’s database. According to Ehsan, links such as
biological parents cannot be undone, and this data, much like a date of birth or date of marriage
remains fixed. This contention, even insistence, is reflected in how NADRA facilitated the option to
declare a third gender in response to, through the advocacy by the transgender and transsexual
community, but refused to replace the biological father’s name with the name of the “guru,” who in
fact serves as the head of household in many transgender communities in Pakistan. At the same
time, in conversations with NADRA officials, I found that many were astute observers of norms
around kinship and recognized the diversity of kinship terminologies and practices, such as calling
your cousin your brother or even “your neighbor, your aunty (khala),” as one NADRA official joked
with me.
While some kin relations do change, particularly through marriages, divorces and births, as
we saw in the last chapter, NADRA’s system—and indeed the dynamism of datafied kinship,
itself—is designed to incorporate this “dynamic data,” as the NADRA ex-chairman called it,
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through requirements to register “life-cycle events” such as children and marriages. The way that
individuals are traced alongside their kin network emerges from a pervasive perception about the
significance of kinship for the production of identity on the level of everyday life, a sentiment
expressed above by Ehsan. In turn, this networked identification maps onto the well-developed
notion that kinship is a central, even primary connector in Pakistani society.
Kinship’s centrality to how individuals are identified within NADRA’s framework is
reflected in the method that NADRA uses to verify individuals’ identities. Ehsan mentioned that
questions posed to citizen-applicants asking them to identify their family members serve as basic
“security questions.” Ehsan described this as an immediate source of verification: even if an
applicant brought their parents’ identity cards but did not know who else was in the family tree, that
applicant’s case was seen as a big red flag for NADRA. These two notions of an individual
constituted through family relations and of a security screening for all citizens attempting to “enter”
the database, are thus intertwined and mutually constituted. The idea that only those who fulfilled
the criteria for identification (based on verified kinship links) would be allowed into the database
represents the dual concerns of national security and cyber security. For national security, this
revolves around who is seen to belong within a schema of genealogical descent as it is mapped onto
territory.10 In this way, a territorialized, kinship-oriented sociology of security informs who is
ultimately considered a threat—namely those who are suspiciously without a family in the database.
For cyber security, this meant focusing on controlling who was enrolled into the database via
technical means. Both concerns were focused on avoiding threats and intrusions into a highly
securitized and “politically sensitive” area, digital and territorial. These securitized goals were
10 As part of its verification procedures, as Chapter Three describes, NADRA’s documentary requirements include genealogical charts from the revenue department (authenticating the relationship between family members and landed property) as well as documents from before 1978 (when a large number of Afghan refugees entered Pakistan), demonstrating a connection between oneself or one’s family member and the territory that is currently Pakistan.
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informed by NADRA employees’ conceptions of Pakistani society, grounded in how they
understood social relations to work. The assumption quite simply is this: everyone has a family, and
the proof of having one must be documentable, traceable and rooted within the territorialized
nation-state form of Pakistan.11 The citizen, the territory of the nation-state and the databased family
are thus mutually constituted in NADRA’s practices of identification.
Such an assumption plays out in complicated ways at the Islamabad Mega Registration
Center. As I described in Chapter One, a next of kin can be asked to “attest,” that is, provide a
guarantee for a family member (applying for an identity card for the first time) through their
biometric print. While there are alternatives to this process that involve further bureaucratic
interactions, this mode of authenticating an individual (through a family member) was actively
encouraged. At the backend, I was told, the primary use of biometric attestation was to lead relatives
to present themselves, quite literally in person, in front of the data entry operator and thus allow for
(ideally) these familial relations to be verified at the backend in the database.
By compelling citizen-applicants at registration centers to provide information about their
families, and then by authenticating it in various ways both at the front end and at the backend,
NADRA has over the past twenty years collected an incredible amount of what we can call “big
kinship data.”12 As one software engineer at the Technology & Development department explained
to me, “through rising rates of identity registration, NADRA was able to gather more and more
data. It became possible to create links and so have more verifiable data.” NADRA verifies who is
who in terms of the connection between unique bodily characteristics (such as fingerprints) and
unique ID number, as well as who is related to who in terms of their kin. NADRA officials see the
11 Chapter Four, which discusses Pakistan’s first paper-based identity registration scheme that was launched after the creation of Bangladesh in 1971, illustrates how “verification procedures,” even then, were reliant on recording kinship and were the foundation for NADRA today. 12 Big data is not solely a factor of the sheer amount of data but the scale, in relation to the set, that it operates on. See Doctorow (2008) and Cukier and Schoenberger (2013).
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accumulation of identification information as reducing errors, allowing them to more accurately
denote how people are connected to one another in the database and out. The accumulation of this
big kinship data allows for NADRA, in their view, to claim greater credibility through the enhanced
ability to identify more accurately.
The kin-based logic of the NADRA database is reflected in how familial data serves as the
ground for verifying individuals. In turn, it fulfils the security function by flagging those individuals
who are not authenticated according to these protocols. This can be observed in the fact that since
2011, any given person not linked to at least one other person within the database is marked as
“system independent”—an anomalous person within the database who has not been connected to a
family relation. The basis upon which one can be connected to another was through a “next of kin”
relation. An unconnected person flagged as not having a databased family is deemed suspicious and
has to go through additional procedures to “verify” their identity. This verification involves proving
one’s identity all over again, but this time around with additional evidentiary materials, especially
documents that substantiate claims to kinship.
A related category of suspicion within the database is, in NADRA’s terms, the “family
intruder”: a person who fraudulently (allegedly) claims to be the parent, child, or sibling of an already
existing uniquely identified individual, and so in NADRA’s terms has “intruded” into a family. The
category of a “family intruder” is, at its origin, a technological formation generated when certain
attributes of an entity within the database suggest that the entity might not belong to the family unit
it is claiming. The automated process of producing family linkages was described to me as a means
of verifying those already in the database. Simultaneously, new information was collected when
citizens came into a registration center to make changes (such as register a marriage) and keep the
database’s information on familial relations up to date. Through this process, anomalies within data
collected through new registration and updates to existing records, NADRA officials and algorithms
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can flag false data. In short, NADRA is concerned about fraudulent claims to kin relations. How do
they establish this? For instance, a potential intruder could be a person who lists a different mother
tongue or place of origin that doesn’t match with the rest of their family members, representing an
outlying attribute. In addition, a family intruder could also be identified if one of their supposed
relatives denies having any relation with them, leading NADRA to flag the individual.13 The family
intruder is made in multiple ways: by algorithmically flagging inconsistencies in the data shared
between family members, the reporting of fraudulent kinship claims by family members and by
NADRA data entry operators manually flagging individuals they deem suspicious at the “front end”
at the Mega Registration Center. In terms of the latter, suspicion can only be flagged manually, and it
takes much more on the backend of the database to ultimately declare an intrusion. The procedural
differences between manual profiling and automated verification map onto the distinction between
social identity and databased identification; the identification process does disproportionately impact
some groups over others but curiously enough it does so without using (sociological) identity
markers.
While “family intruders” could be anyone falsely claiming a kinship link, this intrusion within
NADRA’s sociology of securitization maps onto an intrusion into the country—and more
specifically, by Afghans. In a discussion with a software engineer at the Technology & Development
department, he explained that “given the high population of Afghan refugees, there was a high risk
of infiltration into the system. One cannot detect this intrusion by observing someone’s appearance,
or even language—given the overlap with the Pashtun population. But using family linkages was one
13 In this vein, even though marriage is indisputably common, it poses a problem in that it introduces new, potentially unverified, links between persons. However, since NADRA accounts for connections that are both biological and legal (such as marriage, adoption or naturalization), it is not always a problem if elements of spouses’ data do not correspond, especially as individuals are connected to two distinct families: affinal and consanguineous. The fact that NADRA does collect data for married women’s consanguineous families—much to the confusion of many citizens who presume otherwise—shows that its database does not follow a patrilineal tree-like structure but one where the connections between “blood” relations are in fact a central way of detecting anomalies within consanguineous families, in part for identifying “family intruders.”
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way of doing this.” While there were certainly informal profiling procedures—based on appearance,
demeanor and accent—at play when I spent time at the various data entry stations at the public
registration center in Islamabad, it was difficult to detect nationality with certainty at the stage of
data entry. For instance, data entry operators would check, with greater frequency, for “digital
impounding” in a Pashtun applicants’ family tree, which would show if there were those who had
already been declared “confirmed alien” or was undergoing further verification. There was never a
case of simply turning some away from the Mega Registration Center because they were Pashtun.
Rather, the ethnic profiling, to the extent it happened at the front end at the Registration Center,
worked through the family linkages generated within the database, which were considered a more
effective and automated mechanism of identifying intrusion of more than one kind.
While the aim of finding “family intruders” in the database is to prevent identity fraud in
general and in large part to identify non-citizens, this process does not neatly map onto sociological
categories of Afghan or Pashtun in terms of cultural practice or even as stereotypes. The database
does not collect any data on ethnicity. There was no point (in my experience) at which a NADRA
data entry operator ever asked, “are you Pashtun or Afghan?” Instead, NADRA can reconstruct data
on ethnicity through multiple techno-bureaucratic indicators. An individual is established as
“Afghan” through complex and often multiple forms of indexing which generate a mark on an
entity such as the “family intruder.” Importantly, this entity is not a preconfigured identity category,
such as nationality, but constituted through a set of relations—particularly kin relations but
occasionally also home address or place of origin, as the following chapter will show, as well as
connections to other databases. Thus, the database’s mode of producing and marking persons is
distinct from but has connections to and implications for the sociological categories we use in daily
life. Such identification processes allow NADRA to operate without ostensibly appearing to
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discriminate against any one ethnic group, and potentially expand verification (and exclusion) to
other groups in the future.
NADRA officials appear to be well aware of seemingly exceptional, “messy” entanglements
that may produce anomalies within the database. In a conversation with me, the ex-chairman of
NADRA made sure to stress that they had worked on “both the social and technological parts of
NADRA to make it suitable for our needs in Pakistan.” In fact, this might be why they deploy
kinship as the means to intercept these connections. The technical and conceptual category of family
intruder implies a static presumption (on NADRA’s part) that new forms of relatedness do not and
have not emerged between refugee and non-refugee populations. Further, the category of family
intruder assumes that descent-based networks correspond to the timeline of the nation-state’s
formation and do not extend past the latest demarcation of territorial borders.
Consider the fact that in 2019, the Pakistan Electronic Media Regulatory Authority notified
television channels that they were not allowed to host the Pakistani Senator Hafiz Hamdullah on air.
The reason was that Hamdullah had been declared a “confirmed alien,” and his identity card had
been “digitally impounded” by Pakistan’s National Database and Registration Authority. Given that
Hamdullah was a Pakistani legislator, a prominent member of a political party from the religious
right, Jamiat-i-Ulema-i-Islam (F), and that his son was in the Pakistani army, this case received a
significant amount of public attention and debate. NADRA declared that they had designated
Hamdullah a foreign national, and specifically Afghan, because he was unable to establish descent-
based familial connections that would indisputably tie him to Pakistan. Importantly, Hamdullah’s
tribal affiliation to the Noorzai tribe, which had “origins in Afghanistan,” cast doubt on his national
status. Political commentators who noted this also argued that many such families had migrated
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prior to Partition, and that being Afghan (in this genealogical sense) does not mean one cannot have
Pakistani national status.14
At the same time, even as the terms used to describe Afghans—and more specifically
Afghan refugees within a Pakistani family are “intruder” and instances of “infiltration”—the fact
that datafied kinship networks are the primary structuring feature of NADRA’s database implies that
ideas of what should not be in the database were as much a part of the process of designing the
database as considerations of what data would comprise it.15 Even as the technical and conceptual
purposes of “family intruder” and “system independent” point towards the heavily securitized
nature of NADRA’s information infrastructure—against intrusions from the outside and the
unverified “system independent” within—this security logic percolates into routine forms of
databased governance which one would not associate with security.16 NADRA’s system of
generating family links does not only function to catch those errant kin, the black sheep of the
database, so to speak. It is a system embedded in everyday governance functions that informs how
people can navigate the needs of daily life in Pakistan.
The ubiquity of NADRA’s kinned operations is also evidenced in the Family Registration
Certificate (FRC), which has coalesced NADRA’s record of descent-based relations into a
document. As mentioned in Chapter One, the FRC provides a “family composition” of your family
by birth by marriage or by adoption. On its website, NADRA describes the FRC “as a means of
being identified with your record.” Prior to 2011, I was told that NADRA would produce the family
registration document upon request. Now, unless the person requesting the FRC requires some sort
14 JUI-F’s Hafiz Hamdullah declared ‘alien’ by NADRA,” The Express Tribune, October 26, 2019. 15 This does not make it any less exclusionary. The exclusions are as much part of a logic. This is all to say that in the database the “unmarked” is in a sense a part of the marked through its relational logic. It is not outside, but within. In order to then intercept it, they need to be within the data first. Accordingly, even at the level of the registration center, they would rather “capture” the data of someone they suspect to be a non-citizen then to flat out refuse their registration entirely. That does not mean that the person will get a card, but that their data will be within the system. 16 The NADRA card is used for SIM verification, buying bus tickets and enrolling children in public schools, among other everyday functions.
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of modification—in case of discrepancies in names and such—they are able to “simply create the
document,” as one NADRA official told me. This is because the information about familial relations
has been linked to each individual family members’ unique ID number such that when someone
goes to a NADRA registration center to request the FRC, they can print it out right there from the
data they have access to. The fact that a document like the FRC exists as a “product,” in the words
of NADRA officials in their Projects Divisions, means that the immediate family unit—sibling,
spouse, and parent-child relations—have been effectively linked through each of their unique ID
card numbers. It was only with high rates of registration that it became possible to create links and
have more verifiable data, as not only the father but also the mother and daughters registered for ID
cards. With NADRA’s ability to link more and more kin, and thus produce a more accurate record
of family relations, the FRC is most commonly requested by embassies for visa purposes.17 In his
discussion of the development of passport regimes, Torpey (2000) characterizes identity cards as
“internal” controls on mobility in relation to visa regulations. NADRA’s case, and the FRC in
particular, highlight the connections between the two.18 It is these kinds of expanded uses of the
identity card that lend NADRA’s securitized logic its ubiquity; it pervades through aspects of
ordinary life that extend beyond, for example, securitized check points.
Starting from Scratch
NADRA’s ability to become ubiquitous as an information infrastructure necessary across various
governmental (such as voting) and non-governmental functions (such as banking) was directly
connected to the technical shifts it underwent as a system. It was early on in my discussions with the
17In a sense, NADRA sees the high “demand” for their product, primarily due to the visa-related issues many Pakistanis are embroiled in, as a sign that it had been positively received and that people recognized how it would help identify them more accurately. 18 Also see Feldman (2007), Singha (2013) and Caplan and Torpey (2001) for discussions of passport and other documentary regulations directed at controlling movement.
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architect of NADRA, Brigadier Moin, that I came to understand that NADRA was not a singular,
unchanging database, but one that had gone through various transitions and even transformations.
Moin had an illuminating macroscopic view of the entire infrastructure. As a technocrat and
military man with a somewhat unusual professional trajectory and vast experience in building an
identification system “from scratch,” he visualized the various moving parts involved in constructing
identity as intersecting data points. While his military background certainly played a role in his desire
to establish a system of tight control and protocols at NADRA to “fill in all the loopholes,” Moin’s
vision for NADRA also stemmed from what he saw “on the ground.” Military officers in Pakistan
often somewhat dismissively tell “civilians” that they do not understand the “on-the-ground
realities” in the country. This is sometimes a means to justify military dictatorships and, at other
times, a subtle attempt to manage democratic processes in the country. This was not Moin’s
approach in explaining the motivations, as he saw them, behind NADRA’s formation. For one, the
familiar air of condescension of military superiority over “civilian” ineptitude was conspicuously
absent. He certainly had an idea of what progress meant in the Pakistani context: it involved better,
more efficient and transparent systems. Secondly, progress for Moin entailed stability, systems and
institutions that could ensure state security in the post-9/11 context. Yet, Moin did not invoke
military control as the necessary solution. Instead, he believed technology would get Pakistan
“there”—that is, to a secure and stable future.
However, in Moin’s view, obstacles to efficient and transparent governance, facilitated
through said technology, lay in the social and cultural practices of Pakistani society. For example, a
function as fundamental as the identification of citizens is complicated by the fact that people can
have up to five different names, used across various contexts, where cousins call each other by kin-
terms that imply they are siblings and so on. In contrast, NADRA defined kinship through
biological relatedness or other legally recognized bonds such as marriage, and not local (internally
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differentiated) ways that people may refer to or recognize family members. At the same time, Moin’s
recognition of other kinds of kinship terminologies and practices shows that the origins of NADRA
were tied up in the very messiness of the social world that Moin recognized all too well.
NADRA was officially created, after promulgating the NADRA ordinance in March 2000,
one year before 9/11. The original NADRA ordinance’s stated objectives were to launch “a new,
improved and modernized registration and database system is the emergent need of time for its
multiple beneficial uses and applications in efficiently and effectively running the affairs of the State
and the general public thereby achieving the goals of good governance, public service and
minimizing scope for corruption and inefficiency.”19 The Ordinance itself does not provide details
into the day to day workings of the registration procedures, however, in subsequent amendments we
can see how the question of security increasingly became a concern.
In 2000, the questions of “security and secrecy” in the NADRA Ordinance primarily address
the securitization of information and of data. NADRA’s functions, as outlined in Section 4(d) of the
Ordinance are to “ensure and provide by regulations for the due security, secrecy and necessary
safeguards for protection and confidentiality of data and information contained in the registration
and database systems developed, established or maintained, or so caused to be developed,
established or maintained, under this Ordinance including any database, data warehouse and
networking infrastructure.” According to Section 29 of the Ordinance, contravention of this is
punishable by imprisonment for a term extending up to fourteen years, or a fine “not less than one
million rupees, or with both.”20
By 2016, however, there was a substantial change in NADRA’s structure and operations, as
NADRA absorbed the National Alien Registration Authority (NARA). NARA had been set up in
19 NADRA Ordinance, Pakistan National Assembly, Ordinances Laid, March 10, 2000 (available at nadra.gov.pk). 20 Ibid.
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2001 to register all foreign nationals in the country. According to a news report, which cited a
“senior official of the Presidency,” NARA’s purpose was to scrutinize and collect data of all
foreigners in the country, as there were more than four million foreign nationals of Bangladesh,
Myanmar, African and Arab countries in Pakistan.21 The backdrop of this merger was of course
increasing concerns with terrorism attacks in Pakistan at the time but also a large number of
“immigrants” in Karachi in particular, as a judge of the Sindh High Court in March 2013 expressed
displeasure over the lack of proper document of foreign immigrations.22 The discussions around the
NARA-NADRA merger in legislative bodies emphasized the fact that NARA did not have more
than a 100 employees and had only managed to register approximately 125,000 foreign nationals. It
was due to this “poor performance” that NARA was subsumed by NADRA.23
Importantly, in the merger or in the documents, there is no mention of Afghan refugees.
This is because NADRA had already worked with the United Nations High Commission for
Refuges (UNHCR) and related Pakistan government agencies to produce the “Proof of Registration
Card,” which provides a biometric-based identity card to Afghan refugees in Pakistan. In April 2021,
the “Documentation Renewal and Information Verification Exercise (DRIVE)” campaign was
launched to renew these cards.24 Thus, by absorbing NARA, NADRA would now be able to
centrally manage and centralize information from both Pakistani nationals, foreign nationals and
refugees.
As a result of this merger, NARA’s assets and liabilities were transferred to NADRA. This
did not include the transfer of civil servants employed by NARA but did include the transfer of all
records of those registered as foreign nationals in Pakistan. The stated reasons and objectives for
21 “NARA merged into NADRA,” Dawn News, Sept 12, 2015. 22 “A Land of Promise: As illegal migrants pour into Karachi, who keeps count?” The Express Tribune, Oct 25, 2012. 23 National Assembly Session, 10th Session, Friday, April 4, 2014.. 24 “Pakistan launches ‘drive’ to issue smartcards to registered Afghan refugees,” UNHCR Press Release, April 15, 2021.
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such a merger were that “illegal immigrants have increased manifold in Pakistan which has created
numerous socio-economic problems, negatively impacting the security situation in the country. The
National Aliens Registration Authority (NARA) was not equipped to cope with this situation.
Consequently, the merger of NARA with National Database and Registration Authority (NADRA)
to improve the registration of aliens in the country.”25 Thus, while securitizing the data against data
breaches and leaks was a concern at its origins, NADRA’s merger with NARA by 2016 signified
increasing security concerns about terrorism.26 The manner in which NADRA evolved, both as an
institution and as a technical entity, reflects increasing concerns with more data (in contrast to
NARA’s low registration rate) as well as “cleaner” identification data. While the development of
NADRA’s infrastructure, particularly network communications, was a result of concerns with
heightened security in the wake of increased terror attacks, these concerns were processed through
an existing socio-technical foundation, which had been built with social and cultural notions of
generating accurate identities.
Moin connected the impetus to computerize the process of identity card registration to a
seemingly mundane problem linked to the patterns of social relations and behavior. For instance, the
way that Pakistani citizens were “in the habit of” getting others to fill their forms for them. Culprits
to this practice included the illiterate as well as the very privileged who got their personal assistants
to do most of their paperwork.27 Further, he described how the initial data collection process was
riddled with errors due to the nature of cursive Urdu handwriting and the lack of a character
recognition program for the nastaleeq script at the time. The historic lack of an adequate text
recognition software made it difficult to search through computer records. Even as application
25 Bill to amend NADRA Ordinance (2000), Majlis-e-Shoora (Parliament), May 19, 2016. 26 In fact, there were also reports during the same period of the Minister of Interior directing NADRA to produce a “counter terrorism database.” See “Nisar asks Nadra to prepare counter-terrorism database,” Dawn News, July 7, 2015. 27 See Cody (2009) for a detailed discussion of inscription practices in relation to questions of citizenship and literary activism in South India.
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forms were scanned and converted into digital images during the early stages of registration, it was
not possible to search characters or text within the images themselves. As an experiment, an early
cadre of NADRA officials set up two registration centers where all the information would be taken
down orally from citizen-applicants by a NADRA employee who would enter it into the computer.
In this set-up, it is clear that Moin was deeply aware of the particularity of Pakistani social space and
the ways it would shape the operations of identification.
Beyond this original shift—setting up data entry stations for a computerized identity card—
the most fundamental transformation occurred in 2011 when NADRA’s information infrastructure
moved from a “batch system”28 to one that would operate in “real time.”29 However, when
describing this major change, NADRA employees detailed a series of smaller changes leading up to
it. These smaller shifts foreground the constantly shifting nature of not only the NADRA database
but also the series of technological, governmental and social dynamics attached to it. To describe
this, I will provide a chronological account of the changes that took place, their impact on database
design and the effects it had on how we conceptualize NADRA’s shift from an organization that
issued “computerized” identity cards containing kinship data to one that oversaw a relational
database that could identify individuals with increasing accuracy as a function of their relatedness
with others.
Initially, computerization in and of itself was not what differentiated NADRA from previous
identification systems in Pakistan.30 Even prior to NADRA, the Directorate General of Registration
28 Batch processing here refers to the compiling of individual records in order to submit those records as a single “batch,” as opposed to “real time” where each individual record is sent as soon, although not instantaneously, as it is received. 29 The shift to “real time” here refers to the way data is processed and approved concurrently with registration (even as further verification will happen at the back end). In other words, data processing has become convergent with the time it took for a person to go through the registration process. Hence, it is relative to the process and hardly instantaneous—see Hu (2012). 30 Chapter Two of this dissertation discusses the “manual” registration system, managed by the Directorate General of Registration, in detail.
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(DGR) had a computerized system that produced identity cards. While the majority of the
registration offices operated through register entries, there was a concerted effort to set up pilot
projects, where the registration system ran on the Linux operating system and key punch operators
were used for data entry. One of the people who worked on this pilot project in the late 1990s was
Tahir. I met him by accident, as he was the personal assistant of another NADRA official I had
scheduled a meeting with. After working for a year and a half on this pilot project at DGR, NADRA
had been set up and Tahir (among other DGR employees) had been absorbed into it. Since he had
some training in the more technologically evolved aspect of this earlier form of “manual” identity
card production, he had found it considerably easy to adapt to NADRA’s culture. Tahir’s skills,
however, clearly lay in his negotiation and management of interpersonal relations in the office. He
even acted as an intermediary of sorts between the clashing cultures of NADRA and DGR,
especially during NADRA’s early years. He described to me that the pre-NADRA “electronic” card
was not written out (as cards through the 70s and 80s were) were but was printed on what he
described as these “huge printers.” Tahir, content in his administrative role at NADRA and
converted to the idea of NADRA’s technological superiority, described this old technology, of
computerization nonetheless, with an ancient quality that oddly made it seem more primitive than a
technology not involving computers at all.
NADRA officials saw DGR’s decentralization—the fact that the system was not linked
across districts—as the primary distinguishing feature between the two organizations, not the
seemingly ancient quality of DGR’s form of computerization. Since the first few numbers of the
manual card denoted a given district, technically officials could contact (through post) the district’s
registration office when in need of verification, especially in cases where the applicant’s parents lived
in a different district and had provided copies of the parents’ ID card. However, as NADRA
officials emphasized, communication for the purpose of cross-checking hardly ever happened
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because it was time consuming and DGR officials were not as concerned with authenticating
records in this manner.
In contrast, NADRA prioritized centralization from the very beginning. It is a national
database not only because it includes persons from all parts of the whole country but because it is
considered a coherent, singular institutional entity. Even when the NADRA database was not what
it is today, with the entities it contains representing a relational logic, the communication links
between its offices were always strong.
For the first four years at NADRA, paper forms with identifying information were filled out,
scanned and then uploaded as digital images. A NADRA official described the information collected
during this period as “garbage data” due to high rates of inaccuracies. Another went so far as to say,
“it was registration for registration’s sake.” In 2004, live data acquisition began. Under this system,
“forms” were filled out directly by a NADRA employee into a computer. Electronic data entry
allowed for the information received from citizens to be screened from the outset. At the end of the
day, each of these would be processed and sent off to the central data warehouse. Thus, this “batch
system” would upload its data onto the local system. As one NADRA employee described to me, “it
was an old database concept. Line by line entry, names, birth date, signature. And at night when the
whole data was compiled, it would produce a printable form, which was then exported in the form
of batches. The data was picked up, matched, processed.” This was characterized as an “offline
system” where information was not instantly transmitted but accumulated until the end of the day
and then uploaded via FTP (File Transfer Protocol) to the NADRA server. This change had a
practical effect: when files were sent in batches, approval also had to take place in similar, uneven
stages. In the current system, approval by the floor manager can occur as part of the same process,
allowing each floor manager to view any data entry form in her office seamlessly and concurrently,
ostensibly improving the quality of data collected.
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Making Identification More Accurate
The early years of NADRA were described to me as “just a data entry project,” implying that initially
it was the mere collection of data that mattered. Ehsan, who as mentioned earlier was one of the
first employees at NADRA, told me they had always struggled with the question, “How do we move
ahead? To make an actual identity card? How do we determine who is in a family?”
One of the primary changes that advanced NADRA, identified by both senior officials at the
Mega Registration Center and others at the headquarters who had been around for the transition,
was the move towards centralization. This meant data would no longer be stored on the local system
at the Registration Center. Instead, after data entry, information moved to the centralized database,
and that too according to the highest encryption standards, Ehsan added, emphasizing NADRA’s
high level of security and data protection.
With the immediacy of data transfer, two types of rapid verification procedures emerge
concurrent to the registration process. The first, as Ehsan described, is at the registration center.
Here, data entry operators are supposed to exercise a degree of vigilance, vetting information they
receive from citizens, questioning or verifying where something does not seem quite right. As an
example, “how can a Pathan be called Khalid Bhatti?” Ehsan asked, using the last name “Bhatti” as
a stable sign of Punjabi ethnicity. Second, “there are two types of thumb impression. Your one
thumb is matched with 140 million other thumbs. In one second, six million matches are made. The
data entry operator at the Registration Center can find a duplication during matching,” Ehsan
explained. In this way, automatic verification would occur against other existing information,
particularly since biometric matching was now so quick.
The technological improvements of this synchronicity were marked, affecting data security
as well as efficiency. Prior to 2011, it would take 24 hours for the data to make its way to the central
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warehouse, during which this data could be altered on the local system. Ehsan was quick to say that
while this never happened, it potentially could. In addition, the time to get the identity card was
reduced through dramatic improvements in network speed and infrastructure.
While there were many technological advances in terms of network infrastructure and
connectivity, NADRA’s increasingly accurate identification practices were also a product of a very
slow accumulation of data. Through eleven years of data collection that covered almost 95% of
Pakistan’s population, it eventually became possible for NADRA to collect enough information to
then accurately create linkages between the unique identifiers. Further, it was through NADRA’s
ubiquitous use in everyday life in Pakistan, and its insistence on asking citizen-applicants to update
information every time they came in due to a “life-cycle” event (birth, marriage or death), that
NADRA was able to gather more familial data. NADRA officials claim that through this process of
accumulating data, kin relations could then be encoded with increasing accuracy. Transcoding
kinship in this mode allegedly allows NADRA to sharpen its identification of discrete individuals as
they became more and more firmly rooted within their datafied familial networks.
In Ehsan’s view, given that it takes a while to get to the truth, often we have to start with
general claims about how something ought to be. Ehsan described how he was fascinated with the
specifically database mode of arriving at solutions: a process that often meant not getting it all right
at first. This can be understood through Ehsan’s professional trajectory. He had been at NADRA
almost from the very beginning. He had been working at a bank for a few years but was always
“crazy about computers” and would “play around” with ZX Spectrum.31 In 1999, he saw a
scholarship for a course offered by Oracle. Ehsan was already working nine to five at a bank at the
time and decided to attend this course after work. The Oracle course shaped his love for databases.
After the course, he dropped off his resume for teaching jobs in computer science. Arriving at an
31 ZX Spectrum was an 8-bit personal computer released in 1982 in the United Kingdom.
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empty building, he handed his resume to a man who worked there. The man asked him why he
wanted to teach. “I responded that I wanted to stay abreast of new advances in the field, and that
teaching would be one way to stay up to date. He said, ‘what if you get a job that allows you to do
that?’ and asked me to come the following morning.” He met Brigadier Moin when he showed up
the next morning. “Everybody was given a test that was designed very interestingly,” according to
Ehsan. At the interview, Brigadier Moin asked him to come in last. They had a long conversation,
during which Moin expressed that he was intrigued by one of Ehsan’s very incorrect answers. “That
was a unique kind of conversation. He (Moin) has been a mentor to me since.” The sheer amount of
time that Ehsan has spent at NADRA since starting in 2000 has allowed him to closely observe the
shifts, both institutional and technological, it has gone through. Ehsan described that conversation
with Brigadier Moin as crucial to his understanding of identification systems. He described the road
to accurate identifying information as this painstakingly slow path. In this vein, he said that the
move to “actual identification” took place through a major reconfiguration of NADRA in 2011. On
June 25th, 2011, NADRA became a truly networked database.
The use of digital technology and the increased availability of network terminals across
NADRA offices now allows the database to be accessed at various points and for this information
to be transferred across these multiple locations. It also enables continual updates to the interface,
and for the database to be interfaced across devices (through multiple apps), accessible at secure
official locations. These digital capacities enable the immediate verification of information and
transform a registry of identity cards into a systematized, interlinked and searchable database.
While digital technologies convert data into a format that is transmittable across platforms in
ways that it was not before, I want to foreground how the electronic inputting of data, or the coding
of information, does not alone define NADRA’s identification process. Paper documents—identity
documents as well as paper application forms—continue to mediate the digital process of
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identification.32 Paper documents are an important part of generating information in code and
otherwise, a critical element in the datafication process.33 Two decades out from when NADRA first
opened its doors, it has raised its standards for “clean data,” and thus heightened its demand for
accurate identification. Accordingly, the demand for paper documentation has only increased. 34
“There was no quick way to do this. As you can imagine, this would take years. It was only after
much of this data had organically been collected—compiled and analyzed so as to create all these
links—that we could make it mandatory. It is now mandatory to have parents’ information, but
really to have some kind of link with somebody else in Pakistan.” The process of creating relations
between data, according to NADRA officials, thus enabled identification in a “real sense.”
As Ehsan explained, “computerization,” and creating an electronic database did not in and
of itself allow for more accurate identification, especially considering that electronic data entry,
predates NADRA. They still needed to ensure the quality of data. NADRA’s various transitions—
from a batch system to one concurrent with the applicants’ registration process, localized to
centralized—generated greater automation in the domain of registration and data processing. But to
have greater accuracy, NADRA felt the need to increase requirements for evidentiary proof in the
form of paper documentation.35
With increasing anxieties around the supposedly indestructible archive of the internet, the
relationship between such a digital record and longstanding, habituated ways of dealing with our
“paper lives” is overlooked in discussions of surveillance and its social and political implications.
32 Lisa Gitelman (2014) examines the rise of the PDF document to show both how it draws on older forms as well as the continuing relevance of documentation, particularly in relation to its reproduction. 33 Relatedly, see Koopman (2019) on the role of documents in the history of information. 34 See Van Dijck (2014) for a discussion of how “dataism” (specifically in relation to surveillance or “dataveillance”) is an impetus to collect increasing amounts of data. 35 This illustrates, yet again, that an individual’s body (through its unique characteristics) fails to serve as the sole proof of their identity. The person needs to bring a document that connects them to some family member, such as their identity card, along with other documents that can verify their permanent address. Chapter One, focused on the Islamabad Mega Registration Center, describes in detail how documents work in relation to registration.
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The case of NADRA raises a larger issue of what happens to paper identity documents—that part of
the identification process that we can physically hold onto—in an age where our identification data
is diffused across space and time in digitized form.
The technical system in its entirety is not visible or transparent to identity card holders
interacting with NADRA. For the most part, cardholders understand NADRA through documents,
be they identity cards or even supporting documents they need to present in order to be identified.
But to what extent is the identity card a document and in what ways is it just one part of the
database? It is a unique ID number, which in spite of all the changes to the database, never changes
for any cardholder. The stable nature of the identity card as a material object, along with its
continual use as a unique identifier (particularly through search queries) within an evolving database,
makes it a constant across the database’s various transitions. Conversely, its stability is assured
through the database; even as cards are regularly lost or expire, the unique ID number maintains
continuity, allowing for the card’s reproducibility.
NADRA’s requirements for paper, and applicants’ material relationship to documents,
demonstrates the continual significance of paper documentation in e-governance. Documents are at
the center of the encounter with NADRA in ways that the database cannot be, even as the database
is behind most interactions with NADRA in a significant way. On one hand, NADRA’s trajectory
tells a localized story about identification within a securitized post-9/11 context, particularly in terms
of how kinship, social relations and documentation is understood to work in Pakistan. On the other
hand, the shifts we see in NADRA as a database are tied to larger developments in network
technology and computing globally. A close examination of the changes in NADRA’s structure and
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operating procedures allows for comparative insight into the role of identity databases and biometric
technology in shaping statecraft.36
“Software is a Process”: Creating A Unique Identity
The database’s role in shaping encounters with NADRA, as well as social and political relations in
Pakistan more broadly, became most apparent to me through the operations of the Technology &
Development (T&D) Department at NADRA. As a culture, officials at T&D echo the “innovative”
and techno-utopian ethos pervasive in Silicon Valley: they envision the production and maintenance
of software as a dynamic and continual process, which in turn modifies and sharpens identification
processes through a constant cycle of “updates.”
Employees in other departments such as Operations expressed (with some resentment) that
T&D employees considered themselves different from the rest of the bureaucracy—perhaps even
superior. In my experience, pretensions of superiority aside, T&D was certainly different in its work
environment from other parts of NADRA. The T&D division’s atmosphere was in stark contrast to
the rest of the building. Walking through the labyrinth of dingy hallways at the NADRA
headquarters, I was surprised when I entered through a heavy door (secured by a guard) and saw an
open floor plan and offices with fiberglass doors encircling the central open space—unlike the
conventional bureaucratic office style where one room led to another. The furnishings were
contemporary, computers and screens ubiquitous and the atmosphere almost corporate.
Aside from these spatial characteristics, I learned through conversations with T&D
employees that they had the impression they were at the center of NADRA’s project—which above
all was deemed a technological endeavor. This motivated Ahmed, a software engineer at T&D, to
36 For a discussion of the changing role of biometrics for statecraft, specifically before and after apartheid in South Africa, see Breckenridge (2014).
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work at NADRA. “Otherwise, as you can imagine, a public sector job can be difficult,” he explained.
Yet Ahmed pointed towards a tension. On one hand, even though T&D was squarely situated
within a bureaucracy: “we operate like a software company, wherever we see needs, we provide
solutions.” On the other hand, T&D was not dealing with consumers. Their “product” was for
citizens who saw themselves interacting with the Pakistani state.37 T&D was aware they were not
marketing a product to users but trying to figure out the best way to identify people, individually and
as citizens, to incorporate them into the database.38
For this purpose, Ahmed explained, on-site software development was ideal. “Software
allows for process. If software is in your culture, you can make changes as you need, and everything
falls in line. Through the capacity of software development, you are able to visualize that which
doesn’t exist.” Software, especially in relation to a massive high-stakes identity database, was the only
way to order and continually verify the unwieldy data of millions. Especially as these millions had to
be connected to one another as citizens. The technological development of the database illustrates
how NADRA’s software functions, and more importantly, how those who produce it imagine,
intersect and encapsulate social relations in their design of the database. We can trace shifts in
technologies of governance—especially in comparison with other kinds of record keeping devices—
through an empirical understanding of functional capacities beyond impressionistic notions about
the newness of digital technology.
A key feature differentiating the database from other register-based records is searchability.
Running searches through millions of identity records presents a significant break from how paper-
based identity records are accessed or cross-checked. Earlier, the record room staff played a crucial
37 See Ruppert (2012) on governmental database typologies. 38 To clarify, NADRA’s identification procedures, targeted at discrete individuals, rearticulate the concept of population. While the terrain they are concerned with is that of the total national population, NADRA has the capacity for unique identification beyond the enumeration of various demographic or anonymized statistics.
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role in enabling access to these records. The expertise and localized knowledge of individuals was
essential for locating the record in question, producing what was described to me as a “record room ka
badshah”—king of the record room.
While there are still bureaucratic permissions at play, automated through pre-configured
access to different parts of the database, computational ability allows anyone to query a particular
search through the entirety of the database. This search capability opens the database up to new
functions besides just record keeping. It also allows for NADRA officials to see whether a record
exists apart from what may be physically in front of them—be that an identity card or a body.
Alongside the expansive capacity of database searchability, each unique identity is designed
to be linked to one set of biometric prints. Hence, those who are “duplicated” within the database
can now be “found.”39 No one person is getting more than their adequate share of identity—to be
used for fraud or a greater amount of welfare benefits than one is due. The potential of “de-
duplication”—ensuring that one citizen only has one identity—has consistently emerged as one of
the primary virtues of digital biometric-based ID, especially in the context of development
organization and governance institutions.
However, biometric prints are only one searchable part of the database. Other kinds of
information can also be requested with relative ease. NADRA offers a number of SMS services,
allowing one to text the government, in a sense, to obtain information regarding their eligibility for a
number of programs without having to physically show up at the centers. One such service is the
SMS-based citizen verification program: as long as you know the 13 digital number on your own or
someone else’s ID card, you could text it to the phone number “7000” and confirm that the card
holder (again, not necessarily oneself) exists within NADRA’s database of citizens. I experimented
39 Lawrence Cohen (2019) describes the process of de-duplication in India’s identity database Aadhar, paralleling this process (of de-duplicating) to an emergent mode of governing India itself.
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with this with a few friends in Pakistan. Within a minute, they all received a response with their
name (they were texting their own ID card number) and their father’s name. Through such a query
function, verification takes place in two ways: one can verify the ID card numbers of others; and
that verification takes place through a family relation, specifically the father. NADRA is at the
forefront of e-governance activities in Pakistan, including voter management and welfare provision,
precisely because it is a searchable database that allows for rapid verification in the ways described
above. One could technically text a registration office and ask them to confirm the existence of an
identity card. But the textable “citizenship verification” program provides automated responses,
again only possible through a searchable database.
While NADRA’s data warehouse is located in a single securitized place (and one I was never
allowed access to), “the” identity database is in fact distinct databases that are linked together in
relational, networked form. Searchability involves querying both within but also at times across
databases.40 What this means for identification is that one’s identity in NADRA does not reside in a
single location, be it the citizen-body or the database.41 Rather, it involves a process of collecting
multiple elements together to produce an identifiable entity. It is in this sense that I find the
interlinked nature of databases—many but connected—to be key to identification practices. These
databases do not simplify or condense an otherwise complex social reality and the identities that
move within it. Database structures provide insight into how identification, more generally, cannot
take place without a messy process of assembling different kinds of attributes under a unique
identifier. Instead of conceptualizing this single identifier as collapsing all the diverse kinds of
40 For instance, all banks in Pakistan pay NADRA Rs.30 for each biometric verification as a part of the “Know Your Customer” program to prevent fraud and impersonation. For this, NADRA’s database is queried, through the biometric reader physically located at the bank, which then confirms the relation between identity card holder and biometric print. 41 Relatedly, Hayles (1999) discusses the creation of “virtual bodies” in cybernetics and through informational processes.
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information within it, it is more useful to see the unique identifier as pointing to a set of shifting
relations (quite literally one’s kin relations in this case) that provide the identity its relative stability.
Database or File: Network Links or Paper Clips?
The very first version of the computerized national identity card launched by NADRA also reflected
the significance of kinship and the multiplicity of relations to the production of individual identity. It
had, along with the unique ID number on the front of the card, a “family” (khandaan) number on
the backside of the card. This is no longer the case. As it turns out, there is no need for this number
because family members have already been linked inside the backend of the database itself.
This khandan number used to “call,” or query, the database to allow database operators to
bring onto a screen a set of individually identified people who constituted a family. The
obsolescence of the khandan number raises the question: what form do kinship relations take as data
within the database? In their datafied form, these kinship relations are crucial to the process of
individuation within the database and thus have profound consequences for the recognition of
citizens as “identifiers.” The khandan number was the only way in the early days of NADRA for the
database to have a referent for a family unit. Otherwise, there would be no way to query the unit.
Thus, members of a family, as far as NADRA could determine them as next of kin, were bound
through this number in order to organize identified individuals into relation with one another.
One NADRA official, who I will call Haseeb, described the process of creating family
linkages using the metaphor of “clipping.” The khandan number, which currently does not need to
be on the card, provided a way to bring together “individual” family members into a set. This “clip”
(a nuclear family unit) was then “hung” on a bigger “branch,” which was then connected through
another clip. This clipping happened in a number of ways. For instance, the information can be
clipped to one’s parents as well as to siblings, who then have their own set of family members (such
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as children and spouses) to whom they may be similarly attached. It is precisely through this bush-
like structure that nuclear families were never left isolated in the database but connected through a
series of links that extend far beyond their immediate kin. This daisy chaining of familial identity was
apparently always intended to be part of the design even if it was not fully achieved until much later.
In other words, the metaphor of “clipping” reveals how kinship networks always served as
the structuring logic for the database. In fact, even prior to NADRA, kinship information was
recorded in the register-based manual identity card system as well.42 With the removal of the khandan
number from the physical card itself it may seem like this logic had receded, if not withered away
entirely. Instead, kinned links had been integrated so completely into the database that any need for
an external number—a categorizing element of sorts—had become obsolete. Currently, there is no
need for a number on the card to do the work of connecting family members. Rather, through the
affordances of a relational database, those members are already connected as a unit (under an
“alpha” family and a “beta” family through birth and marriage, respectively) as well as within a larger
network of not only their own nuclear family but also extended kin.
As I have discussed above, kin relations are particularly well-suited for NADRA’s
identification purposes. In addition, relational databases are particularly well-equipped for
constructing individual identities through these relations—especially in contrast to hierarchical
databases. In “Relational and Non Relational Models in the Entextualization of Bureaucracy,”
Michael Castelle (2013) details the heated debate and complex trajectory leading up to the ubiquity
of relational databases that we see today. Salient to the discussion of “clips,” Castelle describes how
the relational database model differs from the hierarchical model primarily in its symbolic and
tabular representation of data. He sets up the distinction between these two database models in the
form of a fundamental (even philosophical) question: “what is the most appropriate representation
42 Chapter Four of this dissertation discusses NADRA’s predecessor Directorate General of Registration.
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of entities and their relationships in the world?” (2013, 3). The relational model represents both
entities and their relations in tabular form, allowing for a vast simplification in the process of data
retrieval through a query language now partially realized in the near-ubiquitous Structured Query
Language (SQL). Drawing on Charles Peirce, Castelle argues that the distinction between the two
database models is fundamentally semiotic, that is, it responds to a problem of how to represent
things in the world. While the hierarchical database model’s “pointers mimic the indexical real-world
physical relationship between part and supplier, the relational model represents that relationship in
an explicitly symbolic, tabular form” (2013, 11). The relational model allows for freedom through
relational query languages. Through SQL these entities can relate, via joins and projections, with new
entities with every interaction. Relevant for our discussion is the fact that in a relational database,
through the use of tables, entities do not have to be made related but are already represented
(symbolically as Castelle argues) as entity relations.
In light of the differences between relational and hierarchical databases, we can reflect on the
khandan number and see that the clips described by Haseeb were links required to connect the
various individuals together. By moving into a fully relational model, unique individuals are already
represented with their relationships. There is no need for an external object (such as a number) to
do this work. Furthermore, as the following section will describe, the relational form not only
heightens the significance of kinship for the database but also allows for data independence, which
allows for NADRA to participate and embed itself in a variety of governance functions.43 It is thus
not accidental, as Castelle shows, that such features of the relational model have their origins in
43 Relational databases allow for a particular kind of picture of kinship. Lineages (as opposed to bush-like networks, growing in different directions) would be fairly easy to represent in a hierarchical database, and if only patrilineal lineages were to be tracked, the paper registration system would also work. But due to the material difficulties of tracking across lineages in a paper-based registration system, only a relational database could also present information of people across spatial units such as districts. Otherwise, women’s natal villages, where they may be connected to their consanguineous families, would both be lost in a paper-based system and would be significantly more cumbersome to handle in a hierarchical database.
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commercial manufacturing interests and other large organizations, especially bureaucracies—all
institutions that prioritize data security.
Haseeb, the NADRA employee who described this process to me, was a computer scientist
who had also held administrative positions at NADRA. He was used to explaining technical
processes to “non-technical” people such as myself. While he had cultivated an impatient tone for
the impromptu lessons that I believe he secretly enjoyed giving, he also provided helpful
metaphors—as described above—for understanding something that is difficult to explain (what
does a database look like?) in the absence of being able to just show it or make it. Yet, I wondered
about how far the metaphors were meant to extend.
The semiotic capacity of the database relies on this new technology, even as it continues to
be haunted by its metaphorical and material past lives. The analogy of clips, reminiscent of paper
clips, presents the database somewhat like a physical filing cabinet—particularly one where a file
whose contents and their arrangement were used to verify or incriminate the person whose name it
was under. It was the relationship between these contents that gave the file a coherent identity; if
something was out of place, then there would be a problem. The use of clips, even as metaphor,
implied that there was something almost manual about the process.44 At the very least, these
contents could be taken apart and put back together.
At the same time, the metaphor of clipping—and the extension of the metaphor through the
file—evades a salient feature of NADRA’s database: the automation of bureaucratic processes of
verification. When a new file was created in the earlier paper-based identity card system, it was
simply not possible to verify the file’s contents in relation to all the other files due to material
constraints. Conversely, such verification is precisely the function of the database.45 Further, the
44 See Christidou et al (2016) on the role of metaphors in scientific representation. 45 At the NADRA Registration Center, your data is cross-checked with all existing records in the database. It goes onwards to the next stage only if there is nothing in one’s data that would raise red flags. This could be in relation to
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transformation of the database in 2011, which removed the use of the khandan number, moved the
database a few steps further from being a register, or rather a filing cabinet, towards an entity that
did not have to be broken up into separate pieces to be unified again. As mentioned earlier, a daisy
chain connects various family members in the database as far as those connections are known to
NADRA. It would be impossible to link paper files in such a manner given the material limitations
of paper, storage, and geographical distances. The materiality of both paper as well as the register
continue to significantly shape the NADRA databases, as I show elsewhere in this dissertation. Yet,
new technological affordances regulate the semiotics of the database—the representation of entities
within the database—facilitate the capacity to locate items, such as identities, in ways that was not
possible before.46
The “Smart” Identity Card: Document, Technology or Both?
NADRA is frequently referenced in everyday life in Pakistan in relation to the physical object of the
identity card itself and hardly ever as a database or bureaucratic organization. While NADRA as an
information infrastructure coalesces within the ID card itself, the tangible form of the card, as a
document that all citizens can carry on their persons, affords it a distinct set of purposes and
capacities. Aside from NADRA officials, most card holders I spent time with initially conceived of
the information that NADRA held as located in the physical card itself, particularly in the chip of
the smart card. However, my conversations with NADRA officials associated with the Cards
one’s membership of a family unit, such as through the categories of “family intruder” or “system independent,” or if the identifier is already in the database leading to a case of identity duplication, technically fraud. Additionally, there are also other databases that NADRA deals with at the level of the registration center. When one is going to get an identity card, one is not necessarily always cross-matched with all of those. 46 I follow Webb Keane’s (2003) approach towards semiotic ideologies (defined as basic assumptions about what signs are and how they function) where he argues that “representations” are often read as being about the world in ways that make little about how they are located within it. Keane suggests we attend to the materiality of this process. Iconicity and indexicality (to point to something), in particular, can open up analysis to the possible effects of material qualities. Identification, as argued above, relies on indexing relations. Database technology (in its new indexical capacities in particular) is the material basis on which such identification takes place.
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Division led me to consider the materiality of the card in relation to the information that it indeed
“held,” as it revealed a more complex relationship between database and card.
The former production head of the National Identity Card division, who had been assigned
to the Smart National Identity Card Project and had to essentially self-educate and train for that task,
explained to me that the “old” NADRA card and new smart card (SNIC) were dramatically distinct
as “products.”47 The printing technology is entirely different. In fact, the smart card is not printed at
all—it is fabricated by laser engraving. Using the example of a card that was on his table, he showed
how the card is made of layers that are engraved onto the card, where each letter that is “printed” on
the card is, in fact, a part of a different layer. In the same way, each photo is not pasted onto the
card but engraved through multiple layers.
Further, in contrast to the CNIC’s older barcode technology, chips on the SNIC are coded
such that a thumb impression—read on any biometric reader—can be matched with the biometric
information on the card’s chip. I was given the example of cash grant disbursements to Internally
Displaced Persons during the military operation in Waziristan: “say we are in Bannu. Bannu has no
network connectivity, and you have set up a camp to disburse cash grants to IDPs. As the card’s
chip is read by the biometric reader, the thumb impression from a living person is matched against
the stored biometric data in the chip, allowing for the verification to occur locally.” Thus, data from
the card never “leaves” the card. This was described as adding a layer of security, as the data does
not have to travel through any channels or to any foreign space.
47 Beyond the computerized national identity card and the “Smart” National Identity Card, there are a number of other identity documents that served the purpose of identification prior to and even to some extent during NADRA. For instance, as other parts of this dissertation discuss, the domicile and the manual identity card are still important to the digitized practice of identification today. Moreover, the passport (now integrated with NADRA’s database) has been crucial for managing the mobility of populations. After 9/11, these technologies have been enhanced, with demands primarily from the U.S. for countries to produce passports that are machine readable or containing RFID chips that store the bearer’s digital photo and fingerprints. See Torpey (2000, 195- 217).
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The “matching” aspect of the card indicates its capacity to verifiably say that “you are you”
(Cohen 2019, 2, 9, 14) in terms of linking name to body. I was told that the card is a “reflection” of
the database. Simultaneously, the card is a technology in itself: it carries a lot of its functions within
it and is thus not just representative of the database or registry behind it. Not only is the card more
secure due to its chip, but the chip also has the potential to carry information other than biometrics
such as records about parents, education, and health. It is thus crucial to understand the card as, in
part, the direct embodiment of at least one portion of the database that allows it to perform one
specific function: connecting a name with a body, or at least a thumb.48
In this vein, the identity card represents information in the database but in an altogether
different form. The database’ semiotic qualities, the manner in which it organizes and presents
information, is shaped by programming language and relational structure—much like how in social
life, the way we communicate (and act) is influenced by the words we use. The identity card has its
own distinct set of semiotic qualities, and as a result separate functions (from the database) and
effects, such as the ability to be produced by a card holder at any given moment.
While the card importantly connects the user to the database, it also functions independently
from the database. When making a new card at the NADRA center, each applicant is required to
“surrender” the expired card. In this way, the material lives of identity cards are seen to hold a
potential that is not just tied to the database. The database the card’s chip withholds in this case is a
miniscule portion of the whole—unless its capacity is expanded to hold more information. The
database beyond the card not only looks and reads differently from the information on the card but
also corresponds to the meaning of identification—especially in terms of relatedness—in a
48 This, in turn, has widespread effects. Even if the database does not hold information that identifies individuals according to ethnic groups, in practice ethnic profiling operates in Islamabad (among other cities) on a daily basis through for instance, the permanent address (which denotes place of origin) written on the card. Chapter Three delves into the phenomenon of blocked cards and their effects on Pashtun neighborhoods in Islamabad.
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significantly different fashion. In short, while the card suggests individual ownership, the database
reveals the primacy of networking and “kinned” modes of NADRA’s identification practices.
Further, as other parts of this dissertation describe in more detail, the individual card does become a
shared object in so much as it moves across family members, even between generations, far beyond
its original holder (if there ever was one) in order to attest to the relatedness and by extension
identity of others. In this way, the relationship between kinship practices in Pakistan today and the
identity card is a function of database design.
Conclusion: False Binaries in Databased Existence
I would repeatedly question my interlocutors at NADRA about the reasoning behind the
significance of family relations as opposed to any other form of relatedness for NADRA’s
identification practices. Ehsan, as mentioned above, responded to my question with another: if you
live in Pakistan, then how could you not have a link with anybody else in the country? He then
suggested that “only Afghans, Bengalis and Burmese” would lack robust kin networks in Pakistan—
presumably because as refugees or immigrants they would lack descent-based territorial connections.
Ehsan’s comment indicates the complex and often ephemeral ways that “identity” intersects with
practices of identification at NADRA, revealing the ever present logic of security. NADRA is a
national database, and so the body politic would have to be comprised through inter-connections,
both social and by extension in the database. Apprehending “identities” through relatedness, as
opposed to profiling particular groups, allows NADRA its agility and ability to track individuals,
especially as the groups the Pakistani state may be concerned with could shift over time. The
database, as this chapter has demonstrated, enables a special dexterity in this regard.
In addition, Ehsan’s comments reflect his view of NADRA’s database as a reflection of
Pakistan’s socio-political make-up. In this sense, the database is representational and seeks to
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present, in objectified form, the citizen population. Alternatively, following a material semiotic
approach, I argue that the structure of the database is only able to represent the country because
there are pre-existing material interconnections between the database and the social life of
identification. As kinship studies has demonstrated, it is not only blood that infuses kin ties with
their legitimacy but other shared attributes too, such as milk and houses, among other things.49
Bringing this insight to NADRA, datafied relations are kinship—for officials and engineers who
make the database as well as those who are in it as kin themselves.
NADRA’s use of kinship reveals key features about the nature of identification—not only
for databases but for how identification occurs as a process in general. NADRA’s database structure
deploys kinship for its durability to produce sameness in the form of the unique identifier over time.
Ricoeur argues that “what matters for unambiguous identification is that interlocutors designate the
same thing” (1992, 32). Identity in this framework is described as sameness (mêmeté) and not as
selfhood (ipséité). This is what enables re-identification, that is, “several occurrences of the thing as
the same” (ibid). As a process, relations function as indexes, pointing to the same “identity.” Thus,
the more relations recorded, the better. NADRA collects more and more data about kinship
relations, furthering individuation and creating an ever unique identity. Hence, it is not an essential
“self,” a pre-existing essence (be it biometric or any other characteristic, such as ethnicity) that
enables identification as a process. Through an emphasis on “updating” and thereby creating even
more connections between various disparate aspects of people’s lives, NADRA transforms itself
from what may appear to be a representative model at first sight into a medium that intersects
constantly with people, both living and datafied. As this chapter has indicated at various moments,
the database’s identification process does in effect congeal identifying attributions to produce social
49 Kinship studies has long contested the many substances that make kin (Carsten 1995; Feeley-Harnik 1999) and the forms that represent these ties as legitimate or unauthorized (Schneider 1984; Sahlins 2013).
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“identities”—always within a web of relatedness as opposed to prefigured identities—and this
disproportionately marks some over others. The implications of this on emergent social and political
relations on the scale of everyday life are the subject of the next chapter.
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CHAPTER 3
Bird’s Milk
“Blocked” from Tribal to Urban Pakistan
Introduction: Do You Know Where You Are?
“You think you are in Islamabad but in fact you are in ilaqa ghair. Did you realize that?” asked a man
in his mid-forties with a conspicuously non-Pashtun accent. He had approached me as I was asking
for directions during one of my first visits to Tarnol, a Pashtun neighborhood on the northwestern
edge of Pakistan’s capital city Islamabad. Just as I had struck him as an outsider to the neighborhood
of Tarnol, his accent and his appearance—khaki pants, a collared shirt and a press card around his
neck—suggested that he too did not live there.
The term he used to describe Tarnol, ilaqa ghair, translates to “area unknown,” uncharted or
even strange (ghair). The term is used to refer to the “tribal” areas of the North-Western Frontier
region. As it turned out, this journalist, originally from the nearby region of Hazara, was in fact a
long-term resident of Tarnol. He had seen the area’s demographic and spatial identity shift from a
sleepy village on the border between Islamabad and Rawalpindi, when his family had first bought
land there as an investment, to a bustling urbanized neighborhood where large numbers of Pashtun
migrants settled. It was in reference to the Pashtun population in the neighborhood, primarily
migrants from the former Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) of Pakistan—and potentially
its unplanned spatial and infrastructural configuration—that he had drawn an analogy with the
frontier zone bordering Afghanistan. Yet, I found it revealing that he characterized Tarnol as a
frontier zone itself—an area set apart from the rest of Islamabad.
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The ability of Pashtun migrants to make a life in cities such as Islamabad is contingent on
their status in the National Database and Registration Authority (NADRA) that authenticates
Pashtuns as vouched-for citizens. Securitization protocols, as manifested through NADRA’s
identification system, produces an uneven terrain of national belonging. In particular, Pashtun
migrants’ spatial histories—complicated by a proximity to the Afghan border, transnational family
networks (particularly those extending into Afghanistan) and often multiple migration pit-stops—
disallow them from presenting neat, verifiable forms of identification. These complications
manifested themselves in the fact that the majority of Pashtun migrants in Tarnol had been, in their
words, “blocked.”
Official notices from NADRA informed them of this change in their identification status,
stating that they had been placed under “citizenship verification.”1 Even while their physical identity
document remains in their possession, the databased function of identification allows NADRA to
change the status of this document. By blocking identity cards, NADRA changes the card-holder’s
status from Pakistani national to an ambiguous category of person, now “under verification.”
While the majority of the people whose citizenship status was being reverified were Pashtun
(and the majority of these were Pashtuns from the tribal areas), NADRA Chairman Usman Mobin
stated in a news report that the blocking had nothing to do with nationality or prejudice.2 This
response is aligned with NADRA’s protocols, which as mentioned in the previous chapters, do not
collect data on ethnicity or caste. Instead, Moin outlined three main reasons behind blocking. First,
he said that in some cases, Afghan nationals were “falsely declared” as family members of those
settled in Pakistan and for a number of reasons it would ultimately surface that these Afghans were
1 Most people, for multiple reasons including the absence of a postal address, had not received this official notice. In addition, most people referred to their cards as “blocked” and did not reproduce the official designation of “citizen re-verification” in casual conversation. 2 “’Pakhtun ID cards not blocked due to nationality or prejudice,’ clarified NADRA chief,” Dawn News, September 2, 2018.
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not truly family members. Second, refugee families would be repatriated to Afghanistan but then
returned to Pakistan and register for ID cards, revealing their refugee status.3 Third, he claimed,
some individuals held Afghan passports while also holding Pakistani ID cards, and this led to their
cards getting blocked. In short, on NADRA’s end, it was the interconnections and overlap between
the data of Pakistani Pashtuns and Afghan refugees that provided the impetus for a citizenship
reverification procedure.
In spending time with this community of blocked persons in Tarnol, I found that their
collective understanding of why NADRA blocked their identity cards was spatialized, connected in
their minds to their own origins in frontier tribal zones and their multiple displacements across this
region.4 Being blocked by NADRA not only obstructs access to governmental and other services,
such as banking or buying a cell phone chip, but also bars migrant access to specific securitized areas
within Islamabad and inhibits mobility within the country as a whole. In this chapter, exploring the
friction between Pashtun migrant experiences and NADRA’s identification practices, I ask how and
why Pashtun migrants get more stuck, constrained by their blocked cards, when they try to move to
make a life in Islamabad? To answer this question, this chapter first historicizes this experience of
blockage within a longer history of frontier governance that Pashtun migrants carry with them.
Turning to the present, I then situate the neighborhood of Tarnol within the securitized, planned
capital city. I examine the infrastructural forms, particularly that of NADRA’s identification system,
which constitute Tarnol as an urban frontier and shapes flows and blockages in the neighborhood. I
3 Since NADRA worked with UNHCR to register Afghan refugees for the repatriation process, Mobin is likely referring to the fact that they had access to the data of all those who had repatriated and were able to cross-check when a particular individual returned to Pakistan and attempted to register for an identity card. 4 Since the military operations in the tribal regions (from 2009 onwards), internally displaced persons (IDPs) have moved across various locations in Pakistan, including IDP camps and informal settlements. In the wake of violent displacement, some drew upon their kin networks in placed like Tarnol in Islamabad among other cities, and have ultimately resettled in Tarnol after moving multiple times. Others migrated prior to the military operations but their connection to geographies of suspicion, such as Waziristan and Bajaur, actively the center of counter-terrorism operations by the Pakistani military, continues to put their status (at least in the eyes of the state) in a questionable place. See "Pakistan army starts S. Waziristan ground assault,” Reuters, October 16, 2009 and Javaid (2016).
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analyze the divergent speculative theories held by Tarnol residents for making sense of the
prevalence of blocked identity cards in the neighborhood and amongst Pashtuns in general. In
particular, Tarnol residents attribute the suspicion directed towards them by the Pakistani state to
the frontier qualities of their neighborhood. Tarnol residents respond to these suspicions directed at
them by reasserting their claims to belonging, not only to the frontier but also to Islamabad. This
chapter foregrounds how migrants’ experiences and narratives reveal that the state’s suspicion
towards them is not about determining citizenship status alone, and in fact corresponds to a broader
logic of securitization which subjects its own citizens to special scrutiny. Accordingly, I argue that the
process of blocking and perpetual re-authentication is not about producing a qualified citizenship, or
second-class citizens, where certain entitlements are taken away. Rather, this process allows the state
to produce an entirely distinct (although not new) political subject and space: a frontier resident.
In this chapter, I understand blocked card holders to be constituted as frontier residents in
three primary ways. First, the mode by which frontier residents are governed is characterized by a
quality of indeterminacy, where their very legal status is rendered uncertain as at this stage (which
can last years) they are not declared aliens or foreigners. As I will show below, the ambiguity that
blocked card holders complain about is connected to, and has resonances with, the colonial mode of
ruling the North-West Frontier that was centrally characterized by this quality of ambivalence.
Second, even as they are residents in Islamabad, I examine how NADRA’s re-verification
procedures (documentary and interrogation-based) continually re-situate Pashtun migrants back into
the geographical space of the North-West Frontier. Third, as the blocked card conditions how
Pashtun migrants can move, settle and live, the spaces they inhabit in Islamabad themselves take on
a frontier quality, in particular through experiences with government officials and with policing. In
this way, I argue that the frontier in Pakistan is not a fixed geographical imperial borderland that
exists on the periphery, a boundary of the country, but instead emerges within the capital city itself
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to become central to the governance practices of the Pakistani state.
Frontier Governance
Scholars have long troubled the category of the frontier, illuminating how space—frequently central
to exchange and circulation of goods and people—can be constructed as frontier. They are neither
natural, geographical or inevitable formations (Tsing 2011). Sanghamitra Misra (2011) describes how
Goalpara in Assam, a space connected to Tibet, Bhutan, Cooch Behar as well as Bengal, was made
politically, culturally and economically marginal by both the Mughal and colonial empires.
Importantly, Misra focuses on how the western borders of Assam were perceived as an agricultural
frontier, leading to the subsequent colonization of its wastelands. In contrast, the North-West
Frontier, particularly the majority of the tribal areas, were only partially incorporated into
colonization schemes, in large part because of the absence of fertile land. Under colonial rule, the
North-West was purposefully maintained as a “frontier” through encounters between colonial
officials and frontier tribes, as colonial discourse reinforced its status as an ungovernable space and
buffer zone for the rest of British India (Haroon 2007; Magnus and Hopkins 2011; Hopkins 2020).
The arbitrariness of the frontier, and the contradictions embedded in the mode of its
governance, was apparent to colonial officials even at the time. The murkiness becomes especially
apparent when British colonial officials attempted to separate British territory from that of the
frontier tribes. On October 7, 1898, WRH Merk (Commissioner of Derajat) wrote a letter to the
Officiating Chief Secretary to the Government of Punjab. In this letter he stated “it is realized that
the populations on either side of the boundary line are closely interwoven and intermingled, socially,
commercially, in all matters of everyday life… an association, territorial and social, which has
endured for many generations. In short, there is no impassable gap or gulf, difficult to cross,
between British and independent territory; the frontier is in reality only an arbitrary line drawn
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through the limits of a more or less homogenous population.”5
After the annexation of Punjab in 1849, colonial expansion on the North-West edge of
British India intersected with growing ethnographic knowledge around tribal society. In light of the
Sandeman policy in Balochistan,6 invasion of tribal territory was subject to criticism by British
officials soon after the annexation of Punjab: the goal was not to territorialize but to maintain the
North-West Frontier as a buffer between Afghan and British spheres of influence. Importantly, this
does not mean that there was a complete absence of government, given that there were
infrastructure projects and to a certain extent, an extension of the agrarian frontier in certain areas
where it would be profitable (Medhi 2020). Instead, a mode of governance emerged that was tailored
to and mirrored the very ambiguities and arbitrariness the frontier represented.
To describe the ambivalence and vacillation that characterized the colonial mode of
governance, I will provide a brief example. The Tochi Expedition in 1897 was a colonial response to
an attack by the Madda Khel section of the Waziri tribe on the political officer’s group. While a
group of colonial officials were in Waziri territory and stopped to eat lunch, fire was opened from all
sides as soon as they opened their food tiffins. This was described as a case of “treacherous
hospitality” by the officials present.7 More than the attack itself, or the speculations around its
causes, the colonial response is most relevant to our discussion.8 Demanding land revenue as a
punitive measure was immediately rejected. There were two main issues identified with this option:
5 Letter from WRH Merk (Commissioner Derajat) to Officiating Chief Secretary to the Government of Punjab, October 7, 1898. Notes and Reports on the NWFP Administration, MSS EUR F 111/315 [BL]. 6 Under Robert Sandeman, a colonial official and political agent in Balochistan, devised a policy of assigning local chiefs as representatives of their tribes, who would act as intermediaries and were given financial allowances for this service. See Hopkins (2012) and Tripodi (2011). 7 Papers on British relations with the North-West Frontier Tribes, and Military Operations Undertaken Against Them (1897-1898), MSS EUR F 86/261 [BL]. 8 As the communication amongst colonial officials reveals, there was little understanding of the nature of or reasons behind the tribal agitation and demonstrations amongst the Madda Khels, Khidder Khels and Manzar Khels of the upper part of Tochi valley during Eid. They cite a number of causes that ranged from fanatical incitement to the demarcation of the Durand Line (which divided the Madda Khel population) to even an extra-marital affair. Part of the reason behind this confusion, and inability to account for it, is due to the surprise of the attack.
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“British government cannot take revenue from a country unless they first take possession of it, and
if circumstances compelled the government to take possession of the whole or a part of the Madda
Khel country, it is anticipated that the regular assessment of land revenue as such would cost more
than any income to obtained would justify.”9 Thus, the Tochi Expedition was certainly punitive but
not aimed at establishing territorial control in terms of gaining access to land, its resources or its
people. In fact, the economic calculus of whether it would end up being more costly informed the
decision on which action to take. Ultimately, the Tochi Expedition led to the forced migration of the
Madda Khels to escape from the military operations. The Commander Tochi Force announced that
until all rifles were captured, and fifty or more men surrendered, no Madda Khels would be
permitted to return to Tochi. In their words, this measure was intended to make the group “feel the
pressure of banishment from their country.” 10 Thus, the Madda Khels were effectively blocked from
re-entering their own territory.
This account of the Madda Khels is one of many, as militarized skirmishes between colonial
forces and the frontier tribes were fairly common. Other tactics deployed for “punishing a refractory
tribe, and in many cases the most effectual, is to inflict a fine and demand compensation for
plundered property, or for lives lost.” 11 It was not legal proceeding or even direct military action. At
the same time, this mode of irregular government was accompanied by agricultural settlement in
some areas as well as infrastructural projects such as the Khyber Pass Railway (Medhi 2020). Such a
combination of settled/unsettled, regular/ irregular government characterized the frontier, and
imbued its governance with ambivalence and vacillation, even in relation to cartographical decisions.
9 H.W. Gee, Political Officer at Tochi, 9 Papers on British relations with the North-West Frontier Tribes, and Military Operations Undertaken Against Them (1897-1898), MSS EUR F 86/261 [BL]. 10 See London Gazette, July 2, 1895, and the "The Tochi Valley Expedition 1897,” p. 113, The Rifle Brigade Chronicle for 1897 11 Report by R.I. Bruce in the Papers on British relations with the North-West Frontier Tribes, and Military Operations Undertaken Against Them (1897-1898), MSS EUR F 86/261 [BL].
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The demarcation of the Durand Line in 1893 between British India and the territories
controlled by the Afghan Amir generated much anxiety amongst colonial officials, particularly in
relation to the independence of the tribes along this border.12 They worried that “the work of
marking out a frontier line through hundreds of miles of wild tribal country could not fail to arouse
suspicions,” and that it might be taken to mean that the colonial government would be interfering in
internal tribal affairs.13 Modern states conventionally demarcate borders in order to distinguish
between citizens of their own territories and those of others,14 and this was certainly an objective for
the British in demarcating the Durand Line. At the same time, rule on the frontier was characterized
by vacillating positions with the frontier tribes, and localized actions these tribes took against
colonial officials, which were then dealt with on a case by case basis.15 This dynamic produced
ambivalence, reluctance and vacillation on the part of the colonial government, which I will
demonstrate remains crucial for how the Pakistani state (specifically through NADRA) governs
frontier residents and their mobility today.16
12 The Durand Line is the 2,640-kilometer border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. As mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, it was demarcated as the result of the Anglo-Afghan treat between Sir Mortimer Durand, a secretary of the British Indian government, and Abdur Rahman Khan, the Amir of Afghanistan. 13 Secretary of State for India (George Hamilton) to Viceroy (Lord Elgin), 28 Jan 1898. MSS EUR F 111/ 315 [BL], p.177 14 As we know from the work of Vazira Zamindar, Jason Cons and others, demarcating a border does not mean this work of separating out one nation’s citizens from another’s complete. In practice, such a separation requires continual bureaucratic work, and frequently borders can generate as much ambiguity as they do clarity about the boundaries of states (Cons 2011, 51) 15 Thomas Simpson has described how the Durand Line was an exception, not the rule, in terms of broader practices of demarcating borders at the outskirts of British India with a regular series of man-made markers. In addition, he argues that in spite of this seemingly authoritative imposition, a clear gesture to the Afghan Amir (and the hostilities between British and Afghan guards during the demarcation process are well documented too), borders and frontiers in nineteenth and early twentieth century colonial South Asia were significantly shaped by tribal concerns and local actions, and only partially and occasionally the strategic motivations of colonial officials (Simpson 2015: 539) 16 This can also be observed in the fact that the colonial naming of the province “North-West Frontier Province” was only changed to “Khyber Pakhtunkhwa” (Land of the Pakhtuns) in 2010, after lobbying by the Pashtun nationalist party Awami National Party. In addition, the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), which constituted the “unsettled” frontier during the colonial period, was territorially maintained in that form as a semi-autonomous zone until 2018. In 2018, FATA was merged into the province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. In 2017, as part of the FATA reforms, it was decided that colonial era laws governing the region, in particular the Frontier Crimes Regulation (which placed collective tribal responsibility for individual crimes), would be gradually replaced by the regular judicial system operational in the rest of Pakistan.
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Scholarship on frontier governance has emphasized, particularly in relation to its quality of
ambiguity, that the frontier is both a spatial and temporal category (Hopkins 2020; Mehdi 2020). In
fact, the reason the frontier is difficult to pin down as a spatial category is precisely because of how
its character, meaning and even geography shift over time. In Ruling the Savage Periphery (2020),
Hopkins proposes that a better way of grasping the meaning of the frontier, and specifically the
North-West Frontier on the Indo-Afghan borderlands, would be to focus on the practices that
constituted it as a frontier. In particular, he defines the constituent elements of frontier governance
practice as indirect rule, sovereign pluralism, imperial objecthood and economic dependency
(Hopkins 2020, 18). Sovereign pluralism, in particular, reveals how multiple political allegiances,
which could indulge “native sovereignty and independence” without contradicting colonial officials’
own claims to power, were central to the form that colonial rule took in India. In turn, this produced
a manifold code of law, most prominently in the form of communities’ civil codes, while the Indian
Penal Code operated more generally as criminal law.17 How then did this general practice of colonial
governance differ from what was operationalized on the frontier? Hopkins argues that “colonial
governmentality worked on a register of civil difference and criminal sameness. Frontier
governmentality, in contrast, excluded frontier inhabitants from the colonial legal sphere altogether,
save in certain limited cases, and in so doing abjured the colonial state’s sovereign claims” (Hopkins
2020, 21).
In a familiar move (Kolsky 2015; Marsden and Hopkins 2011), Hopkins follows this mode
of characterizing the frontier (by colonial officials) as a space of exception. One of my aims in this
chapter is to demonstrate how frontier governance does not function as an exception but is instead
central to the operations of statecraft. Frontier governance is not limited to a bounded location but
17 As Radhika Singha’s study of colonial criminal law in The Despotism of Law (1998) shows, the Indian Penal Code’s redefinitions of criminal law (most prominently in the case of homicide where compensation was the norm in the precolonial era) continuously grappled with already existing local conceptions and practices of criminal law.
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extends to locations like Islamabad, the capital city. Drawing on Abhilash Medhi’s (2020) argument,
who challenges the “ready urge to understand the imperial governance of these regions as
instantiations of an Agambian state of exception,” we can see how such an exceptionalism was not
always true during the colonial period either.18 Medhi demonstrates how instead of operating in a
space of complete juridical exceptionalism, the frontier produced (or reified) new legal forms
(including the tribal jirga). Colonial administrators worked on the specificities of geographical and
ethnographic knowledge into a frontier mode of governance, which Medhi connects back into
colonial capitalist circuits as well as the logic of the liberal imperial project.
Conceptualizing frontier governance not as an exception but as an iteration of a broader
governance project brings into relief a central characteristic of the frontier itself. It foregrounds the
shifting and indeterminate quality as a functional characteristic of the frontier. In this vein, the frontier
frequently is frequently conceptualized as a temporal category: “implicit in this characterization is the
teleological idea that such spaces are sure to shed the ambiguity or porosity that is so emblematic of
them and harden over time” (Medhi 2020, 1).19 The frontier’s ambiguous status is related to its
relationship with borders and borderlands. As mentioned above, the slipperiness of frontiers as
spatial categories makes them hard to define. Hopkins offers one solution: “some frontiers manifest
themselves as hard lines, drawn on a map and theoretically enforced on the ground. These are
thought of as borders, or more precisely modern borders. Other frontiers articulate themselves as
18 I do maintain that frontier governance can be seen as more central to postcolonial statecraft (in comparison to the colonial) because of the database affordances of the NADRA identity card, which allows the frontier to emerge in locations such as Islamabad, particularly through the function of blocking. 19 For instance, the incomplete nature of land settlement (on the frontier but also elsewhere), was seen as a part of the stages of proper proprietorship where ownership moves from the clan or tribe to the family and then ultimately to the individual, as it had during the process of enclosure (Baden-Powell Vol. 1, p. 25, quoted in Medhi 2020, 47).
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zones, where state claims and power recede through space. These are thought of as borderlands”
(Hopkins 2020, 14).20
These definitions are generative for understanding how the frontier shifts form. However,
tying frontiers to borders, or even contiguous to borders as borderlands, reaffixes them to a spatial
form that appears at an edge or at a boundary. As Edwin Ardener (1987) posits in relation to
“remote areas,” which have so long been at the heart of anthropological projects, the element of
physically remove in fact obscures the conceptual phenomena that defines remoteness. Instead,
Ardener argues that the quality of “remoteness” is not a function of being on the periphery but of
not being properly linked to the center. The tribal areas can be understood within this schema, and
the attempt to govern them directly through the center (hence, the Federally Administered Tribal
Areas) is in a sense aimed at producing a “proper” relation between this geographical region and the
structure of governance. This relation is then put into tension with the mobility of tribal persons
from this zone. Put another way, can a border zone come to occupy the heart of a territory or, more
broadly, a state?21 I ask this question because I argue that the process of rendering some citizens as
frontier residents is central to the operations of the Pakistani state and not some peripheral side
activity. As I demonstrate in this chapter, the centrality of this procedure is evidenced in the fact that
blocking is structurally integral to NADRA’s identification technologies which work to produce not
only the citizen but equally as important, the frontier resident—who can also, as we saw in the
previous chapter, double as intruder. If we think through Hopkins’ definitions, producing a frontier
as a border would require settling it in some fashion. In turn, situating the frontier in relation to a
20 In turn, Hopkins argues that the frontier between British India and Afghanistan showed geographical fixity by the mid 19th century, likely due to the drawing of the Durand Line. Simultaneously, he pushes the reader to consider frontiers in temporal terms, and thus analyze them conceptually. 21 Balibar’s notion of the internal border, or the interior frontier in Ann Stoler’s (2020) translation is useful in this context. As I outline in the introduction to this dissertation: in Balibar’s schema the dynamic between insiders and outsiders (of a given polity) is central to the production of an internal frontier, that aspires to purification (of the inside) but is ultimately characterized by ambiguity as this process always remains partial.
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border might also require a degree of fixing—but this time with more flexibility and room. In
contrast to these characterizations, in this chapter, I closely follow the notion that a frontier is
primarily defined temporally through the quality of indeterminacy, which is not an exception but the
norm.
In situating the frontier within circuits of capital as opposed to outside or peripheral to them
(and relatedly the colonial regime itself), Medhi shows how colonial capitalism produced the frontier,
and by extension its settled/unsettled qualities. In short, Medhi argues for the centrality of the
frontier to colonial capitalism. While my study does not delve into the political economy of the
frontier, I argue that the relationship between the geographically fixed North-West Frontier and the
Pakistani state—particularly as it was shaped by the two wars waged along and on both sides of the
Afghanistan-Pakistan frontier22—produced a mode of governance (in the form of securitization) that
has proliferated the quality of indeterminacy beyond a spatially delimited zone. Indeterminacy, as
outlined above, defined frontiers in the colonial period but now it sits at the core of the postcolonial
state, quite literally in the capital city, making frontier residents in lieu of citizens.
Such a move involves a renunciation of bureaucratic rationality in a deliberate and even self-
conscious manner. For instance, when NADRA blocks an identity card it initiates a potentially
never-ending process of verification, as opposed to assigning a new and clear legal category such as
Pakistani “citizen” or “alien,” that is, a foreign national who is definitively not Pakistani.23 Crucially,
this does not mean that frontier residents are left alone. They are, as the cases of Tarnol and the
Federally Administered Tribal Areas show, subjected to extraordinary policing and legal constraints
such as collective punishment in the form of the Frontier Crimes Regulation (Nichols 2013) or, in
22 As the following chapter will show, I argue that this mode of reckoning citizens and security (securitizing citizenship) in fact predates 9/11 and is connected to 1971, and the independence of Bangladesh from Pakistan. 23 While NADRA can eventually assign the category of “confirmed alien” to those it deems such at the end of verification procedures, for most of my interlocutors, this clear category had not been assigned despite multiple bureaucratic interactions and proceedings.
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NADRA’s case, the collective blocking of entire families. Pashtun migrants, while blocked, remain in
a state of verification. During this period—frequently lasting years and for some is ongoing—even
as they are not clearly excluded they are effectively distanced from sites where their presence might
be considered problematic for security, including Islamabad’s red zone areas (the secretariat and
other government buildings) and military areas. Thus, blocked persons are subjected to conditions
of ambiguity and indeterminacy marked by a conspicuous absence of clear boundaries and
categories.
Moreover, the conditions of heightened surveillance in Pashtun neighborhoods in Islamabad
mirror dynamics between the geographically fixed frontier zones, where most Pashtun families
migrated from, and the Pakistani security state. Securitization measures not only keep Tarnol
residents out of certain spaces in the capital. It also keeps them restricted to others. These
securitization measures include policing and check posts, where the identity card is checked as
material document (does it belong to who it says) and as databased object (where the identity card
number is checked through electronic devices), which is available at more heavily securitized nodes
such as the entry/exit points into Islamabad. In neighborhoods other than Tarnol where I
conducted my research, Pashtun migrants spoke of the inconvenience and difficulty they faced in
acquiring documents, profiling by the police and in proving themselves to be verifiable citizens.
People from Tarnol, however, explicitly connected their difficulties with identification to
geographies of displacement and trajectories of migration. They described the curious, halting
immobilization of life in Tarnol and its contradictions. Blocked identity cards, which generate all
kinds of “tension,” as my interlocutors termed the affect in English, demand precisely the opposite
of their halting effect: mobility. Getting unblocked entails moving all over the country to collect
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evidentiary documents to prove one’s identity—a kind of enforced “rapid movement” (bhaag dor)—
whereas being a frontier resident in a city means negotiating life in a zone of immobility.24
Blocked cards for residents of Tarnol present a continuous “crisis” in as much as they reveal
the frictional process of frontier-making. Anna Tsing’s (2004) conception of the techno-frontier is
useful for this: a techno-frontier refers to how a technology can produce an endless frontier, in
contrast to a border tied to specific locations. With the use of technology, the frontier can expand,
redefining geographical regions as frontiers according to patterns of settlement, extraction or
securitization (Tsing 2004). Importantly, as gestured above, NADRA manages to produce such a
techno-frontier within the city of Islamabad through its databased capabilities. An identification
system, as a technology of governance, produces the effect of expanding and contracting space by
enabling mobility as well as constraining it. The databased nature of the identification system,
through its ability to untether from specific locations such as a border or a designated office,
manages the (im)mobility of frontier persons as frontier persons, both in the Federally Administered
Tribal Areas and in Tarnol. Its expanded databased “blocking” function enacts internal checkpoints
within the city—not just at a police check posts but also when trying to buy a cell phone chip (and
cannot because the identity card that such a chip would be linked to is blocked) or trying to enroll a
child in elementary school.
Infrastructural blockage
24 In approaching the contradictions produced by the blocked identity card, I draw on the work of scholars who have troubled the binary between mobility and immobility (Glick Schiller and Salazar 2013), and attend to the non-linear (Collyer and de Haas 2012: 469), multi directional (Castagnone 2011) or circular (Gidwani and Sivaramakrishnan 2003) forms of migration. The purpose of this chapter is not to re-theorize the concept of mobility/immobility (Dalakoglou and Harvey 2012) but ethnographically articulate the experience of being constrained (Balaguera 2018), and further an understanding of how the conditions of migration and displacement map onto the ability to move within the city once migration has already taken place.
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In this way, blocking does tremendous bureaucratic work for NADRA. It allows the organization,
and thus also other government departments and private entities, including passport offices, banks
and telecom companies, to distinguish amongst citizens and regulate their activity. Further, a
blocked status is more than a technical category. As an analytic, for me as well as for my
interlocutors with blocked cards, it reveals the lineaments of NADRA as both a piece of the larger
state machinery and as an information infrastructure itself. Infrastructure studies emphasize how the
breakdown and interruption in infrastructural flows allows what is fundamentally invisible (infra
being under) to become visible (Star 1999; Appel, Anand and Gupta 2015). In this vein, blockage is
what makes aspects of NADRA’s frontier governance most visible, specifically as a channel that
communicates meaning (in the form of verified information) about distinct individuals and their
relations at multiple nodes in everyday life.
Moreover, I would argue that “blockage” as an analytic extends beyond interruption or
breakdown (von Schnitzler 2015). In NADRA’s case, blockage is central to flow and the system’s
functioning. Paul Kockelman brings together Michael Serres’ concept of the parasite in the same
frame as the cybernetician Claude Shannon’s notion of the channel in ways that are helpful for
grasping the role of blockage in a network as a whole. Following the model of message source,
message destination and channel in between, Kockelman describes that in devising a system of
encryption, Shannon replaced the transmitter and receiver with encipherer and a decipherer, and so
instead of “noise” we have an “enemy” seeking to intercept the encrypt the cryptogram (the
message). As Kockelman notes, “the enemy is precisely that which the system is designed for (or
rather against)” (2010, 409). As we saw in the last chapter, the increasingly dense network of kin
linkages, and thus the use of categories like “family intruder,” constitute and produce identification
in its current form. Designing against intrusion—not only in the sense of cybersecurity attacks but
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also in terms of individuals seeking to access the identity database—is fundamental to the very way
the system functions.
Serres allows an additional way into conceptualizing blockage, as he considers how all
relations (between two things) are in fact part of a system that consists of several interrelations
among several beings (Kockelman 2010, 411).25 In this way, the primary benefit of engaging Serres is
to conceptualize the entirety of the system, or in his terms, the “assemblage” (Serres 2007). This will
be useful for understanding how blockage is not an isolated incident but one that can affect kinship
units across their network of relations and extends out into neighborhoods and communities. In this
mode, parasites are not exceptions but are a part of the infrastructure.26 In particular, if we
understand the blocking of national identity cards in Pakistan as a kind of sifting, where the
verification processes operate as a sieve to differentiate between desirable and undesirable entities
(Kockleman 2017), it follows that the database is designed with the qualities of that which it seeks to
sift. NADRA, as an information infrastructure, communicates the identity of persons in Pakistan as
they go about their business, banking, voting, enrolling their children in school or even getting on a
bus. Thus, any obstruction in this channel, that is, when an ID card does not work for someone
such as during a bank transaction, is just as important as flow, or when the identity card does
function (Serres 2007, 79).
These blockages do not just indicate glitches (or a parasite) but also indicate how
information flows through the infrastructure. In so doing, blockages demonstrate how the system is
built around what is not supposed to be there. In a parallel fashion, individuals who are not supposed
25 Kockelman is reading both Shannon and Serres through Charles Peirce, and in so doing, is following the resonances between these two thinkers and Peirce, particularly through his notion of thirdness. 26 The problem with Serres’ notion of the parasite is that it comes across as a multi-splendored entity, in that as Kockelman defines it, it is “any perturbation of a relation” (Kockelman 2010, 412). An exemplary one, however, would be a catalyst that produces reactions in the system, and we can consider the initial “block” of a family member’s card as the catalyst in a chain of blocking.
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to be in the system (blocked citizens of Tarnol) reveal a strategy of governance that produces
control through a gesture that resembles a constant, but indeterminate, rebuffing as opposed to a
clear exclusion from the system. Hence, when Tarnol residents are asked to identify themselves and
fail to do so due to their blocked status, they are not deported or immediately accused of being non-
citizens. Rather, they are simply turned away, not allowed to enter an area or access a service. This
form of regulation produces frontierization through databased forms of identification and
verification, making citizenship itself (as a legal entitlement or presumed status) ultimately
insufficient for guaranteeing ease of passage beyond specific points of blockage that demand
repeated verification. To underscore, being a Pakistani citizen does not prevent residents of Tarnol
from being governed within the urban setting as frontier people.27 This mode of databased
governance and identification thus reconfigures parts of the city, transforming them into frontier
zones.
Figure 6: Tarnol, encircled in red and starred (source: Google maps)
27 I limited my ethnographic focus to Pakistani Pashtuns, the majority of whom in Tarnol hailed from the Federally Administered Tribal Areas. To my knowledge, none of these individuals identified themselves as holding Afghan nationality. As a result, the Afghans that I learned about during my fieldwork was through Pakistani Pashtuns. This was a choice I made because of multiple reasons: working with Afghan refugees might have jeopardized my access to NADRA institutional sites and in turn, my work with NADRA would likely have made those in refugee status, given that much of my fieldwork was around the question of documentation, uncomfortable and potentially put them at risk if they did not wish to disclose their refugee status.
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Urban Frontier
The landscape to which early migrants arrived was described by many in Tarnol to be “wild, like a
jungle.” The process of turning this into an inhabitable space—building roads, clearing tall grasses
for building houses and so on—involved, perhaps inadvertently, turning Tarnol into a part of the
city itself. This section focuses on Tarnol’s spatial characteristics that both integrate and separate it
from the planned city of Islamabad. I delve into the details of the built form, including homes and
streets, as well as the spatial dynamics of life in Tarnol, which contribute to its frontier qualities and
ultimately come to intersect with its residents’ identification troubles.
Tarnol is in the northwest of Islamabad, has a population of approximately twenty thousand
people and covers an area of approximately 450 acres. Pashtun migrants move to places such as
Tarnol, seemingly on the “periphery” of the city, precisely because they appear outside certain
conventional restraints of governance. As described by one of my interlocutors, Tarnol was a “free
zone” as it was not an official planned sector of the city and was outside the bounds of Islamabad’s
Capital Development Authority’s direct control, particularly in relation to infrastructural provisions
and regulations such as water supply, sewerage or street and road maintenance. Additionally, in the
absence of functioning identity cards, it was easier to buy property or rent a house in Tarnol than in
the formal sectors of the city. It then makes sense that Tarnol would be called ilaqa ghair: a self-
governing zone on the North-West Frontier of Pakistan, semi-autonomous on one hand and on the
other a site of hyper-surveillance and control (Tripodi, 2011).
I learned about Tarnol through interlocutors at an earlier fieldwork site during my
preliminary fieldwork, an informal Pashtun settlement in the sector of I-11. More specifically, after
I-11 was demolished by the Capital Development Authority in 2015, many of the residents of the
informal settlement moved to Tarnol. The Islamabad High Court ordered the Capital Development
Authority (CDA) to demolish all settlements occupied by illegal squatters. They demanded that the
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CDA start with I-11 as it was the largest, comprising approximately twenty thousand people. The
CDA, however, started smaller demolitions in other squatter settlements while buying time to
negotiate with the residents of I-11. In addition, the CDA began an active media campaign (to a
large extent on social media), and a key component of this was that I-11 posed a security risk due to
the high density of its Pashtun population. They drew on unsubstantiated suspicions that a bomb
blast in the nearby wholesale vegetable market, where the majority of the residents were employed,
was carried out with the help of I-11 residents.28 On account of their ethnicity, and the fact that the
settlement was unplanned, it was seen as a sanctuary for terrorists and criminals.29 The day following
the demolition of I-11, the Special Branch (one of the many sub-divisions of the Intelligence
Agencies) said there were reports of ammunition and arms hidden in cellars constructed under the
mud houses.30 Thus, security reasons were used as justification, most prominently in the allegation
that I-11 residents were not Pakistani citizens and thus posed a security threat to the state.
Even as some of their identity cards were “blocked,” I-11 residents used them along with
other protest materials and placards. The CDA’s bulldozers arrived three days prior to the actual
demolition. The residents had been organizing against this moment for about two weeks at that
point and occupied the road in front of the settlement, standing on their roofs with placards and
protest materials. They held off the police and the bulldozers for two days. On the third, the CDA
struck a deal with an elder in one part of the settlement, promising that only 20 houses would be
demolished. People gathered as the police and bulldozers moved in. However, after the fifth house
was demolished, a crowd of about two hundred people picked up the stones on the ground and
rushed at the rows of around three hundred policemen to drive them back to the other side of the
road. They succeeded, but a tear gas battle ensued in which eventually the violence of the state
28 “Insecurity grips Sabzi Mandi traders, labourers,” Dawn News, July 21, 2014. 29 “Safe-havens: Police haul over 100 from I-11 katchi abadis,” The Express Tribune, September 29, 2013. 30 “Capital’s Sector I-11/1 ‘Katchi Abadi’ no more,” The News, July 31, 2015.
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apparatus with its batons, tear gas guns and finally tear gas tanks that slowly made their way into the
heart of the settlement overwhelmed all resistance. During this period of four to five hours, the
houses that were at the front of the settlement were slowly demolished. Their residents picked up
whatever belongings they could find and ran to the other side of the settlement. The rest of the
demolition took place over the course of three days.
Figure 7: A woman carrying a fan from her home during the eviction of I-11 in Islamabad (source: photo by author)
My early experience of I-11’s demolition alerted me to how Pashtun migrants’ ability to
make a life in Islamabad was continually thwarted by the perception of the security risk they posed.
While the demolition continued over three days, I continued to return to the settlement to help
move residents to temporary housing. Residents that tried to move in with relatives in Rawalpindi
(the city adjoining Islamabad) had their vans and trucks, which were carrying their belongings,
stopped by the police. They were asked to return to Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, the Pashtun majority
province, or even Afghanistan. It was during one of these moving trips that I first visited Tarnol
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with former I-11 residents. Since driving to Tarnol is much like driving out of Islamabad and
towards Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, the Pashtun majority province in Pakistan, there were fewer check
posts and questions going in this direction. In Tarnol, I learned that while some planned to rent
homes, often half-finished upper portions of houses, others had been saving money and already
owned small plots of land in this neighborhood. As I returned to do my long term fieldwork in
Tarnol, I found that even as it offered more stability in that my interlocutors’ homes were not
constantly under the threat of demolition, other conditions of uncertainty and the ability to settle in
the city continued, including the fundamental problem of the blocked identity card.
Even though Tarnol is in the Islamabad constituency, one of the reasons I-11 residents were
reluctant to move from the settlement was because Tarnol was further outside of Islamabad.31 As
you move towards both the Grand Truck (GT) road and the “modern” motorway (Khan 2006),
there are a few narrow streets at an unassuming junction after a railway crossing and a row of fruit
stands. There is a cluster of “colonies'' behind these plazas, and within these are two, Ittefaq Colony
and Chaudhary Mohalla, which (within Tarnol) was where I conducted my fieldwork as it was also
where there were most people with blocked cards. Tarnol seems to have grown longitudinally along
the highway and also includes some middle-income and affluent housing developments in this area,
such as the Fazaaia Housing Scheme. The journey to Tarnol, for most of my fieldwork, was awful.32
The construction for the metro bus lanes to the airport had broken the road, leading to detours and
billowing clouds of dust. One can observe how the “plan” of the city gradually erodes away at these
fringes, producing an awareness that something has somehow transformed. Even as certain visual
31 Tarnol is a part of Union Council 54, which elects a member of the National Assembly, and is thus politically incorporated into the system of elected representatives from Islamabad. 32 Not only for me, but importantly, for my interlocutors who worked in the wholesale vegetable market (sabzi mandi) in I-11 reported multiple accidents on this road due to the dismal road conditions, especially in early hours of the morning when they would have to get to the vegetable market in time for the morning auction.
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markers of the planned city such as street signs disappear, the streets of Tarnol have a grid of their
own, one that has been created through the settlement pattern of its residents.33
The fact that Tarnol is on the way to the province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, where the
majority of Pakistan’s Pashtun population originates, is telling. Its location allows for easy travel to
towns and cities, including Peshawar, where many of its settlements have friends and family. Tarnol
also borders Rawalpindi and is proximate to Taxila, the ancient Ghandhara city, and the Pashtun-
majority planned sector in Islamabad, G-13. The occupation of many of Tarnol’s residents reveal
why they live in this particular area. On the main highway, one can see the various kinds of heavy
machinery. Given that this is the direction (West) that the city is growing towards, the construction
businesses are strategically located here. Many Tarnol residents, particularly those who did not move
from I-11, work in construction as business owners or employees. A large number, as mentioned
earlier, also work at the local wholesale vegetable market, which is not far from Tarnol or from the
exit of the highways where the fresh produce from nearby agricultural areas comes from. Tarnol
residents’ livelihoods are tied to the expanding edge of the capital city.
Tarnol was considered the easiest place to live in by former I-11 residents as well as migrants
moving from outside of Islamabad due to the neighborhood’s existing networks within the Pashtun
migrant community, particularly those from the tribal areas. When I returned for my long-term
fieldwork during one of my first visits to Tarnol, I called Waseem Jaan, a commission agent (arthi)
who worked at the wholesale vegetable market at Islamabad. Waseem Jaan and his family had
moved from the informal settlement in I-11 to Tarnol, as he already owned property there, and since
moving he had gotten into the property dealing business in Tarnol. It is not coincidental that
property dealing happens to be a thriving business and popular occupation in Tarnol. Since the
33 As Paul Carter suggests while discussing the spatial dimensions of imperial history, the use of the grid in urban spaces as a source of authority but one that does not signify the same thing across distinct geographical locations (2010, 211).
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neighborhood is outside the planned sectors there are more opportunities for these independent
entrepreneurs who profit from developing the neighborhood as it grows.
As Tarnol is outside of Islamabad’s planned urban sectors, parts of Tarnol continue to be
owned by its “original” (abayi) inhabitants. While I did not spend much time with this group during
my fieldwork, I met one such family at a celebration at Waseem Jaan’s home when he returned from
Hajj. Waseem Jaan had bought land from this family and then apportioned it to sell it forward.
Tarnol’s distinctiveness in relation to parts of planned sectors in Islamabad is reflected in the
neighborhood’s mixed spatial categories and forms. The first house I entered in the neighborhood
appeared half-built. Walking in through a small door in the gate, a gate left open but covered by a
curtain to maintain privacy, there was an open area with a loose dirt floor, a stove in a corner and a
few charpoys (traditional woven bed) spread out across the space. The walls were made of cinder
blocks. A half-finished staircase, with its underlying structure partially visible, led upstairs to an also
under-construction second story. I was guided up to this second floor by my hosts. They had moved
in just a few days ago after the demolition of their home in I-11 and were renting two rooms. The
rooms had been finished quickly so as to accommodate them; there were no doors, just curtains, and
sheets instead of glass in the windows. Perhaps as a result of the partially finished state of the
upstairs, there was an unusually large terrace with an open view of the Margalla Hills in the distance.
The state of this house, both in terms of its physical state and its occupants, is not an
anomaly. Tarnol’s dwellings, inhabitants and its political economy indicate that the “unfinished”
state of homes was in fact a part of the homes and neighborhood’s design. Other homes too had
incomplete elements, such as unfinished floors or even partially built stairways. Many other houses
had an open space within the home where they could keep animals such as goats or buffaloes. This
was not simply a matter of resources or how soon a family could fully finish their house. There were
elements of choice and function involved in these decisions. Having animals in the house means
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fresh milk and possibly an additional income. Further, a mud floor allows for a naturally cool, even
if dusty, floor during the long summer.
Rural and urban spatial forms combine in Tarnol, integrating elements from past homes and
ways of inhabitation as a matter of preference and habit.34 One of my interlocutors from I-11 who
moved to Tarnol explained “our grandmother (dadi) was very distraught when I-11 was torn down,
and when we went to live with relatives in Pindi—our father hadn’t found this house (in Tarnol)
yet—dadi was going to go back to the village to our uncle (chacha). She said she felt suffocated in our
relatives’ house (dum ghut raha tha). Then we came here, she saw the open courtyard (sehan) and the
fields nearby and decided to stay.” The integration of urban and rural life can also be observed
through material markers on the landscape, including names of areas within Tarnol—Chaudhary
Mohalla, Sarai Alamgir, and Gulshan Colony—that point to the layered nature of rural and urban
space with the names of old villages combined with relatively newer forms such as the “Colony.”
For example, if I was meeting male members of a household and was accompanied by my research
assistant, a Pashtun man, I would often be hosted in a household’s baithak. The baithak is a foyer
that typically allows for a separate entrance to the house to ensure privacy for the women of the
household. Despite the small size of many of the houses in Tarnol, most of them had this feature.
Asadullah opened the door of the baithak. In order to do this, he had to go into the main house where I had been before. As I waited, I remembered that the main house was all exposed brick on the inside and so not entirely finished. He opened the door from the inside, and I saw that the baithak did have plastered and painted walls. The baithak was an adjoining room, so I could hear the women of the house cooking and washing dishes. I suppose this way their work would not be interrupted if Asadullah had guests. Asadullah’s baithak was refreshingly cool compared to most, perhaps due to the dirt floor. It also had three charpais and a television set. Asadullah turned the television on, which had a channel with wrestling on. He left it on as he began a conversation with us. A young boy, Asadullah’s grandchild brought
34 Studies of urban South Asia increasingly focus on the boundary regions between urban and rural and examine the blurring of these categories through emergent spatial formations (Gururani 2019; Ghertner 2011; Makhopadhay et al 2020). At the same time, we can see how this process has historical roots beyond our current moment of globalized urbanization, such as in the new “market towns” in colonial South Asia (Glover 2018).
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us a Coca-Cola. I noted how the modern house in the planned sectors did not allow for this. In particular, I was thinking of my friend’s mother who lived in the sector G-13 and observed strict purdah was constantly having to dart into the kitchen as guests directly entered the living space of the house. (Author’s field notes, September 2018)
The design of these homes, along with the infrastructure and layout of the neighborhood as
a whole, informs how we can situate a space like Tarnol within the broader political geography of a
fortified and securitized city such as Islamabad. On the scale of the house and the street, there are
significant connections between how homes were organized and who lived on a particular street.
For instance, a number of brothers, if not living in a single home, would live next door to one
another. This allows for information about bureaucratic process and documentation to be shared
between kin and tribal groups—or in the case of feuding family members, to acquire and then
withhold documents that were needed by another. On one hand, Tarnol’s infrastructure was built up
from practically nothing by its inhabitants and this was reflected in design choices and spatial
configuration. On the other hand, the fact that Tarnol fell outside the jurisdiction of the planned city
and was inhabited primarily by Pashtuns meant that it was subject to more extreme laws of
governance.35
Residents of Tarnol experienced regular interrogation as well as harassment by the police.
For instance, one day when I arrived on 24th March—the day after the holiday “Pakistan Day”—I
was sitting at the local recycling depot (kabarwala) when the owner of this establishment was called
on his cell phone by a relative. He explained that as a person who had a functioning identity card, he
had to provide a character guarantee (shakhsi zamanat) for five to ten young men who had been taken
to the police station the night before. When I met one of these young men later and expressed
35 The primary reason these inhabitants still preferred Tarnol, to squatter settlements for instance, was because it offered the security of a house that was not in any danger of being demolished. However, this relative stability (of not having your home be “illegal” and so demolished) did not mean that they were not subjected to other kinds of profiling and policing in Tarnol.
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concern, he said “oh this is just routine. Whenever there is a holiday—Eid Milad-un-Nabi, 14th
August (Independence Day) or even the processions for Muharram—they will come and pick a
bunch of us up. We know we’ll have to spend the night in jail.” When I asked why the police did
this during holidays in particular, I was told they considered it part of their policing “duty.” This is
not uncommon for Pashtuns in Islamabad in general. A young man in the Pashtun settlement of I-
10 in Islamabad who also had a blocked card pulled out from his pocket an old and ragged receipt
from the NADRA office—stating that his card would be delivered in twenty to thirty days, which of
course it never was as he was put into citizenship re-verification—and explained, “I keep this with
me, so that when the police stop me, I can say my card is going to be delivered.” I asked, “don't they
see that the date is from so long ago (two years)?” He shrugged his shoulders and said, “sometimes
they question me and take whatever cash I have anyway and other times they let me go.” In this way,
while the complaints about policing are common amongst Pashtuns in general, including friends at
Quaid-e-Azam University who show their student identity cards and are still harassed, residents in
Tarnol described that they felt the police made an extra effort to enter the neighborhood as a means
to show that it was still under their control. This simultaneously indicates that Tarnol was not as
completely under their jurisdiction as they would want.
Such a posture of policing reflects, in Jason Cons’ words, territorial anxieties where
“ambiguity and anxiety are hallmarks of both life in and rule of sensitive space.” (Cons 2016, 26). In
Cons’ ethnography, the anxiety felt by residents of Dahagram, a Bangladeshi enclave inside India, is
in direct relation to the Tin Bigha corridor, a militarized border always at risk of being closed off.
This uncertainty is central to Dahagram’s residents’ anxiety. While borders are commonly
understood as clearly demarcated, at least until they are redrawn, Cons foregrounds the elasticity of
land as his interlocutors stress how their lands are being “eaten up” by an encroaching border (Cons
2011, 32). In Tarnol, an explicit border is absent. And like many peripheral urban neighborhoods, as
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the city grows, Tarnol gradually becomes a part of it. Yet at the same time, unlike Dahagram, Tarnol
continues to be separated from the city through the blocked status of its residents. As mentioned
above, Tarnol operates as a frontier in part because its inhabitants hail from another borderland.
The porous presence of the Durand Line, and the territorial anxieties around that space, resurface in
Tarnol through whispered conversations about Afghan neighbors and references about its mirrored
state as an ilaqa ghair as mentioned above.
The ways that Tarnol gets cut off from the city has much to do with government services,
including NADRA. For instance, unlike other sectors that might have the Capital Development
Authority ensure their water supply, however patchy, Tarnol residents bore their own water wells.
Consider the fact that during my fieldwork, a group of Tarnol residents asked me to assist them in
requesting a NADRA mobile van which would come to Tarnol and facilitate the registration of
women in particular who did not have identity cards. When I made this request at the NADRA
Mega Registration Center in Islamabad, I received an unequivocal “no” for an answer. The
reasoning was that a large number of Afghans lived in the area, and even if there were some
Pakistani Pashtuns, NADRA could simply not take that risk. NADRA’s refusal, especially as it was
expressed in the language of risk, reflects its strategy of withholding identification and state
recognition from certain groups. These groups are maintained in an ambiguous space, namely as
residents of a frontier zone, in order to distance them from sensitive areas (Cons 2016).
Tarnol, as the point of arrival (or arrival after displacement in the case of I-11 residents) for
migrants, shades their potential for recognition and identification by NADRA. Tarnol draws in
people who have hopes and aspirations for a different kind of life where they can escape the political
and social instability that surrounds them, in part because documentary regimes have fragmented the
imaginative horizons for those who live there. In Tarnol, stability does not necessarily materialize in
a particular kind of house but in the ability to participate in select parts of the city by virtue of
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existing in its borderlands. Tarnol’s borders are not fixed, as the neighborhood continues to expand,
but are spaces of fission and fragmentation. Through Tarnol residents’ experiences of blocking and
for some unblocking, identification reveals itself as a phenomenon that is intimately connected to
spatial dynamics, of urban peripheries as well as tribal frontiers. Conversely, while the relationship
between identity documents and migrants is forged through their spatial histories, emergent
neighborhood-level social and political dynamics shape the present of urban life in securitized cities
like Islamabad. In this vein, the blocked card indexes both where someone is from as well as where
they stand at present.
Mysteries of the Blocked Card
Double Patta: The Mismatch of Address
The frontier character of Tarnol extends beyond the neighborhood’s spatial organization to the
encoding of inhabitation and migrant identity in NADRA’s database. In conversations with blocked
card holders in Tarnol, it became clear that there was something about Tarnol itself as a marker of
suspicion that contributed to the plethora of blocked cards across the neighborhood. This section
explores a series of speculative theories that people in Tarnol developed over time about why their
cards were blocked. It analyzes the various, occasionally divergent, localized attempts to theorize and
by extension negotiate the opacity of NADRA’s verification procedures.36 I focus on how Tarnol
residents’ theories extend beyond concerns with citizenship rights and entitlements. In particular,
Tarnol residents’ explanations for their blocked status reveal the highly spatialized anxieties of
Pashtun migrants with regard to both current and past residences, as well as a self-conscious
36 Importantly, in my fieldwork at NADRA offices, I found that there was no singular, definitive reason behind blocking. It is a collection of factors, and this unknowability that generates chronic uncertainty about the future of migrant life in Islamabad. This uncertainty is intertwined with the partially finished, occasionally illegible, and indeterminate qualities of the neighborhood itself.
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awareness about how their migrant itineraries and lives as frontier residents generate instability
within NADRA’s operations.
Razaq, a blocked card holder, was the first to begin introducing me to others in Tarnol with
the same problem. He suggested we approach Hafiz Sahib, since he had heard that Hafiz Sahib had
compiled a list of all those in Tarnol who had blocked identity cards. Hafiz Sahib was active in the
neighborhood, a political worker for the political party Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam (JUI-F), and a
community leader of sorts, even if self-appointed. Almost every time we arrived at Hafiz Sahib’s
baithak; he was asleep on his charpoy with two pedestal fans directed at him. The first time this
happened, Razaq had just asked his grandson if this was a bad time when Hafiz Sahib, hearing
voices, jolted awake and ushered us in. He was the only one I met in Tarnol who immediately
handed me a business card. The card stated his name, the title “social worker” and three cell phone
numbers. It was clear that documents were an important form of self-presentation for him, and the
blocked card appeared to have put his authoritative status in jeopardy. If he could not navigate the
government himself, how would he be able to do so as a “leader” on behalf of others?
Hafiz Sahib told me “at first, all of our cards—mine and nine people in my family—were
blocked. Two of my brothers were in Saudi Arabia at the time, and one brother’s son as well. Their
visas were frozen, since they could not renew their passports, and so they had to come back to
Pakistan. I ran around, called people, did all that I could from, but the cards stayed blocked for five
years. They were ‘released’ just a few weeks before the month of Ramzan this year (2018). NADRA,
mashallah, is considerate enough that maybe they realized that people would like to go for Umrah
during Ramzan or for Hajj, and so they released the cards...”
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Once he was “unblocked,” Hafiz Sahib pedantically explained to me that the verification
process through which a card is “released” relies on one’s record to be cleared.37 He explained, with
obvious embellishment, “I have had to clear my name at every single government office in this
country (mein ne iss mulk ke har daftar se apna naam saaf karwaya hai).” He emphasized how one’s name
and character had to emerge untarnished in the process of verification proceedings. For most of
Hafiz Sahib’s family the trouble lay, according to him, in the fact that they had listed their temporary
address (when registering for the identity card in the first place) as Tarnol, while the permanent
address varied according to different family members. He believes it was this discrepancy in
recorded address that caused NADRA’s alarm bells to ring, alerting them to the fact that
“something was off (kuch garh barh hai).” He explained, “if you put your address down as
‘Charsadda,’ but they can’t find your record in Charsadda then they will obviously be suspicious of
you. It was all these different addresses, for different family members, that caused the problem in
the first place.” Hafiz Sahib referred to this as the “double address” (double patta) problem.
“If you give conflicting answers then whose fault is it, NADRA’s or your own?” he asked.
His tone implied that citizens ought to know the nuances and the nature of mistakes that a techno-
bureaucracy was likely to make. It was one’s responsibility (zimedari) to know the system inside out
to prevent what might go wrong. Without direct knowledge of what an algorithm is or how it
operates, Hafiz Sahib speculated about what might cause a discrepancy in NADRA’s records. While
Hafiz Sahib was attentive to the specific capacity of electronic records—he specifically considered
what records NADRA’s system could pull up and what might cause problems—he was especially
wary of how bureaucrats responded to inconsistencies (especially in terms of residential address) in
the documents provided. Whether this was indeed the case or not is hard to say, which perhaps
37 The terms “unblocked” and “released” were both used to describe when a previously blocked card was re-authenticated after the requisite proceedings by NADRA.
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supports Hafiz Sahib’s argument for attempting to visualize and preempt the operations of a black
box.38
It was not only double patta, which produced conflicting or confusing information and led to
a blocked card in Tarnol. It seemed like having an address from Tarnol itself was the problem. The
majority of Tarnol residents I spoke to, in one way or another, attributed the reason behind their
blocked card to living in Tarnol itself. Providing two addresses, one temporary and the other
permanent, was allowed by NADRA. In fact, requesting two addresses is common practice for a
number of forms and records. The statement “all of Tarnol is blocked” was repeated to me
countless times. Something about even a single address (or occasionally both) from Tarnol seemed
to create friction in NADRA’s databases. The mismatch in addresses was not simply a technical
problem of not being able to pull from two separate records. That is precisely what a database, as
opposed to a paper registry, should be able to do. Instead, Tarnol residents hypothesized, the
problem lay in how the two addresses did not compute the right kind of person.
Noorullah, another Tarnol resident, explained this by arguing “none of my relatives in
Mohmand (the tribal agency he was originally from) have their cards blocked. Why? Because they
live there. Both their permanent and temporary addresses are from Mohmand, no one can question
that they belong there. Everyone knows them. It is us, in Tarnol, that this blocked card is a problem
for. They (NADRA) see the Islamabad address and their ears prick up (kaan kharay ho jatay hain).”39
38 The concept of the “black box” was used by Bruno Latour in Science in Action (1984), borrowed from cyberneticists who draw a box when referring to a set of commands too complex to be outlined in their entirety, focusing instead on input and output alone. In approaching NADRA’s “black box” from the perspective of those who experience its effects, such as Hafiz Sahib, I foreground the speculative attempts at mediation and access that proliferate precisely when the black box remains unopened. See Winner (1993), Mackenzie (1990) and the more recent re-evaluation of the proliferation of the black box metaphor in the special issue of Science, Technology & Human Values (Schindell 2020). 39 I saw this discomfort in action at the NADRA Registration Center where on two separate occasions, Data Entry Operators told me that “local offices” in the tribal areas were more equipped to deal with the registration of the people in their area as they were more likely to know who was who and would be able to tell if something was amiss. However, legally (starting around 2015), NADRA had started allowing people to register for an identity card anywhere in Pakistan regardless of their place of origin. As a result, Data Entry Operators relied on checking in with their superiors, Assistant Managers, and digitally marking a file for extra verification beyond the data entry procedure.
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Blocked card holders began to self-consciously see themselves as in between a tribal area and a
strange, unevenly governed Pashtun neighborhood in the capital city.40 They realized that this
combination of addresses expressed migration routes that could potentially send the wrong signals
to authorities, provoking them to verify their identities. The discussion in the next section below
further details how this sentiment, namely of Pashtun migrants’ recognition that it was their
presence in Islamabad in particular that was unsettling to NADRA officials, intersects with the
meaning of citizenship (for Pashtuns) and the ways in which this could be established.
Citizens or Intruders
“Tarnol would not exist were it not for the people who made this place inhabitable. It is these same
people NADRA is depriving of identity cards now.” Sher Khan gestured around him to the houses
under construction in the distance. The road was being levelled behind us by a group of men with
shovels and heavy equipment was boring a well right next to us, so Sher had to shout these
grievances in my face.
Sher Khan is a Pashtun migrant currently residing in Tarnol. Sher and his wife’s identity
cards had been blocked for a year—a fact they discovered when Sher lost his card and went to the
NADRA office to get a duplicate. When I asked why he thought his card had been blocked, he
responded “it is us who have made Tarnol a livable place, us who the government is blocking now.”
By that time in my fieldwork, I knew he was referring to the assumption that the residents of Tarnol
are not all Pakistani. Sher argued “it is these ‘suspect’ (mashkook) people that cut the grass, made the
sewer lines (naalian), bore the wells and made Tarnol an inhabitable place (rehnay ke laiq).” He
implied that this mode of belonging, of staking a claim to a place, was disregarded in NADRA’s
40 As Ammara Maqsood notes (2019, 108), a pattern of circular migration is common amongst tribal Pashtuns. The families of maliks (tribal heads) move out of the tribal areas for schooling, health care and professional careers including civil service and bureaucracy. In addition, families from lower-income backgrounds also move to larger cities as well as the Gulf, working seasonal jobs. For both these groups, parts of the family taken turns living in the cities while some are back in the tribal areas.
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calculus of who could be serviced an identity. Sher’s comments make oblique references to an
underlying tension: the widespread idea that Tarnol is not only predominantly Pashtun but also
Afghan. However, Sher chose not to speak to this directly or even make his referent (Afghan or
Pakistani) clear. He avoided the question of legal status as it emerges through postcolonial and
national cartographies. Instead, he offered an alternative view for reading the citizenly qualities of
Tarnol’s residents, primarily as grounded in a future oriented relationship to making home in a
migrant neighborhood.
In contrast, another blocked card holder and Pashtun migrant in Tarnol, Ajab Khan from
Waziristan, spoke to the heart of the problem in clear and unabashed words. “If you think
Waziristan is in Afghanistan, then fine, you can block our identity cards. But if you accept that
Waziristan is on this side of the border, that it is indeed in Pakistan, then how can you block our
cards?” For Ajab, the question of citizenship was very different from Sher. Ajab offered a
cartographical and even legalistic solution. For Ajab, borders, and specifically the Durand Line, had
been set in stone and so what could the confusion possibly be about but discrimination.41 When I
questioned him about whether Waziris are as affected by blocked cards as those belonging to the
tribal area of Mohmand, Ajab offered another geographical explanation. He explained “in Mohmand
Agency, members of the same tribe (qabila)—even the same family if the daughter, for instance, was
married into a family across the border—are split across the two sides of the Afghanistan-Pakistan
border. So entire families from Mohmand are blocked—even up to thirty or forty people.”42 Thus,
41 In fact, it is precisely the porousness of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border that produces this discrimination, and the fear by both Afghan and Pakistani governments that both territories are permeable from this borders (Omrani 2009; Poya 2020). 42 Ajab’s explanation can be corroborated by the high-profile case of Hafiz Hamdullah, a senator who was declared a “confirmed alien” by NADRA. In news reports, his blocked card was connected to his genealogical origins from the Noorzai tribe, which purportedly originated in Afghanistan. See “JUI-F’s Hafiz Hamdullah declared ‘alien’ by NADRA,” The Express Tribune, October 26, 2019.
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Ajab argued, Waziris, in contrast to the Mohmand, were blocked on the basis of individual
suspicion.
Ajab relied on a cartographical understanding of citizenship (based on borders) to argue that
it made even less sense for his card to be blocked as opposed to Mohmands. Simultaneously, in
making that argument, Ajab shows us how unstable the process of mapping citizenship as a set of
entitlements onto national territory is. Ajab’s very need to insist on the fact that he belongs to an
area that is Pakistan betrays the fact that in social and political life, citizenship is not binary
(Benhabib 2004). In Ajab’s schema, “citizenship” means the bare minimum—the basic capacity to
exist within a territory. It is hardly an expansive sense of belonging, thriving and reproducing a
political self (Lister 2005; Kymlicka and Norman 1994). Moreover, a minimalist notion of
citizenship does not account for the imbrication between citizens and non-citizens (Rainer 2005).
This imbrication manifests itself in the thick density of networks, social and political relationships
and potentially inter-dependence between those who fit a given legal category and those who do not
(Bosniak 2006).43 Cartographically grounded notions of citizenship do not encompass the ways that
political and social personhood is shaped through relations that may be outside of how borders and
migration routes are intended to map onto persons. Rather, claims to citizenship have evolved and
transformed historically (Jalal 1995) and are not universal across Pakistan (Ali 2019) but shaped by
who one is and where one is.
In Flexible Citizens, Aihwa Ong discusses trans-nationality by underlining that “trans denotes
both moving through space or across lines, as well as changing the nature of something” (Ong 1999,
4). The focus on national borders, especially as they pertain to migration, does not account for the
43 As I described in the Introduction, and will also describe below, people like Hamida Bibi and her family, had their cards blocked due to a distant Afghan relative, who used their original identity card to claim a familial relation to them. In addition, one of my interlocutors Gulnar Bibi (from Chapter One) had a daughter who was married to an Afghan refugee, and she continually worried that this would lead to trouble with NADRA who would think that they were all Afghan.
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uneven and partial nature of the postcolonial citizenship project and the variegations of borders it
produced (Chatterji 2012; Zamindar 2007).44 Polities such as Pakistan, which were produced out of
violent partitions (Das 2007; Gilmartin 2015) and continued to experience conflict over territory and
autonomy, intentionally maintained “buffer” zones such as the Federally Administered Tribal Areas
and Northern Areas (Beattie 2002). Through this historical experience, the “trans-ness” of not only
citizenship but along various vectors of identification is experienced continually through a multitude
of internal check posts.45 In this context, citizenship depends not only on a system of exclusions (by
defining who is not a citizen) but also a series of categorical transgressions by groups who fit but
barely (namely tribal Pashtuns who could be mistaken for Afghans) as they attempt to maintain
mobility, and create new spaces of belonging (Castañeda 2019). In this sense, the concept of
citizenship only partially encompasses migrants’ trajectories and practices for making a place such as
Tarnol inhabitable.
Sher, Ajab and Hafiz Sahib’s discussion of how and why they were blocked foregrounds the
stakes of their structural position and experience as residents of frontier zones—as opposed to a
contestation over a lesser form of citizenship. Adriana Petryna and Karolina Follis (2015) similarly
challenge a traditional concept of citizenship that “casts citizens as bearers of natural and legal rights
that are (and must be) protected as a matter of birth right,” and argue that it is crucial to follow the
fault lines along which experiences and life itself is negotiated. This shifting terrain, which disabuses
us of clear cut ideas of who belongs and who does not, produces the need for a dexterous system
like NADRA that can continually reassess people’s status. The notions of “biological citizenship”
44 Beyond the South Asian context, also see Thomas and Clarke (2013) for a discussion of how globalization processes, racialization and citizenship in a neoliberal era have both disrupted and perpetuated practices of national bordering. 45 In the context of Tarnol and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, it is important to note that technically both locations are within a single national territory (Coutin 2010), albeit disputed and contingent., The distinction between regions within Pakistan was historically and continues to be maintained through internal borders and variegated systems of governance and sovereignty (Barth 1965; Gilmartin 1988). In contrast, transnationalism, as a concept developed within migration studies, refers to existing simultaneously in two places, and connected to more than one place, space or community (Glick Schiller, Basch, and Blanc-Szanton 1994).
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(Petryna and Follis 2015) or “flexible citizens” (Ong 1999) works within the analytic framework of
citizenship while also effectively troubling and testing the stability of liberal democratic notions of
citizenship. However, the continued use of adjectivized citizenship reproduces the idealized forms
and hopes in which citizenship ought to exist,46 potentially marginalizing the already existing ways in
which political persons engage with the state and one another on the contested ground of co-
belonging.
Given that NADRA has accepted that some “genuine Pakistani citizens”47 might be blocked
in the process of re-verification, legal status of citizenship is only one part of the problem. In fact, by
blocking Tarnol residents (and other blocked card-holders), the Pakistani state deliberately produces
ambiguity around their legal status and flags them for additional security scrutiny. The logic of
security and surveillance thus apprehends some citizens over others, purportedly to find the
terrorists amongst them. It is this security logic that largely constructs Tarnol as a frontier in ways
that does not map onto national borders. In turn, the status and identity of all frontier persons
(whether from Tarnol or FATA in general) is continually questioned through blocking, reifying their
literal and figurative position within the polity. Such a mode of politics is made possible through the
databased and biometric technology that links to, but extends beyond, the physical identity
document itself.48 This relatively new technology allows the Pakistani state to enact an older form of
46 Certain security protocols such as the U.S. Patriot Act highlight the paradoxes in the universal claims and entitlements citizenship status is supposed to provide in the first place (Herzog 2015; Joppke 2015). Building upon a critical anthropology of security (Goldstein 2010), this chapter foregrounds ethnographic approaches that not only trouble state-centered security discourses but also show how migrants respond to securitization measures (and by extension the patchy absence/presence of citizenship based entitlements and rights) in their everyday life. Also, for a discussion of ideal concepts of citizenship, see Pocock (1995) 47 Chaudhary Nisar, the Interior Minister of Pakistan, held a press conference in 2016 where he announced that as part of a national security drive, 200,000 “fake” identity cards had been blocked. He recognized that some Pakistani citizens might be affected as well but could appeal their case through NADRA. See “Nisar orders re-verification of 180 million Pakistani citizens,” Dawn News, May 25, 2016. 48 As Chapter Two, “Coding Kinship,” describes, the impetus behind NADRA’s formation was to use database technology and biometrics to allow for de-duplication of identity (no individual could hold more than one identity card) as well as greater potential for securitized verification—all of which a database allows in a way a physical identity card or manual registration system does not.
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politics where the state generates ambiguity about national status (through blocking), and belonging
more generally, to then produce frontier zones that stand in contrast to clearly demarcated borders.
It is important to note that Tarnol and FATA are not the only frontier sites produced by the
government. Nosheen Ali has described how, in reducing the territory of Gilgit-Baltistan to its
physical environment, and natural beauty in particular, the Pakistani state engages in “ambiguous,
contradictory and exclusionary modes of representation” (Ali 2019, 32). Tactics of illegibility and the
ambiguous status of this region, both constitutionally and in its relation to Jammu and Kashmir,
allows Pakistan to bring the territory under their de facto control and invisiblize the people who
inhabit Gilgit-Balitistan. In a similar fashion, blocked persons are treated as residents of a frontier as
opposed to citizens of a state. The process of blocking and perpetual re-authentication is not about
producing second class citizens who lack certain entitlements that others might have. Instead, it
allows the state to produce a political subject distinct from the citizen, namely a frontier resident.
NADRA’s continual re-authentication creates distinctions that map onto questions of
citizenship only in name. As the previous chapter described, since identity is conferred via kinship,
NADRA also identifies the proximity of some (citizen) individuals to Afghans. In this way, the
Pakistani state not only creates distinctions but also (as a part of the same process) finds connections
between persons, rendering some citizens proximate to undesirable people and places. In so doing, it
reveals that the identification system is in fact driven by motivations to surveil and securitize, not the
desire to determine the true citizen identity of particular individuals. It makes sense then that Tarnol
as a neighborhood experiences blockages not only because Afghans reside there but also because of
the nature of connectedness—as neighbors, friends, employer-employee, and even marital
relations—between Pakistani and Afghan Pashtuns in this space. Instead of clearly distinguishing,
once and for all, between Pakistanis and Afghans, both are put into an undifferentiated category of
being blocked—not quite citizen, not quite alien.
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Importantly, there exists an Afghan refugee “Proof of Registration” (POR) identity card that
would in theory serve to differentiate all Afghan refugees from Pakistani citizens. Yet, according to
the most recent UNHCR figures, the only official number of registered Afghan refugees (who have a
POR card) in Pakistan is 1.4 million, with the majority residing in the provinces of Khyber
Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan.49 Starting in 2002, there was a significant effort to repatriate Afghan
refugees (4.4 million according to current estimates) as a part of which UNHCR offered repatriation
packages of $200 (which has been increased to $400).50 Given the U.S. war in Afghanistan after 9/11
and continuing instability from the ongoing war, the likelihood of Afghan refugees wanting to return
was, and continues to be, low. Sana Alimia (2019) has shown that the POR card is a part of the
strategy to force more refugees to return, as the POR card subjects Afghans to more harassment and
discrimination in Pakistan.51 Second, and relevant to the context of Tarnol where Afghans run
construction businesses and own property, the POR card’s capacity to definitively mark Afghans as
foreigners could put their businesses at risk, subject them to police harassment and compel them to
pay bribes to avoid detention and arrest.52 Afghans in Tarnol were in fact distinguished from
Pakistani Pashtuns (by my interlocutors) in the neighborhood because of their more privileged and
affluent status. In this way, while the POR card may be seen as an effort to distinguish Afghans on
the part of the Pakistani state, in my experience in Tarnol there was no mention of identifying
someone as an Afghan because they had the POR card. In fact, as I will shortly discuss, Afghans
49 Year End Report (2020) Operations, Southwest Asia, Pakistan, published by the United Nations High Commission on Refguees: https://reporting.unhcr.org/pakistan. 50 Pakistan: Voluntary Repatriation of Afghans from Pakistan Update, published on April 30, 2019, by UNHCR on https://reliefweb.int/sites/reliefweb.int/files/resources/69624.pdf 51 This has been called a mass forced return by human rights organizations, with rampant abuses partly after 2016 when the security situation and diplomatic relations between Afghanistan and Pakistan deteriorated. See Pakistan Coercion, UN Complicity: The Mass Forced Return of Afghan Refugees, published on February 13, 2017, by Human Rights Watch. “https://www.hrw.org/report/2017/02/13/pakistan-coercion-un-complicity/mass-forced-return-afghan-refugees 52 On the specific problem of police harassment, see “‘What Are You Doing Here?’ Police Abuses Against Afghans in Pakistan,” published on 18 November 2015 by Human Rights Watch: https://www.hrw.org/report/2015/11/18/what-are-you-doing-here/police-abuses-against-afghans-pakistan.
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who held NADRA identity cards too were “blocked.” As I will describe through Asadullah’s case
below, when an Afghan who was connected to a Pakistani family was blocked by NADRA, it put
both the Afghan and the Pakistani into the same category. In turn, during the period of
reverification, both their statuses remained ambiguous and effectively kept them restricted to zones
produced as frontiers.
The fraught and securitized logic of the “citizenship re-verification” process became clear to
me during a conversation in Tarnol with Asadullah, mentioned above. Asadullah had told us that he
was scheduled for a “board”—an interview-style meeting with a group of government officials
including NADRA employees, officers from the intelligence agencies, and occasionally a political
agent from the relevant tribal agency—that was a crucial component of “citizenship re-verification.”
As far as I can tell, there are three rounds of board interviews. The first is with the Zonal
Verification Board, which during my fieldwork included NADRA officials at the Blue Area
Registration Center.53 If the case is not cleared at that level, then it is referred to the District Level
Committee, which as reported by my interlocutors took place at the District Commissioner’s Office
in Islamabad. Ultimately, re-verification cases are sent to the Joint Verification Committee, which
can include representatives of the intelligence services and occasionally officials from the office of
the relevant tribal agencies’ political agents.54 For most of my interlocutors, it was difficult to name
the precise stage they were at or exactly which committee they had been presented in front of, for
the reason that they could not speak English and so commonly just referred to these meetings as
“board.” In part, the indeterminacy of the re-verification process is a function of the temporality of
the process, that is, the fact that it can take a number of years and, more importantly, that the
53 I was not given access to attend board interviews; I could have potentially accompanied some of these interlocutors but given that NADRA officials were not comfortable with me attending board interviews, I did not think it prudent to do so. 54 The presence of intelligence officers is corroborated by news reports, for example, see “NADRA may ease up on CNIC blocking policy,” The Express Tribune, February 20, 2017.
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blocked card holder has little to no idea of where they are in the process until they receive
confirmation.
After this “board” interview, Asadullah greeted us with a wide smile and told us that all had
gone well. This was a moment of great relief since getting to this stage had taken four years, during
which Asadullah had almost given up at many points. As we entered his baithak, he began to tell us
something he had not mentioned prior to this, which provided yet another hypothesis about why an
identity card might be blocked. He told us that a “Kabuli” (as Afghans are referred to often in
Tarnol) had used his (Asadullah’s) parents’ card, pretending to be their son, as the basis to register
for his own. Asadullah’s parents were both already dead at the time and so it was clearly a “deal”
with someone on the inside at NADRA. How, otherwise, could you make a card based on a dead
person’s card? Asadullah placed the blame, quite squarely, on NADRA.
Even if this fraudulent person had somehow evaded the requirement for the next of kin’s
fingerprints or original identity cards, how had he gotten a hold of even photocopies of the original
cards? Asadullah claimed he did not know, and instead presented me with his father and
grandfather’s cards from 1978 and 1974 respectively. Given what had happened, Asadullah’s
verification process had primarily involved proving that he was his father’s son. He also had his
father’s passport, and he had to accumulate his parents’ documents to prove that he was indeed who
he said he was, in terms of his kin relations. Further, all these documents, including passports and
identity cards, were all from before 1978, which NADRA had set as yet another criterion to prove
one’s nationality, for it was after this year that a large number of Afghan refugees had begun to enter
Pakistan. In short, not only did Asadullah have to physically possess his relations’ cards from a
certain time, but he had to prove his kinship relations as the source of his citizenship claim through
the process of accumulating a large number and different kinds of documents.
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Asadullah explained further. His sister, who lived in Lahore, went to get a duplicate copy of
her card and the NADRA office showed her family tree. In the list, she saw someone in the family
tree by the name of Saleh Khan. But she knew no Saleh Khan. NADRA’s records said he was her
brother. It was after this that the entire family, including Asadullah’s, got blocked. Saleh Khan, yet
another “Kabuli” who had apparently used Asadullah’s mother’s card claimed she was his mother. I
confirmed with Asadullah whether he thought this was why his card was blocked. Apparently not.
There was a third instance.
Another man had claimed that Asadullah was his father. How did Asadullah find out that
this man had registered for an identity card claiming he was Asadullah’s son? Asadullah told me that
this was during the time, a few years ago, when NADRA had sent public service messages to all cell
phone numbers asking people to send their unique ID numbers to verify their family trees. When
Asadullah did this, he saw the name of someone who was listed as his son but clearly not his son. In
addition, this man had then added nine other people in his own family tree. When Asadullah
reported this to NADRA, his own card got blocked, despite his honesty and forthrightness about it.
As it turned out, this third “Kabuli” lived right here in Tarnol! He too was blocked when
Asadullah was. Asadullah did not divulge all the details of how this came to be but said the “Kabuli”
came to Asadullah’s house and told him when he (the “Kabuli”) got blocked. Asadullah did not
appear to feel antagonistically towards him. Instead, he explained that while he had incurred a lot of
expenses during the unblocking business, the “Kabuli” had spent even more money on this process,
apparently close to Rs80,000 ($800 at the time). Asadullah explained that since this Afghan man
lived in his neighborhood, it was not viable to pursue litigation. And after all, they were now both in
the same boat with blocked cards.55
55 Afghans in the neighborhood were more affluent, and of course, neighbors who had been living alongside Asadullah, and I imagine that this was part of Asadullah’s reasoning for being forgiving. I did not think it appropriate to question Asadullah about why he was not angrier, since that might have been seen as anti-Afghan sentiment on my part.
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The moral of the story, according to Asadullah, was to be extremely careful with your
identity documents. He told all his children to not go around making or giving copies. Asadullah
expressed that he suspected something fishy. It was not clear how three people from one family
were used to make a fraudulent identity card and suggested that there may be some sort of racket
where identity cards, or at least ID card numbers, were being acquired fraudulently. This possibility
was one I did not get to the bottom of, despite many conversations with photocopiers across
localities in Islamabad.
To a certain extent, this is a story about identity theft. Yet, what is important to consider is
that Asadullah’s identity as an individual was not “stolen” or duplicated. Rather, the fraud lay in the
relationship that Saleh Khan and the other unnamed “Kabuli” claimed to Asadullah. It made me
consider that kinship was not only deployed by NADRA as a means to determine descent-based
identification but also by others who could use it to include themselves within a kin group. Inserting
oneself in another’s family was a handy way to get an identity card.56 Was kinship a means for self-
identification that then extended into the domain of the state, or one that NADRA had initiated,
only to be beaten at its logic?
While the figure of the Afghan “family intruder” is central to NADRA’s database on a
national scale, this concern takes on a localized form in Tarnol, a neighborhood where Afghans and
Pakistani Pashtuns live side by side. The experiences of Sher, Ajab and Asadullah illustrate how the
figure of the Afghan realizes and materializes itself in interactions with NADRA, vexing the
question of citizenship as well as identification. For Hafiz Sahib, when it came to the question of
Afghans, he explained that it was during his interrogation style interview with NADRA, where they
56 In this sense, the notion of identity theft is a limited interpretation of the phenomena at play (Whitson and Haggerty 2008). Inserting oneself into genealogies or making kinship claims, as a means of identifying not only as but also with others, is in fact commonplace even as it might in this particular context create tension with legalistic notions of identity. See discussions of fictive kinship, (Vatuk 1969), adoption (Howell 2009) and chosen families (Weston 1991).
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conducted an in-person verification meeting, that “doodh ka doodh, aur pani ka pani ho gaya.” Using the
expression “when milk separates from water,” he explained “the officers asked me, ‘When did you
last go to Afghanistan?’ My card is blocked! I don’t even have a passport! How am I supposed to get
to Afghanistan?” Pashtuns, primarily from the Pakistani tribal areas, recognize the state’s
misrecognition and deal with it in very different ways—at times resentful, at other times accepting
and celebrating their proximity, and occasionally both.
A sound bite of sorts went around Tarnol: “Afghans, in fact, have functioning identity cards
whereas we, Pakistanis, have cards that are blocked.” Some of my interlocutors took this a step
further to argue that the reason for this was that Afghans had done their due diligence to keep their
papers in order and procure even better documentary evidence than Pakistanis. Hafiz Sahib, for
instance, complained “we have been too self-assured and taken for granted that we belong to this
country, so we never secured documents.” In contrast, he described the Afghans’ approach as far
more proactive. He gave the example of a man in their neighborhood who had all the papers he
needed from the Orakzai Agency. This man was not from Orakzai but had spent enough time there
such that he could answer any question directed at him by the NADRA officials during verification,
so as to prove that he was in fact from there. Thus, whether they are migrants from Afghanistan
(muhajir) or not, claimed Hafiz Sahib, they have all the documentary evidence to prove that they are
citizens.57 They, not people like Asadullah or Hafiz Sahib, have evidence that could appear
irrefutable.
57 While the term muhajir was most frequently used for Muslim refugees from India (Verkaaik 2004, Ring 2006, Zamindar 2007), the term muhajir (migrant) is frequently is also used for Afghans in Pakistan—most often by other Pashtuns. Technically, Afghans in Pakistan, even as they are managed by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) do not hold official refugee status because "Pakistan is not a party to the 1951 Geneva Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, nor the 1967 Protocol. It regulates the entry, stay and movement of foreigners through the Foreigners’ Act of 1946, according to which all foreigners without valid documentation, including refugees and asylum-seekers, are subject to arrest, detention and deportation. In practice, however, Pakistan has generally respected international standards in its control over the stay and treatment of refugees.” UNHCR Global Appeal 2004, published in https://www.unhcr.org/afr/3fc7547e0.pdf.
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The issue of whether a particular individual is an Afghan or a Pakistani Pashtun emerges
precisely (and possibly only) due to the heightened tensions produced by a securitized landscape.
Some people such as Hafiz Sahib place part of the blame on Pakistani Pashtuns who live proximate
to Afghans. In particular, they call out political agents (maliks) in the Federally Administered Tribal
Areas who have been bribed into issuing domiciles and other documents to Afghans that
authenticate Afghan claims of belonging to the area. Hafiz Sahib claimed that it served Pashtuns
(Pakistani nationals) right then, as this was the obvious result of being a collaborator or for not
having the foresight to see the eventual repercussions as “things got worse” after 9/11. In
attempting to make sense of blockages and the uncertainty they brought, people such as Hafiz Sahib
not only blamed NADRA and the Pakistani state, but also themselves. Such comments betrayed an
internalized view of a colonial law, the infamous “black law” (kala kanoon) of the Frontier Crimes
Regulation that placed collective culpability on an entire tribe (or extended kin group with
collectively blocked cards in this case) even where the act may have been committed by an individual
(Nichols 2013).
At the same time, the line between Afghans and Pakistani Pashtuns, as all my interlocutors
recognized, was far from clear. While terms such as muhajir or “Kabuli” signal that there are means
of distinguishing different groups on a local scale in daily life in neighborhoods such as Tarnol, the
fraught nature of these terms continually emerges as well. Along with Asadullah, a pair of brothers
who ran a local store in Tarnol mentioned to me that indeed it was true that “Kabulis” had less
trouble with their (NADRA) ID cards in Tarnol than Pashtuns. They noted the slightly more
privileged status of Afghans in Tarnol, specifically given their earlier arrival and role in the
construction business. Many Pashtun daily wage workers were employed in Afghan businesses.
Moreover, they lived alongside them. As one of my interlocutors explained to me “if we start
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bringing these resentments up to them directly, it will end up in a fight. What is the point of the
accusations? They live here, we live here, we do not want to get into these feuds.”
While these conversations about Afghans and their documentary prowess (often never rising
above the level of rumor) continually emerged during fieldwork in Tarnol, it was after the Prime
Minister Imran Khan made a statement about giving Pakistani citizenship to Afghan Refugees in
September 2018 that this issue took on a new reality. This would be the first time that a mainstream
route was to be provided to Afghan refugees naturalization in Pakistan. With the precedence set
from a Peshawar High Court judgement from the late 1990s, it has been practically impossible for
Afghan refugees to be naturalized as Pakistani citizens.58 In 1999, a child of Afghan refugees who
was born and raised in Pakistan was denied a national identity card (prior to the existence of
NADRA) and he challenged the decision of the authority by claiming citizenship by birth. The
Peshawar High Court rejected this claim on the ground that children of Afghan refugees could not
become Pakistani nationals due to their parents’ refugee status, which only allows them to stay in
Pakistan under conditions of temporary refuge and governs them under the Foreigners’ Act of 1946.
To my surprise, despite the resentment and almost jealousy many of my interlocutors felt
towards the superior documentation of Afghans, they mostly welcomed Prime Minister Imran
Khan’s announcement as a way to move beyond the current impasse Afghan refugees faced in
relation to their citizenship status in Pakistan. When this topic was under discussion over tea one
day, I questioned how people in the neighborhood felt about the political opposition to the Prime
Minister’s statement. They remarked they could not speak to the geopolitical implications.59
However, the way that they saw it, if the government resolved the issue of the muhajirs, then their
58 Ghulam Sanai vs The Assistant Director National Registration Office, Peshawar, PLD 1999. 59 See “Opposition attacks PM’s statement on citizenship for children of refugees,” Dawn News, September 25, 2018. In addition, this news unsettled claims of some Pashtun nationalists, who have historically supported the idea of “Lar-o-bar Yaw Afghan,” that is, the notion that across both sides of the borders, all Afghans are one, beyond the Pakistani nation state boundaries (Shah 2020).
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own issues too would be resolved. In the words of one of the brothers mentioned above, “it is a
connected problem and will be resolved together.”
It was then that I fully understood the degree of entanglement: the proximity between
Afghans and Pakistani Pashtuns extended beyond the question of language and frontier. The
“problem” (masla) was one of recognition and misrecognition (Povinelli 2002), specifically by the
postcolonial state.60 It was this that bound the two migrant populations together, leading to
resentment as well as an acknowledgment that for them this was not a negotiation that could take
place in an external political arena, but one that had to be negotiated on a daily basis in the
neighborhood itself.
“It’s All Political”
In the summer of 2015, the streets of Tarnol were filled with campaign materials, mostly of groups
of candidates running in alignment with one another for the local government elections. There was a
constant buzz around the neighborhood as local personages transformed themselves into politicians.
I turn to this local government election now because a large number of Tarnol residents reported
that it was after these local government elections held in November 2015 that their cards were
blocked. The local election thus constitutes the centerpiece of one set of theorizing around the
blocked cards. I was surprised that Tarnol residents connected blocked cards to such a specific time
and event. Following up on how the election might have led to a spate of blocked cards—for
residents of Tarnol who voted for union councilors in Tarnol—I learned it was related to who was
running for the local level elections from the neighborhood as well as the electoral outcomes. This,
60 In the case of a nation such as Pakistan, an idea realized into territory amidst contestation and ambiguity (Dhulipala 2015; Toor 2011), individuals are called upon to express their self-identity not only through abstract claims (specifically around Muslim identity) but also evidentiary means (Zamindar 2007). Since an abstract idea of a Muslim nation is potentially de-territorialized (Jalal 2014), with Muslim populations extending past borders, a historical relationship with the documentary state ends up determining national identity. This produces a paradox, exemplified in the experience of those whose cards have been blocked by NADRA, where state recognition requires persons to produce their own and their family’s personal archives of documents and experiences, primarily with the local everyday state, in order to gain recognition in a more general sense.
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according to supporters of this particular theory of blocking, also explained why there were so many
identity cards blocked from Tarnol specifically, even for those who were not from the tribal areas
and so less likely to be suspected of being Afghan—unless another factor, such as their area of
residence, seemed to indicate it.
A young schoolteacher originally from the area of Battagram (in the province of Khyber
Pakhtunkhwa but not a tribal area) explained that he voted in the election in 2015. At the time, a
councillor running for office was a man by the name of Hakim Khan. There are rumors that he is an
Afghan. In fact, he is young enough to be born in Pakistan but might be of Afghan descent. Hakim
Khan won the election, and his opponent complained to NADRA—specifically to the Interior
Minister Chaudhary Nisar—claiming that not only was Hakim Khan an Afghan but so was all of
Tarnol. This narrative—involving the local election, the Afghan man who ran for it and won, the
angry vindictive opponent, and the Interior Minister—was repeated to me countless times when I
questioned residents about the link between Tarnol and blocked cards. Their responses, as
mentioned above, first pointed to the state authorities’ assumption that the neighborhood was
mostly Afghan. Second, they pointed to the election as a discrete event that produced such an
assumption.
Prior to the centralization of NADRA offices in a singular Mega Registration Center in
Islamabad, there were several smaller registration centers across Islamabad. Apparently, there was
also one such local office in Tarnol. This preceded my fieldwork, and so I did not have the chance
to visit it. Noor Mohammad, who works in the Department of Defense and is from Swabi (in
Khyber Pakhtunkhwa but not a tribal area), alleged that the Tarnol office was under political
pressure to make identity cards for this area prior to the election, especially for Afghans. After the
election, as a result of a separate set of political pressures—namely, the loss of the PML-N (political
party in power at the time) candidate in Tarnol’s local body election—all the cards registered at the
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Tarnol office (so not just those cards that had a Tarnol address) were blocked. Noor Mohammad
provided an even more geographically specific explanation for the blocked cards: there were many
more blocked cards on one side of Tarnol in Ittefaq Colony (and my fieldwork and survey data,
although not exhaustive, proved this to be true by and large) and not the other side, even as there
are Afghans and Pashtuns on one side as much as there are on the other. But it was Ittefaq Colony
where the loss was from, and so it was as a result of these “politics” that many innocent and
uninvolved persons were affected.
It is revelatory that Tarnol residents theorized the blocking of cards in connection with
electoral politics, a theatrical event of democratic participation. Not to mention, this election was
especially critical given that it was Pakistan’s first transfer of power from one democratic
government to another. If this particular hypothesis is true, it underlines both the contingency of
blocking and its connection to political participation: the event of the election could itself have
drawn attention to Tarnol, provoking suspicion that Tarnol residents were Afghans, marking the
area a “security risk” in the eyes of the state. Importantly, Tarnol residents are sceptical about
whether blocking along these lines is really about security. Instead, during our collective
conversations about the election, many implied that the logic of security was mobilized when the
ruling party’s candidate lost to someone rumored to be Afghan.
Another Tarnol resident and community leader of sorts, Mir Nawaz, connected a larger
narrative of structural discrimination with what had unfolded in the elections, which had eventually
led to the spate of blocking. He said “it is true that the Pashtun community did not vote for the
PML-N candidate. The government’s annoyance was obvious. The very next day after the elections
they released water into an open ground (a well-known tactic for disrupting political events and in
this case, victory celebrations), and when we called the police and went to the station, the police
ignored us and kept drinking their chai. What was the result of this? Pashtuns became even more
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disillusioned with the government. Did you hear that Chaudhary Nisar (Interior Minister, in charge
of NADRA) had a Peshawari chappal (a shoe commonly worn by Pashtuns) thrown at him? It was
in his constituency, and eventually he lost his constituency because of this very policy to block
cards.”
As Mir Nawaz pointed out, the question is not one of exclusion alone. The social and
political consciousness and dynamics produced, especially during the quest for unblocking as the
following section will describe, reveal the forms of critique available. The quest for unblocking is not
a demand for inclusion in any straightforward way. Rather, the re-verification of identity entails an
engagement with a politics of recognition in an indeterminate and for some, seemingly endless, cycle
of evidence acquisition and presentation of the self.61 What forms of identity and social life emerge
through the process of identifying the self (necessarily along with others) not only as a subject of the
state but also a community engaging in political processes?
“Unblocking” Identity
Documentary Burdens
“The only thing they didn’t ask for was bird’s milk,” said Mir Nawaz in response to my question
about which documents NADRA had asked him to provide for the unblocking process. This section
explores how, for Pashtun migrants in Tarnol, there was a palpable sense that the burden of
documentary proof fell upon them in disproportionate ways. Accordingly, this section will examine
how specific people within the neighborhood took on the bureaucratic labor required and built
61 Elizabeth Povinelli argues in The Cunning of Recognition that “the generative power of liberal forms of recognition derives not merely from the performative difficulties of recognition but also from something that sociologists and philosophers have called moral sensibility, of the social fact of the feeling of being obliged, of finding oneself under an obligation to something, or to a complex of things” (Povinelli 2002, 4). This moral sensibility, which might break down under critical argumentation, takes the form of a militarized security logic in Pakistan. Pakistan’s long history of military rule has allowed the military to arrogate to itself, and only to itself, the possibility of safety, stability and orderliness (Siddiqa 2007). Post 9/11, securitization has begun to operate as a “good” under which practices of governance are constructed. Since security depends on identification, the ubiquity of securitized regimes such as NADRA has been enabled by such a general moral sense. As a result, most people experience an obligation that sets into motion a spiraling scramble for recognition.
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communicative channels within and beyond Tarnol to negotiate the unblocking of identity cards.
Documentary requirements forced them to travel across space and occasionally, it seemed, time.
Much of what NADRA demanded was directed at demonstrating a descent based claim to Pakistani
territory. Mir Nawaz’s sentiments revealed a generalized exasperation, palpable across the
neighborhood, about how documentary requirements rubbed against their migrant trajectories and
frontier lives in unequal ways.
Figure 8: Document dossiers compiled for unblocking procedures in Tarnol (source: photo by author)
The process for unblocking on the part of the cardholders inevitably begins with the
collection of documents. When blocked card holders are notified that they have been placed under
citizenship re-verification, they are also given a list of documents that they will be asked for during
their “board” interrogation. NADRA’s list of supporting documents for cases of re-verification
includes land records registered prior to 1978, a genealogical record from the revenue department
(shajarah-yi-nasab) and, from before 1978, local/domicile certificates, government employment
certificates, educational documents and arms or driving licenses or manual national identity cards
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issued by the Directorate General of Registration that preceded NADRA.62 The reason for the 1978
date is since that is the time that a large number of Afghan refugees entered Pakistan, as a result, if
Pakistani Pashtuns are indeed Pakistani, they would have documents preceding 1978.
Given that the NADRA card is biometric-based, one might assume that the question of
verification, and by extension unblocking, might involve authenticating the biometric identity of the
cardholder. However, as the previous chapter demonstrates, what is under verification is not an
individual’s identity as established through unique bodily characteristics. Rather, what is at stake is an
identity determined through authentic designation as a member of one’s kin group. In Tarnol, we
can trace the implications of such a process for the lived experience of frontier residents. Through
the everyday social world of Tarnol, we see that the identity card does not denote individual identity
(“does this card index me?”) as much as it raises the question of who is entitled to have a clearly
designated identity as authenticated by the Pakistani state. Even as all NADRA card holders are
apprehended as individuals, some individual identities are recognized while others are constantly
challenged, questioned and blocked. As a result, the verification process asks blocked cardholders to
embark on a journey of document collection to not only prove relatedness to kin but also their
rootedness in specific locations.
The way that a blocked person, likely also a migrant, collects documents from both relatives
and government offices reveals a meandering itinerary. Ironically enough, it is this circuitous migrant
path that might have caused the problem in the first place. I will now turn to how the document
collection process involves traveling to homes in neighborhoods past, leaning on old friends in
offices in towns once lived in and encountering new obstacles in an ancestral place. While this could
be read through the lens of hardship and inconvenience—both of which were not absent in the
62 During my fieldwork with Pashtun migrants, many of those going through re-verification processes referenced these documents. They are also listed in the news report “Method of unblocking CNIC can turn Chaudhry Nisar ‘Sikh’: PkMAP minister, The Express Tribune, June 2, 2017.
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descriptions they provided—I will focus on the underlying assumption, logic and effects of
verification that can be observed through these experiences.
Mir Nawaz told me that his relatives back in the village complained “you just bring your
dead to bury them here.” It was this grievance that prompted his family, living in Islamabad, to
periodically send gifts and contribute to the upkeep of their lands, mostly barren and mountainous.
Mir Nawaz belonged to the Mohmand Agency bordering Afghanistan but had lived in Islamabad
since 1994. For Mir Nawaz, Mohmand was a place that was beautiful, free and egalitarian. “Yet
sometimes they (the government) take away the cell phone service because of some suicide blast.
Other times, because of the instability people have to leave their homes to be with their relatives
across the border in Afghanistan. Imagine, Afghanistan is safer at times.”63 He complained that he
had heard military officials refer to Mohmand as the “red line” implying that it was considered a
dangerous zone. “They don’t want people from the ‘red line’ to be in their precious Islamabad, but
why should we not come?”
Mir Nawaz’s entire household, a total of thirty individuals, were blocked. Since NADRA
requires some documentary proof of residence in Pakistan before 1978—the year that a large
number of Afghan refugees entered Pakistan—Mir Nawaz had provided two manual identity cards
of two grandparents. These were from Swabi in the province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, the town the
family had moved to when they initially migrated from Mohmand. These documents represent one
stop in their move towards Islamabad.
Mir Nawaz’s family had been called for a “board” to the Deputy Commissioner's office in
Islamabad, and that is where he took these documents. The board, as mentioned in Asadullah’s case,
is an interview-style meeting where the individual with a blocked card is asked to bring supporting
63 Mohmand, Mureeb, “After 10 years: 54 Mohmand families return home from Afghanistan,” The Express Tribune, August 17, 2018.
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documents and is also asked questions aimed at verifying their identity. For his board in Islamabad,
Mir Nawaz took his great grandfather’s service card from World War II. His own father had served
in the war against India in 1965 and had some documentation from then. “Despite this, are you
telling me they can’t ‘verify’ me?” he asked.
NADRA informed Mir Nawaz that they were unable to find the manual cards’ record in
their database of scanned paper registers.64 In the absence of the kind of proof that NADRA
required, Mir Nawaz and his family took a trip to Mohmand to acquire the documents needed for
the process. As part of this process, they had their family “lungi” registered. The lungi is a record of
tribal leadership, although it is not always in paper document form. Mir Nawaz’s maternal
grandfather’s and great grandfather’s physical lungi—a headdress—were present in his natal village.
However, to produce the proof of this lungi they needed not one political agent but four maliks, local
tribal leaders, along with money and time.65 Mir Nawaz reasserted the position his family held in
their natal village which allowed them to have these resources and such a record. “What about those
who do not have lungis in their family? How do they prove their connection to the tribal areas?”66
Mir Nawaz’s frustration centered on how close he would come to being unblocked only to
have another obstacle emerge. Occasionally officials from the intelligence agencies visit the homes
of those who have blocked cards. Mir Nawaz claimed that they had visited their home six times. He
also alleged that they once asked for RS. 50,000 and when he refused to give it to them, the official
said his file would be sent back into re-verification. In the end, Mir Nawaz and his family went to get
64 Chapter Four of this dissertation details how “manual” cards were produced and analyzes how they ultimately came to be scanned by NADRA. 65 The “war on terror,” military intervention by the Pakistani army, and growing militancy in general in the frontier region, has disrupted the local maliki system of tribal governance and leadership. See White (2008). 66 As the former Federally Administered Tribal Areas were not fully “settled” by the colonial state in India, the land documentation system (inherited by the postcolonial state) differs significantly across tribal regions and the rest of Pakistan. See Nichols (2001).
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a court order from Peshawar. Finally, when he ended up in the Islamabad NADRA office, the
family’s cards were finally unblocked.
However, the women of the house who had been married into the family (affinal kin)
remained blocked. While often blocking spreads contagiously across familial lines, unblocking can be
more halting in its effects. How some family members remain blocked while others are unblocked
exacerbates the quality of indeterminacy and sense of unease and frustration amongst the whole
family. Mir Nawaz, for instance, was stumped by this, “these women are part of our family, so it
only makes sense that they should be unblocked too.” If it was difficult for Mir Nawaz to collect his
family’s documents, it was even more complicated to locate evidentiary documents for the women
married into the family. Many of the women I spoke to expressed that gendered norms and a lack of
independent mobility made it difficult to ask for documents from their natal families. In the case of
women, migration and increased spatial distance further compounded their lack of access to
documentation.
Most blocked migrants I encountered had a narrative about unblocking that was entangled
with experiences of a migrant path. By tracing their documentary lives back to the correct sites and
locations, they would be able to pass what appeared to them to be a test of their belonging and
arrival. For this, they needed to be located—spatially and materially—in the records of a particular
place in a particular time.
For Mir Nawaz, a well-connected man with his own business, the process of collecting
documents involved a sporadic and incoherent itinerary between his village in the tribal areas to
Islamabad, involving multiple locations in between, such as Peshawar and Swabi. Not to mention,
Mir Nawaz encountered various kinds of bureaucratic settings far beyond the NADRA office. The
NADRA offices are only one node within a larger ecology of bureaucratic document production. In
fact, other offices in Islamabad, such as the District Commissioner’s office or the union council
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offices, too were only one node in a broader circuit of document collection for those whose cards
were blocked. The work of collecting the necessary documents does not disappear with the
centralized identity database; the burden of collecting these documents also constitutes the process
of verifying oneself.67
The ability to authenticate yourself in various locations requires maintaining ties across space
and time, between your current location and those of potentially not of your own past but also of
your ancestors.68 Quite often this would also require a working knowledge of how different regional
systems of documentation work so as to navigate them successfully. When Mir Nawaz described the
lungi system in the tribal areas to me, he added that it took him a while to figure out how it worked,
which contributed to the time it took him to get the proper documentation. Beyond the question of
lay expertise, the difficulty of maintaining ties was also a common problem. The importance of
being present and playing one’s part in the extended clan’s celebrations and their tragedies (ghami-
khushi) was obviously key. While practices such as intermarriages and a strong sense of obligation to
attend weddings and funerals help sustain these larger networks, the resentments nonetheless grow.
Unlike Mir Nawaz who took the responsibility for the upkeep of familial relations, not everybody is
able to maintain this material and affective connection with their place of origin. In the absence of
this tight knit network, which reveals an underlying ethical obligation, the capacity to verify yourself
in places linked to your or your families past is also curtailed.
67 Identification is grounded in material documentary practices and trajectories, where each blocked migrant is expected to carve out their own route according to their unique identity and its material proof. See Riles (2006) on the relationship between documents and knowledge production, Gitelman (2014) on the historical role of materiality in the production of documents in the digital age and Tarlo (2001) on the role of paper and related material practices in producing the everyday state in South Asia. 68 In the (formerly) Federally Administered Tribal Areas specifically, given the absence of a regular revenue settlement, the documents connecting families to land—including property deeds as well as the shajarah-yi-nasab, a genealogical chart that connects kin units to the land in question—are also conspicuously absence. As a result, many people have to approach the political agent of the tribal agency to obtain a domicile certificate. However, the domicile certificate did not appear to carry as much weight as documents, such as land deeds, which evidenced longer term belonging. Frequently, people also made copies of parents’ government service cards, and in quite a few cases, these included militia identity cards issued to the tribesmen who fought the 1948 war in Kashmir.
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Yet not all blocked migrants are able to move back and forth between current residence and
past homes. Firstly, there are those, especially in a neighborhood such as Tarnol, who are engaged in
wage labor (dehari) and seek to avoid check posts and other kinds of obstacles to their ability to earn
a daily wage. One acquaintance from Tarnol said he knew he had to collect documents from
Peshawar but being a taxi driver, he could not take a day off and still make ends meet. Since
blocking usually affected whole families, often one person in the family (such as one brother out of
many) would take on the burden of bureaucratic labor if his work allowed.
By asking Pashtun migrants, mostly working-class, to return to the tribal areas to collect
evidentiary documents, NADRA officials reaffixes their identities to the frontier, not by forced
return but through the databased forms of identification that they need most in the city for basic
functions such as banking, schools and the police. Furthermore, documentary requirements, or
“bird’s milk” in Mir Nawaz’s words, is not the only means by which this affixing happens. Hamida
Bibi, an interlocutor I introduced in the introduction to this dissertation, had struggled with a
blocked identity card for close to five years. Hamida Bibi’s family was from Mohmand Agency but
she had moved to Islamabad as a young child with her parents who were escaping a family feud at
the time. Eventually, the feud was resolved but for this reason they did not return to Mohmand for
much of Hamida’s childhood. As mentioned in the introduction to this dissertation, the source of
blocking for Hamida Bibi was her son. He had given his parents’ original identity cards to his
business partner, who was an Afghan. As it turned out, this man was also Hamida Bibi’s distant
relative through her son’s wife. This man, who was an Afghan refugee, had used Hamida Bibi and
her husband’s identity cards and claimed at the NADRA Registration Center that they were his
parents. When he took a repatriation package offered by UNHCR to return to Afghanistan, and
likely registered for the Proof of Registration Card, NADRA blocked Hamida Bibi and her family’s
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cards. At that point, Hamida Bibi and her family’s citizenship reverification process, which included
“boards” began.
Hamida Bibi told me that she could not keep track of all of her “boards” (interview style
verification) but the most recent one had happened about six months before our conversation. She
explained that she and her son went together. They took all the documents they had, which included
her father-in-law’s identity card (who was also her paternal uncle) and documents dating to the early
1990s that showed that her and her husband’s family had owned a wood shop in Islamabad. Hamida
Bibi told me “there was an official (afsar) from the tribal agency of Mohmand there. He asked me
where my village in Mohmand was. I told him. Then he asked me where the primary school in my
village was, and I told him. Then he asked me where the post office was, and that I had no idea
about.” Hamida Bibi explained that she had left as a child and hardly went back, or when she did, “I
am not mailing letters on my short visit for a wedding or a funeral.” I found it intriguing that it was
not only Hamida Bibi’s documents and relations that were under scrutiny but also her memory and
her ability to prove that she was in fact familiar with the space she claimed to belong to. In addition
to the documents that rooted her in Mohmand, this mode of interrogation also sought to establish
Hamida Bibi’s link to the tribal areas. Thus, NADRA’s verification procedures reaffix Pashtun
migrants like Hamida Bibi to the geographical location of the frontier.
Hamida Bibi’s card was not unblocked immediately after this. In fact, she heard nothing
after this board interview. It took close to another two years until her card was finally unblocked
after her brothers went with her to the NADRA office and appealed on her behalf. “My brothers are
kind and supportive, thankfully, otherwise many women are not lucky to have such helpful brothers
who would do this and even risk their own cards for a sister.” While she appreciated her brothers’
loyalty and the risks they had taken, she was aware of the pressures this produced. “I wanted to go
to the NADRA office and tell the officials all the pain this has caused me and my family but my
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brothers had told me ‘you don’t say a word when we get in there.’ They think I talk too much and
might say something wrong in front of the officer.” Hamida Bibi was very frustrated about this and
explained that when she went to finally pick up her identity card after it had been unblocked, she did
manage to vent a little to the person who delivered the card to her. The impact of the blocked card
on Hamida Bibi, which at one point she described to me as “shredding her heart” (dil katta ja raha
hai), speaks to the effects of indeterminacy—of not knowing whether it will be unblocked or not, of
whether one will have to remain in this situation.
Moreover, being blocked produced a chain of kinned dependencies. Hamida Bibi’s two sons
and daughters-in-law were blocked too. Like Hamida Bibi, her daughter-in-law too relied on her
brothers to accompany her and her daughter to the Military Hospital in Rawalpindi where her
daughter was being treated and they required an identity card for entry. Hamida Bibi’s younger son
had given up leaving the neighborhood, since he was harassed by the police so much in the absence
of an identity card. “So now I have to take the children to any doctor appointments, to visit any of
our relatives who live in Pindi or anything that requires leaving the neighborhood… since the police
don’t stop women as much,” his wife complained to me.
Bureaucratic Labor
In addition to maintaining a complex familial network across space and familial generations, the
unblocking process seems to require a go-getter spirit and perseverance. Hafiz Sahib suggested this
directly, complimenting himself on his “I get things done” mentality. He talked at length about this,
starting with a meeting held in the open area outside his house. He said that when he used his
contact, a JUI-F politician, to go meet with an official at the District Commissioner’s office to
address the blocked cards problem. He asked twenty others to go with him. “But these people are
lazy, they cannot think ahead, and they refused to come with me. The one who came with me, you
see, his card has already been unblocked.” Hafiz Sahib impressed upon me that stuff doesn’t just get
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done like that. “You can’t just sit here wishing your card hadn’t been blocked, you have to move to
get it unblocked.”
What does it mean to move in the way that Hafiz Sahib implies? This section so far has
described how the unblocking process quite literally pushes blocked migrants to travel from city to
city and across regions to follow their own documentary past. Such movement simultaneously
involves the ability to navigate governmental spaces and protocols. Having a reference from a
politically influential person or a reference from any given office is important for this reason: it helps
one move, with minimal friction, through an otherwise potentially opaque and complex process.69
The ways that people make sense of the ability or inability to move is thus varied.
“When you go to the thana (jail?), there is no Station House Officer (SHO) there. You go to the Union Council office, there is never a patwari (revenue official) there. This is the very basic level of inconvenience that people face. Then every department has one of those officials who do not want to get any work done. And yet, it is better not to fire them because then they create even more trouble. But it is terrible when you encounter one of these yourself. After everything I have been through, in the end, one of the men I met through this whole blocked card process, he wanted me to get him a refrigerator. When I said no, my card went back into verification.” (Author’s field notes, November 2018)
Mir Nawaz, quoted above, is referring to what many would understand as corruption. Aside
from the openly vocalized demand for a refrigerator, it is often difficult to determine what practices
are explicitly corrupt (Sneath 2006). In Paper Tiger, Nayanika Mathur shows that while corruption is
likely rampant (arguably not only in the global South), corruption as an “explanatory trope” (2016,
17) is insufficient. In the case of NADRA, it fails to account for why blocking happens and how it is
dealt with by NADRA officials and blocked persons. More generally, corruption as an explanation
69 Veena Das (2019) argues that the illegibility of rules and regulations, and by extension of the state itself (potentially heightened in the case of a security state, and its identification regimes) is in fact instrumental to its very operations.
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does not capture the ways the Pakistani state does function, and that too quite expertly as a security
apparatus.
While Hafiz Sahib posited the argument that one needs to build resources—contacts,
references, persistence and even a certain kind of charm—to get one’s “bureaucratic work” (sarkari
kaam) done, Mir Nawaz criticized the need for this in the first place. Mir Nawaz is not only
frustrated with the obstacle filled course of unblocking procedures but also the way such procedures
further entrench the role of the everyday state—not to mention, the normalized character of such a
role—in the lives of ordinary citizens. While complaining about NADRA’s procedures, Mir Nawaz
contextualized that he has been fighting incompetent bureaucrats for the last twenty years. He
proudly retells a number of stories, ranging from how he got a corrupt village level revenue official
(patwari) suspended to interventions against the police, who unfairly confiscate local business’s
supplies on a seemingly regular basis. Mir Nawaz connected these encounters with local corruption
to NADRA, and the inconvenience caused by inefficient regional offices that people have to visit
multiple times. He makes implicit references to the “going rate” of certain officials’ signatures, both
in the tribal areas and in Islamabad.
Mir Nawaz’s situation highlights how he (and other blocked persons like him) have to
become the material compilers and mediators of their documentary existence across a variety of
state institutions. As Akhil Gupta posits, in order to grasp the operations of the state we need to
understand it as a disaggregated array of institutions (Gupta 2012, 70). In this vein, Mir Nawaz’s
frustration at the very structure of things and his inability to access the bureaucratic logic may be
quite just. However, it reveals a fundamental aspect of how a security state verifies identity: by
running the blocked person through the vast scale, spatial and temporal, of its disaggregated
institution.
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Mir Nawaz offered a policy alternative to NADRA’s current blocking procedure. He said he
accepted that NADRA had a “problem with Afghans” and that they needed to “conduct their
inquiry.” However, he suggested, they should not block cards before the inquiry had been finished
and the person concerned was definitively determined as an “alien.” He complained about the role
of the intelligence agencies, highlighting the confusion among state institutions that led to ineffective
rules and incompetent governance. He asked, “if NADRA has the ultimate authority, then what are
all these different intelligence agencies, doing in the middle of all this?” He complained, in a hushed
tone, that it was their role that led to an exceedingly difficult situation for blocked people. He
described how he had played a mediating role with the agencies for others dealing with this issue.
The blocked person is hardly ever alone in this process. Both Mir Nawaz and Hafiz Sahib
represent figures that highlight how encounters with the state are mediated on the neighborhood
level, namely through intermediaries who possess contacts, resources as well as lay expertise around
matters of paperwork and bureaucratic procedures. Alaina Lemon argues that bureaucratic practices
activate dyadic illusions, privileging configurations that produce a “certain kind of dyad: decoder
reads sender, conceived as an individual who either hides or reveals information” (2019, 136).
Building on the work of linguistic anthropologists who “have been fighting the dyadic fetish for
decades, drawing from feminist observations about power, as well as from thinkers such as
Voloshinov, Bakhtin, or Goffman, who all worked to subvert both the idea that the individual is the
only kind of subject or agency that matters and the dyadic, speaker-hearer model of
communication,” Lemon (2019, 138) brings attention to not only how dyadic models persist and
what they produce but also how multiple participants and overlapping channels can disrupt them.
NADRA reliance on kinship relations compels NADRA’s identification procedures to
incorporate multiple, non-dyadic points of connection into the identity database. However, through
the data-entry and registration process (described in Chapter One) and by generating familial units
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(through documents like the Family Registration Certificate which list all members of the nuclear
family), NADRA does produce dyadic illusions. It simplifies multiple persons and relations into kin
units, which are then directly verifiable by government officials. The “family intruder” is a leak in an
otherwise established channel between uniquely identified families and NADRA.
Yet such leaks produce their own channels. They provoke contact between the “intruder”
and the family they have intruded into, as was the case for Asadullah.70 Those who are blocked are
inadvertently collectivized through their shared experience and identity of being blocked. This was
the case in Tarnol and other locations where blocked card-holders have also organized protests.71
More broadly, blocking a card is in itself a communicative act: conveying the suspect identity of its
holder to other governmental entities and spaces (schools, hospitals and checkpoint) as well as non-
governmental ones (banks, telecommunication companies).
In response, mediators such as Mir Nawaz and Hafiz Sahib recognize the “blocked-ness” of
the neighborhood as a collective problem and attempt to fix it through multiple (occasionally
conflicting) channels both within the neighborhood and beyond it. For instance, by speculating on
the double patta problem, and entreating people to streamline their records, Hafiz Sahib attempts to
organize the threads of connection between people and places. In so doing, he is organizing
attention72 around the information on the card in ways that could potentially clear a channel (to the
state) that is currently blocked. Mir Nawaz’s strategy is a little different: when he criticizes the role of
70 NADRA’s view of a family is enacted through the dedicated efforts of those who need documents and local connections from “family” that they may not have had much relation to. For instance, women like Hamida Bibi articulate experiences that explicitly speak to the way that fraught kin ties intersect with the pressures of bureaucratic labor initiated by the verification process. The grievances against Mir Nawaz by his family members in Mohmand also highlight how documentary requirements put pressure on family relations. Furthermore, fraught kin relations, and family disagreements, can often translate to family members withholding particular documents (such as a shared grandparent’s manual identity card or government service card) as a means to take revenge and spite an estranged relative. 71 “PM Imran Khan takes notice of people protesting against blocked CNICs in Lahore,” Samaa, September 1, 2018. 72 Lemon defines “organizing attention” as that practice which “requires making decisions about which contrasts make a proper difference” (2018, 150).
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the intelligence services, he identifies a parallel channel—external to Tarnol—that is muddying what
should be the main channel.
Beyond explicitly identifying and proposing solutions to the problem of blocked cards, much
of Hafiz Sahib and Mir Nawaz’s mediating work is grounded in everyday practices of sociality. We
can understand identity cards as credentials, which “condense and represent time and effort spent in
socially buffered zones where expertise is passed on” (Lemon 2018, 113). In this case, expertise
functions specifically as bureaucratic authorization. By turning to politicians and “influential” people
beyond Tarnol, Hafiz Sahib builds upon existing channels of social connections and expands his
circle of reciprocity. In drawing upon these connections—not to mention referencing it and name-
dropping these important people in conversation with myself and others—Hafiz Sahib seeks yet
another form of credentialing. In turn, ideally, expanding this circle of connections would also
unblock his card and clarify his identity status—not only for himself but also for others in Tarnol
who look towards Hafiz Sahib to resolve their collectively clogged channel with NADRA.
Julia Elyachar (2010) describes these highly ubiquitous practices of sociality, of which the
reliance on connections is but one part, as a form of “phatic labor.” She argues that the everyday
social infrastructure of communicative channels is a fundamental component of Cairo’s (her field
site) political economy—just as train tracks, bridges or telephone lines might be. At the same time,
she does not approach the analytic of the network “as an interlocking web of individuals, as a
coordinator of individual interests, or as a framework for action. Instead, I analyze communicative
channels that I maintain are an outcome of practices of sociality on their own terms, as distinct
objects of inquiry” (2010, 455). This approach allows us to see another aspect of Hafiz Sahib and
Mir Nawaz’s work of building, extending and maintaining communicative channels both within and
beyond Tarnol.
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Hafiz Sahib, for instance, organized a large gathering (up to fifty individuals) of Tarnol
residents with blocked identity cards in an open ground near his house to which I was invited too.
He arranged for chai, biscuits and cold drinks for all those present, and got two to three young men
attending college to compile a list of names and blocked ID card numbers. As mentioned earlier, he
met with his contact in the political party JUI-F and urged him to reach out to his contacts at the
District Commissioner’s office in Islamabad. Even as he was dissatisfied with the size of the group
and wanted greater collective action, he ultimately led a delegation of fifteen heads of household to
the District Commissioner’s office and requested his political contact to accompany this group. It
would be impossible for Hafiz Sahib to call upon his contacts if it were not for the consistent work
he puts into keeping those channels open, building into them the potential of clearing up other
blockages. While the identity infrastructure in Tarnol is a primary area of concern, it is not the only
one.
Neighborhoods such as Tarnol—newer settlements on the cusp of (in)formality that require
a lot of developmental work (such as sewers, or garbage removal) that the municipality may not have
taken on as yet—especially require this specialized labor of communicating with bureaucrats as well
as other local influential persons. In such a space where the rules are only partially delineated,
worked out as neighborhood dynamics are established, that the politics of recognition (in relation to
the state) is more crucial than ever. Mir Nawaz’s critique, while resonant with a broader anti-
corruption discourse, is part of a curious politics where he reproduces a reference-based
bureaucratic culture that he criticizes. As Das argues, the documentary practices of the state take on
a whole new life in community practices. Even in resisting the state, social practices such as Mir
Nawaz’s continue to reproduce it in new ways (Das, 234). In fact, NADRA compels blocked
families to engage in the bureaucratic labor of collecting records and making contact with
government officials across departments in ways that NADRA itself, or any other government
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department for that matter, cannot do. In the localized context of Tarnol, simultaneously both
urban space and ilaqa ghair, the desire for recognition by the state, especially through unblocking, is
interconnected with surveillance regimes in the neighborhood and at large. In fact, one does not
appear to be possible without the other.
Conclusion: Frontier Futures
“In Tarnol, the charge 555 is so common. That’s because of the act against ‘vagabond activity’
(awaragardi). The police have to fill their quotas, to prove that they did something, so they come here
(karkardigi puri karni hoti hai). For instance, say Razaq is standing here, between his house and his
brother’s house. The police will pick him up, accusing him of awaragardi. Forget about walking
around alone at night! When people return from work, in the late afternoon, they pick them up.
Even in the middle of the day, they can accuse you of being a vagabond. To top it all: in order to
release someone from lock-up, you need an identity card to provide a ‘character guarantee’ (shakhsi
zamanat). In Tarnol, since someone or the other is constantly being put inside, we always need
people with identity cards to get people out.” Khatib, an acquaintance, explained this state of
policing in Tarnol to me as we stood on a street corner at dusk. At this point, I informed Khatib
that we should all probably return home before we get taken in on the 555.
Hafiz Sahib and a few others like him, who appoint themselves to the role of community
leader, mediate the process of acquiring documents, navigating bureaucratic hurdles and overcoming
daily obstacles like the one described above by Khatib, surprisingly common in a securitized urban
context when functioning identity cards are absent. Anytime the city is on “high alert”—frequently
often in the capital where parades are held, foreign dignitaries visit and high-ranking government
officials live— “security threats” have to be assessed and dealt with accordingly. This often means
interrogation and short term arrest for those who fit the profile, which would be nearly everyone in
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Tarnol. In order to hold sway in the community, it is crucial to have acquaintanceship (jaan pehchan)
or cordial relationship (salam dua) with the police and other state officials. It is these relations that
broker release and mediate antagonistic relations with local representatives of the state, especially in
the case of a partially authenticated identity that could itself be the source of suspicion.73
Those without ID cards have to negotiate their movement within and outside of Tarnol on a
regular basis. Most of my interlocutors in Tarnol had an intimate, almost natural awareness of
checkpoints across the city, like a mental map they carried around everywhere. They knew which
checkpoints around Tarnol were absolutely impossible to get through, such as those that carried the
biometric readers manned by military personnel, and those that were set up temporarily and when
they would be moved to other locations. Others preferred to hardly ever leave Tarnol at all,
localizing their work and other aspects of social life to the neighborhood. For these people, security
extended beyond the checkpoint.
People crossing borders frequently need to prove that they are citizens or that they have the
requisite authorization otherwise. The form this proof takes varies, and these documentary
requirements are fairly recent. For instance, something like a passport, which used to be a travel
document in the time of empire was contingently turned into a marker of nationality (Zamindar
2007, Torpey 2000). While identity documents and borders have long been interlinked, borders shift
and movement across them has not always been marked by dramatic exhibits of one’s nationality
and credentials. Governance practices such as NADRA’s, seemingly ordinary and mundane, create
and manage internal frontier zones through subtle and ubiquitous techniques that databased forms
of identification afford. In short, identification—as practice and technology—extends past border-
crossing events.
73 Frontier zones have elsewhere (outside the context of Pakistan) been characterized by such individuals and mediators, who can serve as both gatekeepers and escorts. For more on escorts, and the role of moral reciprocity and protection in the context of crossing internal and external borders, see Shryock (2019).
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Through an ethnographic view of life in Tarnol, this chapter demonstrated how databased
identification conjures blockages in the conspicuous absence of borders. Sana Alimia (2019) has
termed one aspect of this feature the “performativity” of borders in the context of a card that was
specifically created for Afghan refugees. In a context where the Pak-Afghan border is difficult to seal
off, it is this card that creates differentiations and exclusions. In addition to Alimia’s claims, I would
argue that the Pakistani identity card, which is purportedly the marker of Pakistani nationality and
citizenship rights, functions in this manner for Pakistani citizens themselves. The card can operate as
a security mechanism because it is not only a piece of paper—it also has a database and networks
embedded in it. These expanded functions, especially the fact that a card can be blocked in ways that
obstruct everyday life, allows for it to operate as more than just a border making device. Even the
ideal citizen-subject is only ambiguously defined as someone whose identity card is not yet blocked
but always potentially could be. In this way, it functions to fulfil a security logic aimed at
apprehending not just citizens but purportedly the “terrorists” amongst them. This ambiguity only
heightens the striving for the entitlements of what one may call citizenship, exacerbating a double
bind for Tarnol’s blocked card holders: in order to freely exist in the city, they must participate in a
process that has as its starting point their potential exclusion.
Beyond the impact of documentation on the political subjectivity of persons as citizens, the
blocked card has space-making qualities which shape the social, economic and political lives of
migrants in a constant and friction-full manner. The identity database produces checkpoints across
the city, rendering certain parts such as Tarnol into frontier zones. Returning to the beginning of
this chapter, Tarnol is called ilaqa ghair because it reflects the imaginary of the North-West Frontier,
not solely because its inhabitants originally belong to a frontier but also due to Tarnol’s own spatial
limits and affordances. In so doing, we can see the effects of the North-West Frontier, even when it
is not geographical contiguous, shape everyday life within the capital city for Pashtun migrants.
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In attempting to describe a moving frontier, I have underlined the place-ness of Tarnol while
drawing on the connections it has with other spaces, such as the frontier, which in turn make it the
place that it is. One way to describe the place of the frontier in the city is to recognize that Tarnol is
being imagined through life from the tribal areas. Consider this: after the military operations began
in 2008 in the tribal areas of Pakistan, the residents of those areas also had to register for a
national/country (watan) card. The Pashtun Tahaffuz Movement (PTM, Movement for the
Protection of Pashtuns) has protested the extra judicial killings of Pashtuns across Pakistan,74
demanded that the watan card be done away with. One interlocutor belonging to Waziristan
explained, in the context of a conversation about his NADRA card, that the watan card operated as a
kind of visa for the tribal areas. No one else could enter Waziristan otherwise. However, Pashtuns
made the argument that if they were truly as Pakistani as anyone else, then their NADRA identity
cards should be enough. During our discussion about PTM, he described how the power of the
military and intelligence agencies in the tribal areas did not leave room for a life of dignity. Does
migration to a place like Tarnol allow for a chance for a life with dignity? Beyond spectacular
violence, such as those of drones and military operations, what happens to the everyday fear that
extends across the multiple regimes of identification that most Tarnol residents are caught in?
The way that many Tarnol residents imagine the future of their home is through the end of
their trajectory towards an unblocked identity card, and all that it means about belonging and
stability in their everyday lives. While they hope that their neighborhood will have proper sewage at
some point, their demands are less about turning Tarnol into a formal, recognized space that would
look and feel like the rest of Islamabad. Returning to the frontier of Tarnol itself, the mode in which
it operates as an open and expanding future is in part a product of its spatial configuration. As a
settlement along the Grand Trunk Road, it has grown as a long strip. But what is at its horizon? On
74 See “Why is Pakistan's Pashtun movement under attack?,” Al Jazeera News, 28 June 2020.
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the one hand, as the city expands, so does Tarnol, with Tarnol eventually becoming networked
further into the city. On the other hand, the techno-frontier produced through databased identity
contracts life in Tarnol, separates it from the rest of the city. The spatial choices of Tarnol residents
make it clear that they hope to maintain it as an autonomous space for the Pashtun community.
Simultaneously, a space that could potentially exist out of a zone of exceptional surveillance. In
addition, by focusing on the nature of mundane frustrations, local politics and consistent stress of
bureaucratic interactions, I have described how the residue of exceptional violence intersects with
casual violence on the scale of the everyday. The horizon of the frontier is intimately attached to a
migrant trajectory through spatial, material worlds to enable a future beyond being “blocked.”
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CHAPTER 4
Internalizing Security
National Identification and Documentary Technology
Introduction
“Before there was NADRA, there was the Directorate General of Registration. But why would you
want to know about DGR? There really isn’t anything there.” This was the response to my first
question to Shafiq, a mid-career bureaucrat working for the E-Governance division in NADRA,
about the Registration and Census Organization, eventually re-named the Directorate General of
Registration (DGR). The DGR was formed in 1973 under the government of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto.
This was the organization that produced Pakistan’s first identity registry and card, now referred to as
the Manual National Identity Card (MNIC) by its successor NADRA.
Fortunately, at the time I asked this question, another NADRA official whom I will call
Ashraf was sitting with Shafiq. Ashraf jumped in and disagreed. Ashraf claimed that DGR had been
given an unnecessarily bad reputation. “It’s true, before I had any substantial interaction with them,
I also thought that they were all, you know, inefficient, and couldn’t ever get you anything you
need.” However, Ashraf’s experience with DGR during the 2005 earthquake changed his mind.
During the relief efforts they collected three million paper forms to create a list of beneficiaries.
“These DGR folks immediately started separating the paper forms into different files. I had no idea
what the logic was. Later, we got an audit request, and we had to find one hundred and ninety-six
specific forms. You know what the DGR people look like? I mean they are all so old now, close to
retirement. This old aunty, you would think she doesn’t do much other than knit sweaters for her
grandchildren. Her and this other old man (baba), out of 250,000 (25 lakh) forms in the district of
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Battagram, they found those one hundred and ninety-six forms the very next day. They were given a
letter of appreciation.”
Ashraf portrayed these DGR employees as endearing old people with unexpected expertise.
“All you need to do is give them respect, and they will do everything for you,” he said. By 2022, all
those employed by DGR will be retired. As the three NADRA officials I was with at the time
discussed DGR, I saw a sense of nostalgia grow amongst them for this earlier, almost quaint, form
of registration. They joked that “one day we will be like DGR.” Shafiq eventually conceded to
Ashraf’s argument about DGR’s “efforts,” and how given their era and capacity, they did the best
they could. Shafiq accepted that they made the most of the technology and the tools that they had at
the time. Perhaps much like NADRA now. Shafiq considered, “what we have done now, it was
simply unimaginable earlier. Others who come after us, will look back at us at the way we do at
DGR.”
While the comparison between the institutional and technological cultures of DGR and
NADRA seems stark, particularly from the perspective of NADRA employees, the two share a
crucial preoccupation and motivation: national security. While DGR employees are no longer
participants in NADRA’s day to day operations, NADRA’s foundational identification protocols,
where individual identity is verified through kin-based networks, draws upon the original
documentary registration technology set up by DGR beginning in 1973. This earlier history—
technologically, institutionally and politically—is central to how we understand NADRA’s
identification protocols at present.
This chapter examines the technologies and rationale for launching Pakistan’s first national
identity registration system in 1973, and why national identity took on renewed significance in the
form of documentary technology at this time—approximately two decades after Pakistan’s
formation. Pakistan’s national identity registration system in the 1970s was based in a governmental
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program of securitization, which sought to pin down an “internal enemy” that emerged as a figure in
the aftermath of the 1971 war and then proliferated to encompass other threats perceived within the
territorial boundaries of Pakistan. This securitized logic, which was operationalized at this moment
against the inhabitants of Pakistan itself, is importantly contrasted to identity registration schemes
described in Chapter Two that were largely directed at the provision of welfare benefits. Instead, this
1973 securitized identification regime finds more parallels with regimes that have used internal
passes and identity documentation as regulatory modes of surveillance.1
This history illuminates how the identification structures of the earlier DGR system, with
security logics at its core, was ultimately reanimated and reworked into the contemporary suite of
database and biometric technologies that came to define post-9/11 NADRA. In turn, approaching
the decade of the 1970s through the development of DGR’s identification technology brings into
relief the profound impact this period, following the creation of Bangladesh, had on governance
practices in Pakistan.2 By focusing on technological shifts (from passports to identity cards and
1 While the apartheid pass was directed at controlling black South Africans (and so was not a universal system of registration), Breckenridge (2014) shows how the pass was directed at welfare provision once universal registration was instituted in South Africa. Sriraman (2018) links identity documentation to the ration card, initiated during World War II, and the VP Singh Card was directed at housing entitlements. In turn, India did not institute a country-wide identity registration scheme until Aadhar. The prompt for a National Register in Great Britain during World War I was for assessing the needs of the industry and military and naval purposes for the war and ultimately for conscription. The National Registration Act was repealed at the end of WWII, and those who wanted to keep it primarily justified it by attaching it to the need to assess food supply (Agar 2001, 104). In contrast, Argentina attempted to institute an identity card using fingerprints for not only delinquents and criminals but also “honest citizens” (Ruggiero 2001, 193) in 1916, however this was declared unconstitutional nine months later. The Soviet Union’s “internal passport” presents a case of an internal identity registration system, but one that was explicitly tied to controlling mobility (Garcelon 2001, 92). James Torpey (2001) notes that while modern states require some form of identification—personalauweis in Germany, carte d’identite in France and the driver’s license of social security card in the US—the European cases were linked to the movement of people within the Schengen zone, and the need to establish nationality (in the absence of an EU passport). The question of mobility, and especially when identity cards are used instead of passports in order to control mobility, is frequently tied to distinctive territorial configurations (such as the EU or the Soviet Union). Securitization is then certainly a key factor in these identification regimes. However, for Pakistan’s national ID card, national identification was not tethered to travel, most explicitly through the passport until NADRA came into being, as the CNIC is now required for the passport. 2 For the non-South Asianist reader: when Pakistan and India gained independence, Pakistan was divided into two wings, East and West Pakistan, which were separated by India. These two wings were not geographically contiguous. As a result, in the wake of East Pakistan’s subsequent independence (when it became Bangladesh), there was no border between the two wings and instead the populations (from East and West Pakistan) had to be separated.
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paper registry to biometric database) in this context, we can trace how security became increasingly
entrenched in basic functions of governance, even where these shifts were not always overtly or self-
consciously stated. In fact, the emergent ways in which the consequences of technologies exceed
both expectations and plans (Bijker, Hughes and Pinch 1987; Suchman 2007) alerts us to how
technological effects extend beyond established or stated governmental objectives—for example,
even as the identity registration system sought to weed out “outsiders,” it in fact targeted those on
the inside.3
The design of an identification system aimed towards internal security revolved around the
ability to verify all identifying, particularly kin-related, information entering the system. As I will
demonstrate, the Registration and Census Organization redesigned its protocols in order to achieve
greater verification in identification (albeit it only partially achieved this goal), and eventually was
incorporated into a whole new database and organization in the form of NADRA. In fact, paper
registration records were also critical to NADRA in its early stages precisely for the purpose of
verification—indeed, they continue to be used by NADRA for this purpose. At present, first time
ID card applicants (usually at eighteen years of age) will bring in their parents’ identity cards, as their
parents have likely already been registered in NADRA’s database. At the time of NADRA’s
formation in 2000, however, the only prior form of identification was the DGR-crafted manual
national identity card. Thus, these existing identification records were in fact one of the only means
of verification in the earlier stages of NADRA.
Ultimately, all the older registration records were scanned by NADRA in a near decade-long
3 The discursive aspect of the move to internal securitization emerges most clearly in National Assembly debates from the 1970s, as I show below. However, it is difficult to find records of self-conscious reflections of the shift that I describe—for instance, no officials would explicitly state that refugees from India are no longer a problem for them but instead Bengalis and Biharis are—rather, here I argue that the shifting preoccupations can be gauged through the development of an unprecedent national identity registration regime, directed at those inside, and the securitization protocols that are centered in its design.
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process. Prior to this large-scale digitization project, it was very difficult to locate particular records.
One NADRA employee I spoke to reminisced about his frustration at receiving letter upon letter
from DGR offices all over the country stating the “file is unavailable” (file dastiab nahi hai). He
claimed that the NADRA folks joked about this phrase so much that it became a refrain in the
office, complaining that “this reply really annoyed us tech-people. The idea of not having a record at
all is very difficult to digest.” After growing increasingly exasperated with this reply, he eventually
took a trip to a DGR district office. “When I physically visited a record room, I saw that there were
ten-foot steel racks with registers wider than the width of the racks. When you walked in between
them, it would rub against your shoulders. And so, over the years, or actually decades, the last inch
or so of that paper had been degraded and rubbed off. The entries on the bottom of the page were
in fact lost.” The file was physically unavailable. NADRA decided to scan what was left of the DGR
records so that the salvaged portions would forever be retrievable.
Yet for NADRA, concerns regarding DGR records’ accuracy and reliability remained. In my
search for DGR employees, current or retired, I requested another meeting with my original contact,
the ex-chairman and architect of NADRA, Brigadier Moin. He explained “when we started
NADRA, I had no example to guide me. DGR was not the template we wanted to work off of but
there was no pre-existing system, internationally, which fit our needs perfectly. There were no
‘breeder’ documents, such as birth certificates, which could provide us a solid foundation to start
with. But we had to start somewhere, and so the old identity card was one obvious place.” NADRA
needed a means of verifying the identity of those being registered in the database. In the absence of
a robust system for producing some kind of identity document such as a birth certificate, which
could easily be integrated into a biometric identification system, NADRA officials reluctantly drew
upon the manual identity card registry. First off, using DGR’s paper records was no straightforward
task. Moin described how “we (NADRA) had to verify these ID card numbers in DGR, and we
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would send them the identity card number. But the biggest issue we came up against was the
absence of record retrieval. You would receive a reply after six months—if at all. Only that specific
person who had originally made the entry, and then put that register with that entry in some special
place, was able to find it again. And the record room in-charge in these district offices… he was the
king (badshah) of the place.” Moin expressed skepticism about the manual identity card system on
both an institutional and technological level.
In addition, Moin claimed that because “everyone had an MNIC; it no longer held any value.”
But wasn’t the aim to maximize registration? He explained that without the ability to verify the
identification data provided by individuals and families, and to ensure that the card itself was not
forged, a high rate of registration only translated into an astronomical level of identity theft. Moin
claimed that during election years, ID card printing machines were set up by landowners and
politicians who financed a small-scale manufacturing process to print identity cards for their
neighborhood’s residents in order to secure their votes. These landowners and politicians would
then hold onto individuals’ identity cards until the following year, ensuring complete control over
their constituents. Further, Moin argued that a de-centralized registration system was bound to have
duplications; you could have a card in one location and another in a different location. Technically,
officials could prevent this but practically such checks never took place.
To emphasize the serious implications of the haphazard and poorly regulated condition of
this earlier identification system, Moin pointed to how the absence of verification facilitated illegal
immigration, as people could use forged identity cards with false particulars to apply for passports.
He qualified this by saying that he understood that, historically, immigrants and refugees rarely
returned to the countries they came from. Regardless, he said, the first step of proper identification
was to know and distinguish between groups within the population residing in the territory. “Without
this data we cannot deport or integrate them.” Thus, Moin explained, the Bhutto regime decided to
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launch an identity registration scheme in 1973 because, at the time, the government did not have any
mechanism to distinguish between who was a Pakistani and who was not. “After the war with East
Pakistan, which created Bangladesh, there were a lot of Bengalis and Biharis still residing in Pakistan,
and it was difficult to know who was who (kaun kaun hai).” For the state, Bengalis—who were
Pakistanis prior to 1971—had just been turned into the enemy; identifying them was interpreted to
be of utmost importance. In this way, identification, registration and securitization were connected
then much as they are now.
In this chapter, I analyze how Pakistan’s national identity card regime was created within a
context where security became, overwhelmingly, an internal preoccupation in the aftermath of
Bangladesh’s independence. Both bureaucrats and legislators in post-1971 Pakistan articulated the
problem of security threats as dispersed within the country’s population—and not solely entering in
from the outside. Further, this chapter asks: what purpose was this new identity card supposed to
fulfil that earlier forms of identification did not? In 1947, the Indo-Pak passport regime was
instituted when the Pakistani state was concerned with establishing the citizenship of Muslim
refugees coming in from India—specifically in an attempt to stem the flow of these refugees and
migrants.4 However, when the Pakistani state became increasingly concerned with the identity of
those who had already been established as their citizens—in the aftermath of the civil war where the
Eastern wing of Pakistan separated and became Bangladesh—the new government (under Bhutto)
introduced an internal national identity registration system to manage already existing, but now
compounded, anxieties concerning insiders and outsiders.
4 As Vazira Zamindar (2007) vividly illustrates, the highly surveilled and unique form of the Indo-Pak border was a function of it being both an internal and an international border. It remained an internal border because it was impossible to mark “insiders” and “outsiders,” and this problem continues to be a central one for Pakistan. In fact, it was compounded in 1971, when those who had been marked as insiders, however ambiguously, had to be separated out between two states.
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The events of 1971 were more than a “second partition” (Zakaria 2019; Mookherjee 2019).
Rather, I argue, these events opened up a new set of problems for the Pakistani state: the
government crafted a new documentary mechanism directed at identifying potential and
proliferating internal enemies within the country’s borders.5 While both the Partition in 1947 and
Bangladesh’s independence (from Pakistan) in 1971 generated documentary technologies to
negotiate the ambiguities of separating citizens from “aliens,” these exclusions, when incorporated
into their own specific identification technologies, were distinct in terms of the everyday instruments
of control. Drawing on archival sources and oral histories, I show how security concerns, focused
on movement of both Muslims and Hindus across the Indo-Pak border, were reconfigured into
techniques for managing the population internally through national identity registration in the
aftermath of another territorial rupture in 1971, Bangladesh’s independence.
The Landscape of Identity Documentation in the 1950s
To understand how Pakistan decided to launch a national identity card, we must first examine the
landscape of identity documentation and identification practices that such an identity card would
both draw upon and depart from. The terrain of identity documentation in South Asia was
dramatically reconstituted in the wake of independence in 1947 and, more importantly, through the
violent partition that provoked a mass migration. Mass migration, and the desire to control the flow
of persons, motivated many of the questions around who was entitled to inhabit the territory now
called Pakistan. While this may seem straightforward—through the assumption that those who
“chose” to enter Pakistan or stay in Pakistan would become a Pakistani citizen—the process of
5 In Etienne Balibar’s (1994) formulation of the “internal frontier,” the “inside” is constantly at risk of pollution by that which is outside. This explains why, both discursively and in terms of identification technology, the Pakistani state (in 1947 and 1971) worked to create separations between these two categories. However, the nature of the problem shifted, generating new strategies for dealing with it.
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determining who had “chosen” Pakistan or more specifically, who had the documents to prove such
a choice, had to be established from scratch.6 Moreover, the documents that were to determine who
was entitled to what were themselves under construction.
The most important of these documents was undoubtedly the passport. Vazira Zamindar
has detailed how the passport in India and Pakistan was a document that was not only for purposes
of travel (as it was during an imperial context) but became connected to nationality in
unprecedented ways (Zamindar 2007, 182). As Zamindar shows, Pakistan pushed for the transition
to the passport from the permit system in 1952,7 as there were fraught tensions concerning muhajirs
in Karachi and contentious debates calling for “damming the deluge,” for Karachi was deemed
“full” (Zamindar 2007, 170). The Pakistani government hoped the passport system would stem the
flow of what they understood as “one-way traffic,” and so they also put into place a limit date of
January 1, 1952, on all incoming migrants. The passport was intended to settle the question, once
and for all, of who was a citizen as opposed to a foreigner. Ultimately, the question of citizenship,
however, remained open and contested in both public discourse and in the experience of families
who were divided across the border.
While I draw on scholarship that demonstrates how Pakistan and India settled the complex
questions of citizenship and belonging in the context of post-Partition South Asia, my goal in this
section is much narrower: to follow how notions of belonging came to be embedded within the very
structure of identity documentation in Pakistan during the post-Partition period. The historiography
on this period has established that the desire, on the part of both India and Pakistan, to secure the
6 The process of establishing citizenship, as I will discuss in more detail below, was highly fraught because officials also made determinations with the question of evacuee property in mind. Zamindar (2007) shows how many who had temporarily fled were dispossessed through this process. 7 The permit system was put into place by India, and essentially required governmental permission in the form of a permit to travel back and forth, and it was used to stem the flow of “returning Muslims” who had fled violence during Partition (Zamindar 2007, 84).
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border and limit the grant of citizenship hinged on “documentary identities” (Roy 2016).
Geographical border crossings were far from insignificant to this story, particularly in the
experiences of violence during Partition. However, when I refer to preoccupations about “the
border,” these preoccupations are primarily in reference to the documentary technologies that
enabled or constrained movement across the border.
During the early formative period after Partition, the nascent Pakistani state had to
determine the meaning of distinct identity documents—in particular the emergency certificate, the
citizenship certificate, the domicile, the passport as well as other supplementary documents such as
birth and marriage certificates—linking them to territory and entitlements in order to control the
flow of migrants within the context of the newly-formed national territory. In particular, Pakistani
government officials struggled to establish a stable link between a given document identifying an
individual and an entitlement of citizenship for that individual.
To this end, I closely examine individual cases of adjudicating the allocation of identity
documents in order to trace how the context-dependent meaning of securitization—at this time
focused on controlling migration from across the border with India—was understood through
debates over evidentiary practices in Pakistan. In this section, I trace the internal discussions and
occasionally diverging perspectives between government officials at the Interior Ministry, the
Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Central States, the Ministry of Law as well as the Ministry of
Rehabilitation and Refugees. The Ministry of Interior, and its Citizenship Section in particular, was
authorized to issue citizenship certificates and these would be put towards applications for
passports. Many of the debates I am concerned with in this chapter arise during correspondences
between Interior and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Central States (F.A & C.S), as the latter
was occasionally the point of contact for Muslim refugees from India and was concerned with
foreign policy, external affairs and diplomatic relations with other countries, most prominently
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during this period, India. The Ministry of Law would be consulted about nascent citizenship
provisions, which were either in the process of being drafted or had been very recently drafted, in
relation to the cases the other ministries received. Lastly, the Ministry of Rehabilitation and Refugees
would be contacted if the question of evacuee property—property that had been left behind when
its owners fled Pakistan during Partition violence—arose in relation to a given case. Specifically, I
focus on the debates that emerge after the introduction of the passport system in 1952—as these
officials continually redefined the meaning of particular documents and who was entitled to them as
they adjudicated individual cases.
In particular, after the passport system was instituted at the insistence of the Pakistani
government, cross-border traffic continued to move from India to Pakistan through the then
“illegal” border crossing at Khokhrapar.8 As a result, the ambiguity of who was entitled to
citizenship and, by extension, who was entitled to a Pakistani passport, continued to prove difficult
for bureaucrats responsible for determining each case. Correspondence between the Citizenship
Section of the Ministry of Interior in Pakistan and adjacent departments such as the Ministry of
Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Law and the Ministry of Rehabilitation reveal the deep and fraught
ambiguities around who was entitled to what document. The question of whether an individual’s
possession of a given document, even a passport, translated to something meaningful, like
nationality, remained open for more than a decade. As I show below, officials from the Interior
8 As Zamindar describes, Khokhrapar is a border crossing that emerged “illegally” in Sindh, which Muslim refugees continued to use in the 1950s to enter from India if they had been denied a permit or could not wait for one. While the Indian government policed this crossing such that people could not enter from Pakistan into India, on the Pakistani side there were official and unofficial services for entry. The Pakistani government announced that they would close it after May 1950 but as Zamindar shows, and my examination of documents evidence, this remained relatively unpoliced. Other travel between India and West Pakistan took place through train services (particularly between Karachi and Delhi via Jodhpur) and by air between cities and at other border crossings such as at Wagah in Punjab. Khokhrapar, however, was particularly significant because it was the main point of crossing for Muslim migrants coming from India who were primarily headed for Karachi (in Sindh). In 1965, when war broke out between India and Pakistan, Khokhrapar and other travel services between India and Pakistan were closed. The eastern frontier, between West Bengal in India and East Pakistan was geographically more difficult to police and thus remained a route for those who wished to move across the border (Zamindar 2007, 235). This border, now between Bangladesh and India, has since become highly securitized and regulated (Ghosh 2019; Mookherjee 2019; Cons 2016).
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Ministry lamented the fact that this very question had already been settled through the decision to
institute the passport system, and yet had to be continually re-adjudicated.
Yet it was precisely because the passport was supposed to signify nationality, according to
Pakistan and India’s bilateral agreement, that Pakistani officials sought to control access to other
travel and identity documents that could potentially allow an applicant to eventually apply for a
passport. Debates between bureaucrats concerning nationality and citizenship emerged as they
discussed the evidentiary value of particularities including the issue of minor age, gender, domicile
and kinship. Possessing a Pakistani passport—given that so many Muslims had used it to move back
and forth between India—still could not definitively translate into Pakistani citizenship after the
passport system came into place. As a result, attempts to control the kind of documentation that
could incrementally lead up to a passport thus moved to other kinds of documents, particularly
citizenship and emergency certificates (and domiciles to a lesser degree), whose meaning in relation
to citizenship then had to be settled. In short, once the passport system was put into place, the
validational ambiguity surrounding other documents that aspiring citizens attempted to acquire also
had to be resolved.
For the purpose of tracking how this crucial period of post-1947 document-formation gave
way to a national identity card scheme as we see in the case of NADRA, these early discussions
around specific, individual cases as they were adjudicated by bureaucrats were key for connecting
individual and citizen identity to distinct evidentiary documents. In this early moment in Pakistan’s
history impacted by unprecedented migration, Pakistani bureaucrats struggled to settle the meaning
of documents that evidenced both individual identity, and potentially citizenship, by debating the
implications of linking a given document to a particular entitlement. I will now turn to three such
debates to consider how government officials in Pakistan—after the introduction of the passport
system—sought to determine the status and entitlements provided by a passport, an emergency
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certificate, a birth certificate and a domicile. In analyzing their discussion, I attend to how these
documents operated within a broader ecology where it was precisely their interconnections that
structured bureaucratic practice around them.
The New Passport
In 1952, Sir Mohammed Currimbhoy applied for a Pakistani passport.9 Currimbhoy belonged to a
Gujrati Khoja (Ismaili Muslim) family that had a shipping and trading business in Bombay, India.
According to the Interior Ministry records, his father, Sir Currimbhoy Ebrahim Baronet had arrived
in Karachi from India in 1948 on a temporary permit, which was then extended. Travel permits were
used to regulate travel between India and Pakistan before the passport system had been instituted,
and according to the agreements of this system it was the Indian government that would issue
Currimbhoy’s permit to travel to Bombay. For his second application to extend the travel permit,
the Bombay Government “adopted a silent attitude”10 which led the elder Currimbhoy and his
family to getting “stuck” in Pakistan. Subsequently, the Pakistani government granted him a passport
to travel to Ceylon and the Middle East. Sir Currimbhoy then travelled to Bombay from Ceylon, was
arrested, and then somehow escaping arrest, he returned to Karachi. From that point onwards, since
1950, the Currimbhoy family had been residing in Pakistan.
The Ministry of Interior noted that according to the Pakistani Citizenship Act of 1951,
“every person shall be deemed to be a citizen of Pakistan who before the commencement thereof
migrated to the territories now included in Pakistan from any territory in the Indo-Pakistan
subcontinent outside these territories, with the intention of residing permanently in those
9 Letter from the Assistant Secretary to the Deputy Secretary of the Ministry of Interior, dated 24 September 1953. F. 11/32/50-Poll(I), Serial No. 71, Citizenship Section, Ministry of Interior, NAP. 10 Ibid.
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territories.”11 Yet, the Assistant Secretary also noted that the Currimbhoy family came to Pakistan
“under peculiar circumstances,” (although he does not detail what these are) and had no intention to
reside in Pakistan permanently. The question of intention, and specifically the intention with which
travel occurred and passports were acquired, was significant for determining the validity of Sir
Currimbhoy Ebrahim’s son’s application.
Not only was there insufficient “proof of his intention,” the fact that Sir Currimbhoy was
granted a Pakistani passport was not “prima facie, conclusive proof of Pakistani citizenship of the
holder.” This generated a debate about whether the passport—issued before the commencement of
the passport system—could serve as proof of Currimbhoy’s national status. The Deputy Secretary
from the Ministry of Interior requested clarification on whether persons making applications for
passports before the enactment of the Pakistan Citizenship Act, 1951 were required to write down
“British subjects” or “Pakistani British subjects.”12 He also questioned when the practice of writing
“citizen of Pakistan” on the passport began. Further, if Currimbhoy was not considered a citizen,
then why was he issued a passport at all?13
The response he received from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Law
clarified that prior to the commencement of the Pakistan Citizenship Act 1951, all Pakistanis were
described as “Pakistani British” subjects. However, given that Pakistan was a member of the
Commonwealth and could issue Pakistani passports to the citizens of other Commonwealth
countries, the issue of a Pakistani passport did “not necessarily mean that he (Currimbhoy) is a
citizen of Pakistan.”14 Not only was the meaning of the passport in relation to nationality unsettled
11 Ibid. 12 Letter from the Deputy Secretary, Ministry of Interior to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Central States, dated 30 September 1953. F. 11/32/50-Poll(I), Serial No. 71, Citizenship Section, Ministry of Interior, NAP. 13 Ibid. 14 Letter from Abdul Hamid, Joint Secretary, Ministry of Law to Deputy Secretary, Ministry of Interior, dated 9
November 1953. U.O No.2873/53, Serial No. 71, Citizenship Section, Ministry of Interior, NAP.
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at this point, this discussion and the dual category of “Pakistani British” subject shows how an
independent citizenship status took multiple years and significant effort to take shape in the early
years of Pakistan.
Further, an official from Foreign Affairs emphasized that Currimbhoy clearly had no
intention to settle in Pakistan; he had only acquired a passport to go abroad and “enter India from
some other country stealthily.”15 Hence, in this case the family’s residence in Karachi prior to the
limit date of the 1951 Pakistan Citizenship Act as well as the possession of a Pakistani passport did
not entitle Sir Currimbhoy to Pakistani citizenship, or more specifically, another Pakistani passport.
The officials determined what a passport could mean and what it would mean, particularly in
relation to citizenship, by situating it within a broader set of facts. They took into consideration the
intention with which it had been requested and what it had been used for. This reveals how, after
the transition to the passport system in 1952, the relationship between an earlier passport under the
colonial regime (a travel document) and the new Pakistani one had to be re-established. Not only
were officials unsure of whether issuing the original passport might have implied Pakistani
citizenship, they also needed to confirm how bureaucratic norms operated prior to the initiation of
the passport system. Possession of a Pakistani passport by a father during the permit system could
not guarantee a passport for his son during the passport system. In this way, the sheer fact of
movement across the border, as well as seemingly conflicting loyalties, outweighed the ostensible
legitimacy of documents such as a passport and legal conditions such as residence in Pakistan.
The Emergency Certificate
15 Letter from S.H. Firoz, Ministry of F.A & C.R to Deputy Secretary, Ministry of Interior, dated 21 October 1953. D.9936-PV11/53. Serial No. 71, Citizenship Section, Ministry of Interior, NAP.
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Given that the Pakistani state’s motivation was to limit migration after the mass movement of
refugees in 1947, it attempted to do so by controlling the issue of Pakistani passports since these
travel documents were now increasingly connected to nationality. However, the fact that Pakistan
was supposed to be a “Muslim homeland” complicated matters, and all documentary provisions to
incoming refugees could not be halted altogether. Yad Elahi’s case, which I discuss in this section, is
one of many that highlights this legal-political dilemma for Pakistani officials.16 In particular,
correspondences between the Interior Ministry and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs show that even
as the border at Khokhrapar was officially closed, Muslim refugees from India who continued to
trickle in were frequently provided emergency certificates, a document that was intended for
stateless persons.17 On the basis of the emergency certificate, some refugees and migrants then made
applications for passports in order to travel and visit families across the border in India. Since
emergency certificates could only be granted to stateless persons, the officials granting these had to
establish that there was no evidence that the person in question was an Indian national.18
“One Mr. Yad Elahi, who entered Pakistan from India through Khokhrapar in the end of
the year 1954 has applied to the Government of the Punjab for the grant of Pakistani passport in
order to see his wife and children in India.”19 The Ministry of Foreign Affairs was of the opinion
that although people like Yad Elahi, who were not citizens of Pakistan in the legal sense yet, were
entitled to documents such as emergency certificates in order to avoid statelessness. Despite the
16The discussion of this problem—of Pakistan as Muslim homeland and yet not able to provide refuge to all Muslims—extends beyond Yad Elahi’s file (and this is obvious from the file itself) to the discussion of granting emergency certificates to refugees from Jammu and Kashmir wishing to reside in Pakistan as well as those coming from Hyderabad Deccan. Serial No. 145, Citizenship Section, Ministry of Interior, NAP; Serial No. 99, Citizenship Section, Ministry of Interior, NAP. 17 A stateless person is one who is “not considered as a national by any state under the operation of its law" according to the United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Stateless Persons (1954). The concern with stateless persons was heightened after World War II. 18 This anxiety, of allocating an emergency certificate to an Indian, also emerges in relation to residents of Hyderabad Deccan migrating to Pakistan. In their case, it has to be established that they do not hold documents that would classify them as Indians. Serial No. 99, F-NO-44-35-57- Citizenship Section, Ministry of interior, NAP. 19 Reference preceding note from Ministry of F.A & C.R to Ministry of Interior, dated 26 March 1955. U.O No. D. 884-I(V)/55, Serial No. 80, NO-1-1-56-Citizenship Section, Ministry of Interior, NAP.
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commencement of the passport system and citizenship provisions, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs
argued that “if every person who has entered Pakistan through Khokhrapar on or after 13th April
1951 is required to be registered as citizen of Pakistan for the purpose of obtaining passports, this
would be a very harsh provision.”20 Further, they argued that if Pakistan refused citizenship to even
just a few hundred of such Indians who came to Pakistan on “our implied invitation and whom we
are now refusing to absorb…it would create a disgruntled element of our population many of whom
would perhaps become fifth columnists.”21 The Ministry of Foreign Affairs did not see the provision
of an emergency certificate, and it ultimately translating into a passport, as a problem. In fact, they
thought that this was part of what Pakistan as a state should be providing.
Yad Elahi’s case provoked a contentious debate where the Ministry of Interior responded by
saying that such an approach would in fact incentivize entering illegally through Khokhrapar.22 More
vitally, the Ministry of Interior expressed annoyance that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Central
States “harp on the same string” when the issue had been settled through the commencement of the
passport system.23 While they recognized that they cannot turn people away at the border, the
Ministry of Interior argued that those who are granted Emergency Certificate cannot be regarded as
“bonafide citizens” of Pakistan and cannot be granted travel facilities that would be available to
“full-fledged citizens of Pakistan.”24 The debate, to summarize, is over whether the document of an
emergency certificate could become the basis of a passport. The stakes of this debate center on
whether the holder of the emergency certificate could be a citizen or whether regarding them as such
(by providing them with a passport) might then lead them to make such a claim.
20 Ibid. 21 Letter from M. Ahmed (no official designation), Ministry of F.A & C.R to Deputy Secretary, Ministry of Interior, dated 25 November 1955. U.O. No. D. 3724-PV(VIII), Serial No. 80, Citizenship Section, Ministry of Interior, NAP. 22 Reference from the Ministry of the Interior to the Ministry of F.A & C.R, dated 27 April 1955. U.O No. D. 884-I(V)/55, Serial No. 80, Citizenship Section, Ministry of Interior, NAP. 23 Letter from Ministry of Interior to the Ministry of F.A & C.R., dated March 15, 1956. U.O. No. D-674-PV(VIII)/56, Serial No. 80, Citizenship Section, Ministry of Interior, NAP. 24 Ibid.
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Since emergency certificates did not translate into citizenship, as they were for stateless
persons, those entering through Khokhrapar, according to the Ministry of Interior, had to apply for
citizenship certificates in order to then apply for passports. As a result, there had to be a mechanism
in place to ascertain that an individual had in fact entered through Khokhrapar.25 The Ministry of
Foreign Affairs brings this up as a practical difficulty for following the approach the Ministry of
Interior suggested. In the absence of “automatic citizenship,”26 specific individuals had to be
identified as simultaneously illegal migrants and potential Pakistani citizens.
To this end, the Ministry of Interior responded, a refugee register was maintained with “full
particulars” of all those who enter through Khokhrapar.27 These particulars included fingerprinting
forms, name of the individual and fathers’ name as well as serial number and date of entry. In
addition, there was an identity slip for the individual with name, parentage, address in India, likely
places to be visited in Pakistan, names of family dependents who accompanied him to Pakistan, age
and occupation, identification marks, left thumb impression, copy of photograph, reference to serial
number and date of entry in the Khokhrapar register. This identity “slip” was then forwarded to
relevant officials in Sindh and kept in alphabetical order. The refugee register and its corresponding
identity slip were precisely catered to the purpose of tracing an individual. Thus, the technology of
the refugee register, operating as yet another document in the mix, was essential to the process of
25 In addition, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs also brought up the problem of those who, when refused Pakistani citizenship, would also be rejected by India. While the Ministry of Interior responds to the problem of ascertaining who entered through Khokhrapar (through the technology of the refugee register), it is clear that the issue of producing a stateless person, rejected by both states, was an irresolvable problem. Also, see Raheja (2018) for an account of how this continues through an examination of Pakistan Hindu Refugee claims in India. 26 Those who migrated between the date that the Pakistan Citizenship Act was passed on 13 April 1951 and 1 January 1952 had “automatic citizenship” according to the Pakistan Citizenship Act of 1951. While the term “automatic citizenship” and who is entitled to it is prevalent across the records of the Citizenship Section, it did produce tensions. For instance, when discussing government employees who were opting to return to India from East Pakistan, after close to a decade of service, Pakistani officials expressed that the notion of automatic citizenship was troubling as citizenship could not be “thrust upon individuals.” Rather, they claimed, intentions and desires were also key. Note in Reference to Query from Deputy Secretary, Home Division, Ministry of Interior, dated 12 December 1959. Serial No. 88, Citizenship Section, Ministry of Interior, NAP. 27 Letter from Additional Secretary, Ministry of Interior to the Ministry of F.A & C.R., dated March 20, 1957. U.O. No.1/4/55-Citz. Serial No. 80, Citizenship Section, Ministry of Interior, NAP.
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tracing particular individuals and either providing or denying them further travel and identity
documents.
While the Interior Ministry claimed (in their response to Foreign Affairs) that they would
“always be liberal in the matter of conferment of Pakistani citizenship on Indian Muslims; for
Pakistan is a homeland for Muslims only,”28 the construction and maintenance of the refugee
register reflects a preoccupation with identity tracking for the conjoined purposes of maintaining
security and delimiting citizenship to those who were continuing to enter. Further, Interior
referenced the Nehru-Liaqat Agreement—an agreement passed between Pakistan and India to
ensure protections for minorities in both newly-created countries, reverse displacements and thus
“settle” minorities where they were (in this case Muslims in India)—to refute the notion that all
Muslim refugees coming from India, after the agreement had been signed in 1950, would be
provided asylum in the absence of regular travel documents. Interior officials pointed to the
introduction of the passport system as evidence of the documentary limitations in place. “Now
coming to the question of automatic conferment of Pakistani citizenship on those Indian nationals
who have come over to Pakistan on the strength of Emergency Certificates and the grant of
Pakistani passports to such person, it may be stated that this is a closed chapter; for it has already
been finally decided that the grant of an Emergency Certificate does not imply the grant of Pakistani
citizenship.”29
Thus, the Ministry of Interior attempted to close the question of what an Emergency
Certificate could translate into, in terms of other documents, and what such documents could allow
in relation to mobility, migration and resettlement. In particular, as the flow of refugees and migrants
continued, the Ministry of Interior deployed this particular documentary technology to disallow
28 Ibid. 29 Letter from the Ministry of Interior to the Ministry of F.A & C.R, dated 18 July 1956. U.O. No.1/4/55-Citz. Serial No. 80, Citizenship Section, Ministry of Interior, NAP.
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citizenship claims—as opposed to enabling them. Furthermore, this debate ensued after the
passport system had already been put into place. This timing thus illustrates that when the passport
came to signify nationality, both applicants and officials (such as those in Foreign Affairs) turned to
other kinds of documents that could keep channels to citizenship open. In response, bureaucrats at
the Ministry of Interior labored to reaffirm that only a passport had the capacity to signal
citizenship. In attempting to do so, they engaged in contentious debates to distance the meaning of
other documents such as the emergency certificate from an entitlement such as citizenship. This
shows how concerns about Muslim migrants entering India were managed through documentary
structures and, by extension, exclusionary policies around citizenship were embedded into
documentary practice that restricted access to incremental documents leading up to nationality.
The Citizenship Certificate
Thus far, I have focused on how government officials negotiated and crafted the newly formed
identity documentation structure in relation to Muslim refugees entering Pakistan who sought to
acquire Pakistani citizenship. Now, I will turn to the cases of Hindus who were at risk of losing their
Pakistani nationality through their decisions to travel. According to citizenship provisions, as
outlined above, if Hindus were designated to have migrated to India, then they would lose
citizenship. Hence, I use the term travel and not migration because designating travel as migration
was precisely the legal issue being contested. In analyzing how the Citizenship Section, in
collaboration with other government departments such as the Intelligence Bureau, the Ministry of
Law and the Ministry of F.A & C.R, decides how and when nationality was lost, I attend to the
documentary technologies used and crafted to evidence intention and, by extension, entitlement to
citizenship and nationality. At the same time, to understand how the interpretation of these
documents was continually in flux, I situate them and their unstable meaning within the shifting
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political context and pressures at this early stage of state formation in Pakistan.
In early 1953, the Ministry of Interior was attempting to decide whether a minor, Vanraj
Lalji, a Hindu who was the son of Pakistani nationals, resident in Karachi, was entitled to a passport
that his father had applied for on his son’s behalf.30 At the time, Vanraj was studying in Bombay and
had travelled there as a minor. The Deputy Secretary (Interior) notes that this case was initially dealt
with by the Ministry of F.A. & C.R. who referred it to the Interior as an issue of law, specifically
questioning whether Section 7 of the Citizenship Act could be applied to minor children of Pakistani
nationals who had left for India after 1947. Section 7 of Citizenship Law conditions that “any
person who has migrated from Pakistan to India would cease to be a citizen of Pakistan despite his
birth in Pakistan or his descent from a Pakistani parent.”31 In effect, this provision enabled the state
to use instances of “migration,” or even movement across borders, to disallow claims of
citizenship.32
To determine whether Vanraj could be excluded from citizenship on this basis, despite the
fact that he was born in Pakistan and that his parents were Pakistani nationals, the Ministry of
Interior asked a set of questions in relation to his documents so as to definitively categorize his stay
in Bombay as migration: did Vanraj travel for studies or did he accompany friends or relatives during
a “time when there was exodus of population”? What was the importance of Siddharth College
where he was a student, and why could he not have received the same qualifications in Pakistan?
Does the fact that the rest of his family, particularly his parents, remained in Pakistan while he
travelled as a minor mean that he is entitled to citizenship?33 Through the course of the
30 Note from Hameeduddin Ahmed, Deputy Secretary, Ministry of Interior, dated April 7, 1953, on letter from the Chief Passport Officer, dated March 25, 1953. Serial No. 63, Citizenship Section, Ministry of Interior, NAP. 31 Section 7, Pakistan Citizenship Act, 1951. 32 This was a mirror of Indian Citizenship law, promulgated after the Indian Citizenship Act was passed, and as Zamindar (2007) shows this was used to disallow Muslim refugees from returning to India. 33 Letter from Ghulam Ahmed DS(P), Ministry of Interior to Ministry of F.A & C.R, dated 15 July 1953. Serial No. 63, Citizenship Section, Ministry of Interior, NAP.
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correspondence, officials began to narrow down the possibility of citizenship, especially as
intelligence sources in the police communicated34 that Vanraj had left Karachi with this mother,
sister and brothers and that some of his brothers did settle down in Bombay permanently.
To make an additional argument against Vanraj’s application for citizenship, Interior cited
this letter from the Assistant Inspector General (AIG) Police to the Chief Commissioner of Karachi,
which communicated the family’s “Congressite” political leanings. The AIG quickly deflected any
political motivations for rejecting the application, instead stating that the real reason behind Vanraj’s
application appears to be the protection of potential evacuee property.35 The political circumstances
of this case are further complicated by the fact that Shri Chandra Chattopadhyay, the leader of the
opposition,36 made requests to the Interior Minister to expedite the case. On 11th November, 1953,
Hamiduddin Ahmed, the Deputy Secretary of the Interior Ministry, wrote a note in Vanraj’s file that
unequivocally stated that since citizenship was “essentially a matter of loyalty to the state,” given the
family’s political leanings, it would not be advisable to restore citizenship to someone who “by
training and by environment is not likely to give this loyalty to the State.”37 However, by 16th
November, just a few days later, a note from the Secretary of Interior—and likely pressure from the
Interior Minister whose letter to Mr. Chattopadhyay38 is included in the file—led Deputy Secretary
Ahmed to entirely turn his position around. In the following note, he emphasized that Vanraj’s case
is “different from those Hindus who have migrated permanently to India and are thereby deprived
34 Letter from Assistant IG of Police, CID, Karachi to Secretary to the Chief Commissioner, Karachi, dated 16 September 1953. ILPS/PCC/3422, Serial No. 63, Citizenship Section, Ministry of Interior NAP. 35 Ibid. 36 Shri Chandra Chattopadhyay is well known for his speech against the Objectives Resolution, when he persuasively argued East Pakistan was one-fourth non-Muslim, and that the Objectives Resolution diminished the rights of minorities. See The Constituent Assembly of Pakistan Debates, Vol 5, 7th March 1949. On the question of minorities and the objectives resolution see, Asif (2020) and Toor (2011). 37 Note from Hameeduddin Ahmed, Deputy Secretary, Ministry of Interior on internal memo requesting update on Vanraj’s case, dated November 11, 1953. Serial No. 63, Citizenship Section, Ministry of Interior, NAP 38 Letter from M.A. Gurmani, Interior Minister to Shri Chandra Chattopadhyay, Member of National Assembly, dated 17 April 1953. 13/18/53-Poll(I), Serial No. 63, Citizenship Section, Ministry of Interior, NAP.
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of their Pakistani citizenship. Since his parents are beyond doubt Pakistani, to refuse him citizenship
would entail “splitting the family of a Pakistani national.”39 In his new and radically different
interpretation, the Deputy Secretary read the parents’ Pakistani status as indisputable, likely on the
basis of their current domicile and Pakistani passport. Upon receiving the Secretary’s note, which
pushed against the connection between the family’s political leanings and Vanraj’s status, the Deputy
Secretary was compelled to read the AIG’s note as peripheral to the interpretation of Vanraj’s
documents themselves.
Following from here, Vanraj’s father Haridas Lalji was asked to submit an application and
form “M” on behalf of his son in addition to the form application for citizenship (Figure 9 and
Figure 10). Haridas not only filled out and included this form but also enclosed supporting
documents that were not explicitly requested to support his son’s case. These included a letter from
the Principal of Siddharth College in Bombay stating that Vanraj was the son of Haridas and a
bonafide student at the college. Importantly, there was also a certificate of domicile that included
addresses in Pakistan and outside Pakistan (Khattiwar, India). This domicile also listed the name,
gender and age of all of Haridas’s children as well as Haridas’s personal marks of identification. In
addition, Haridas included an affidavit on a Rs. 4 stamp paper to state that he applied for Vanraj’s
citizenship certification, that he was a citizen of Pakistan and had been granted a passport (with the
serial number of the passport) and that he was granted the domicile certificate by Karachi’s Chief
Commissioner.
39 Note from Hamiduddin Ahmed, Deputy Secretary, Ministry of Interior to, dated 16 November 1953. Serial No. 63, Citizenship Section, Ministry of Interior, NAP.
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Figure 9: Form M, an Application for Registering a Minor as a Citizen of Pakistan (source: NAP) 40
40 Application from Vanraj Lalji, dated 19 November, 1953. Serial No. 63, Citizenship Section, Ministry of Interior, NAP.
237
Figure 10: Form R-1: Certificate of Registration as a Citizen of Pakistan (source: NAP) 41
41 Ibid.
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Further, Haridas attached a birth certificate from the Register of Births and Deaths, Karachi
Municipal Corporation dated 19 October 1949 for Vanraj, who was born in 1933. The fact that this
birth certificate was dated 1949 illustrated that it was likely not originally requested for the purpose
of this application. Yet, it was also dated after Vanraj had already left for India. This document, in
particular, reveals a concern on the part of Hindu minorities about their status in Pakistan, where
precautionary measures, given the insecurities felt by minorities during this period, involved
collecting documentary evidence precisely for moments such as this one. While it would not be
uncommon to backdate such documents, in this case that seems unlikely since requesting one at the
time (in 1953) would have been just as sufficient for the citizenship application.
In November 1953, Haridas Lalji sent quite a few follow-up letters to the Ministry to request
the citizenship certificate for his son (one such letter is copied below as Figure 11). Eventually, a
letter from the Chief Commissioner of Karachi acknowledged the receipt of the certificate from the
Ministry of Interior. This case brings to light a nascent documentary infrastructure that aspiring
citizens were beginning to draw upon for the purpose of producing evidentiary claims. As officials in
the newly formed Pakistani state debated how to ascribe what meaning to which document,
claimants simultaneously engaged various parts of the state, drawing on connections like Mr.
Chattopadhyay as well as local bureaucracies to produce documents such as the birth certificate.
While these documents built on existing systems—for instance, the affidavit on Pakistani stamp
paper reflects the continuation of the colonial policy to use stamp paper—there were also
innovations within the form. For instance, the domicile certificate was included within the Pakistani
Citizenship Act and was one of the documents used to evidence citizenship. Even though a registry
of births and deaths existed prior to independence (as the following chapter will discuss in greater
detail), in this instance it was mobilized, as the date of issue demonstrates, in ways specific to the
novel context of a newly independent state.
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In particular, this collection of documents was put to use for rendering a single individual—
through his connections to both family members (especially his father) and to a specific location
(Karachi)—a Pakistani citizen. In short, the documents were intended to establish a link between
individual and family as well as the relationship between citizen and state. While this was likely not
always a guarantee for success, it shows how the interrelation of documents worked to produce,
evidence and adjudicate claims of citizenship.
In spite of the fact that Vanraj was born in Pakistan and that his parents continued to reside
there, he was suspected of being an outsider. For Vanraj’s case, the evidence of outsider status was
evaluated against the evidence in support of his insider status through the documents that Vanraj
and his family present. My goal in attending to the various details of this case is to highlight the
intricacies with which documentary practice was developed for both officials and citizen-applicants
at this stage. In particular, in Vanraj’s case—where citizenship was established through kinship—we
see how the evidence of affinity was used as a means to establish insiderness. This focus on affinity
will become even more important when I turn to the 1970s when kinship as evidence becomes a
primary means of verifying not just those who are suspect, but all those already resident within
Pakistan and applying for identity cards.
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Figure 11: Letter from Haridas Lalji to the Ministry of Interior (source: NAP) 42
While the circumstances in East Pakistan were significantly different from West Pakistan in
terms of migration, since the mass movement of population in 1947 had taken place across the
border in Punjab and less so across the East/West Bengal border, the Pakistani government was still
42 Letter from Haridas Lalji to Deputy Secretary, Ministry of Interior, dated 18 November, 1953. Serial No. 63, Citizenship Section, Ministry of Interior, NAP.
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obligated to mirror policy, particularly in relation to documents, so as to control the potential
political repercussions of any discrepancy. I will now turn to the case of Mr. Saha, and how the
Ministry of Interior dealt with his return to East Pakistan from India. Mr. Saha, a Hindu man from
East Bengal, left East Pakistan for India sometime in 1950, lived there for close to three years and
then returned to Pakistan in 1953 on an Indian passport. He petitioned the Pakistani government for
citizenship on the argument that he had only migrated to India on account of communal
disturbances. The Interior Ministry rejected this plea and its reasoning quite forcefully. They cited
two reasons: first, they claimed there were no serious disturbances in East Pakistan in 1950 and
second, that Saha presented a “clear cut case” of losing his “Pakistani status under Section 7 of the
P.C. (Pakistani Citizenship) Act. 1951” due to migration, given that he lived in India for as long as
three years.43 Ultimately, Mr. Saha was granted citizenship on the special recommendation of the
Minister of Interior but the Interior Secretary made sure to emphasize that this was on a “purely
individual basis” and did not constitute a change or relaxation in policy regarding citizenship.44
Through such a disclaimer, the Interior Secretary was able to distance the political implication of this
particular grant of citizenship from a broader policy in the context of an increasingly narrowing
definition of “Muslim homeland.”45
An anxiety around political implications was evidenced in the fact that before turning to the
particulars of Mr. Saha’s case, the Citizenship Section outlined their policy regarding the grant of
43 Section 7, as mentioned above, stipulated that nationality could be lost on account of migration. Letter from the Deputy Secretary for the Secretary, Ministry of Interior, dated 10 April 1956. Serial No. 91, Citizenship Section, Ministry of Interior, NAP. 44 Reference D.S.(P)’s notes dated 11 April 1956. Serial No. 91, Citizenship Section, Ministry of Interior, NAP. 45The officials referencing Muslim homeland seem to do so entirely in the context of making an argument why a particular Muslim refugee should be entitled to Pakistan and why Hindus might not be—even as this particular case shows they might have the evidentiary documents to make a case in support of their application for Pakistani citizenship. In this sense, such discussions are set apart from earlier, pre-independence discussions of Muslim Homeland. See Naqvi (2012) on the tensions surrounding the notion of territory in articulations of Muslim nationalism, and how Muslim refugees, and specifically muhajirs’ notions of political belonging (to Pakistan as well as to India) fit within such an ideological formation in the aftermath of Partition.
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citizenship to non-Muslims. Their first point of consideration was that Pakistan was created as a
homeland for Muslims only, and thus liberally granting Hindus (in particular) citizenship would be at
odds with the aim with which the separate state of Pakistan was established.46 The directness of the
Interior officials’ language can be situated within the broader context of the political shifts that led
to, and were further cemented by, the Objectives Resolution which declared Pakistan as an Islamic
Republic and was opposed by all non-Muslim minority members of the Constituent Assembly.47 The
Citizenship Section’s second point of consideration was in direct response to the Indian
government’s policy that refused Indian Muslims citizenship, especially if they had lived in Pakistan
or served under the Government of Pakistan, however briefly.48 Third, they explicitly stated they
were “particularly averse to the grant of Pakistani citizenship to those Hindus who have lost their
Pakistani status under Section 7 of the Pakistan Citizenship Act, 1951 for their return to Pakistan
would dislodge innumerable Muslim refugees who have since been permanently rehabilitated.”49
By “dislodging,” the officials here were referring to the problem of evacuee property. Along
with the massive number of displacements during Partition, refugees left behind properties
amounting to a large but contested sum (Chatta 2012; Zamindar 2007). According to the legislation
around evacuee property in Pakistan, the Custodians of Refugees Property were in charge of these
properties. According to evacuee property legislation, these properties could not be reallotted until
the issues surrounding them were resolved between India and Pakistan given that each country had
claims that it was owed by the other (Schechtman 1953). However, in Punjab migrants and refugees
46 Letter from the Deputy Secretary for the Secretary, Ministry of Interior, dated 10 April 1956. Serial No. 91, Citizenship Section, Ministry of Interior, NAP. 47 Even as many of the Hindu members of opposition cited hadith and examples from the Prophet Muhammad’s life to support arguments for a Minority Protection Bill (Khan 2012). 48 As Joya Chatterji (2012) has noted, the citizenship regimes of India and Pakistan share remarkable similarities and symmetries. In particular, both started out with jus soli as the basis of citizenship, and initially sought to alleviate the fears of minorities. 49 Letter from the Deputy Secretary for the Secretary, Ministry of Interior, dated 10 April 1956. Serial No. 91, Citizenship Section, Ministry of Interior, NAP.
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from India had been resettled in “abandoned” properties, including 1.5 million refugees in urban
areas in Punjab by 1949 (Chatta 2012, 1190). As a result, a primary concern, as I will detail below
and other scholars have noted, was that those who were returning to their homes (in Pakistan)
would claim their properties which might have been occupied by refugees from India.
Importantly, in relation to Mr. Saha’s case, officials from the Ministry of Interior note that
the Evacuee Law was not yet operative in East Pakistan. They still feared, however, that any changes
in policy regarding migrant Hindus in East Pakistan would compel the government to extend similar
treatment to migrant Hindus in West Pakistan. On this point, the Deputy Secretary of Interior
finally accepted that while there was migration from East Pakistan during 1950 and 1951 following
communal disturbances, this migration could not be differentiated from the migration of Hindus
who left West Pakistan in 1947.50 The officials’ underlying fear was about the continual movement
across the border and the “insecurity” such movement would produce. But what did insecurity mean
in this context during this time?
The Interior Secretary argued that “The Evacuee Property Law in the West wing is the
principal incentive to Hindus to return to it. Quite apart from the possibility of our having to apply
the Evacuee Property law to East Pakistan (as a measure of retaliation), any relaxation of citizenship
policy in East Pakistan will have serious repercussions in West Pakistan where the return of any
appreciable number of Hindus would constitute a serious economic and security risk.”51 In this
manner, the question of who should legally constitute the population came to be imbricated with
notions of security, which were in turn intertwined with migration and, centrally, the question of
evacuee property. While the security threats posed by spies were used as a justification (by Pakistani
50 Joya Chatterji’s The Spoils of Partition: Bengal and India 1947-1967 (2007) shows how the displacement of population occurred in waves across the East Pakistan-India border, as there was no inter-state agreement on a definitive transfer of population. 51 Letter from the Deputy Secretary for the Secretary, Ministry of Interior, dated 10 April 1956. Serial No. 91, Citizenship Section, Ministry of Interior, NAP.
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state officials) for the passport system (Zamindar 2010, 181), the “security” concerns backing the
passport systems were closely tied to the fear of tensions and conflict around evacuee property.
Securitizing Citizenship
The meaning of “security,” as it was emerging in debates between government officials at this early
stage, was shaped by the issue of cross-border travel and the so-called “risk” that state officials saw
returning refugees posing to the new country’s social and political order—a risk not just in relation
to espionage but also for the precariously balanced situation concerning evacuee property. The
above-referenced Nehru-Liaqat Act, signed on April 8, 1950 between the two prime ministers of
India and Pakistan, was intended to safeguard the rights of minorities in each country, to reverse the
displacements that minorities had suffered after the violence of 1947 and thus to “settle” religious
minorities where they were (Zamindar 2007, 167). The logic of this Act was that if Muslim rights
were secure in India, then they had no reason to come to Pakistan, thus effectively stemming the
flow of migrants. Consequently, this Act allowed Pakistan to officially close the border at
Khokhrapar after May 1950. While the Nehru-Liaqat Act was supposed to facilitate the freedom of
movement for minorities, the institution of the passport system between the two countries two years
later, to a large extent, restricted this movement again, as the discussion of the Pakistan Control of
Entry Bill will demonstrate below.
The Pakistan Control of Entry Bill was proposed in 1952 “to make better provision for
controlling the entry of Indian citizens into Pakistan.”52 Given that the India-Pakistan passport
system was already in place at this point, this Act was aimed to enforce a decision that had already
been bilaterally agreed upon between India and Pakistan. Still, the Bill provoked controversy in the
Constituent Assembly in Pakistan and, importantly for the purpose of this chapter, the discussion
52 Pakistan Control of Entry Bill, Constituent Assembly Debates, November 24, 1952.
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around the Bill reveals how securitization became the justification and came to mean controlling the
entry of “Indian citizens,” as they were referred to in the language of the legislation.
Here emerges, more concretely, the question of who was an insider to Pakistan and who was
an outsider. This question continually arose in discussions during the meeting of the Constituent
Assembly, not only in reference to the Bill but also in relation to the members of the Constituent
Assembly themselves. In particular, the question of whether a given Constituent Assembly
member’s position reflected who they were “really” supporting (India or Pakistan) was refracted
through the question of security, which some members argued that everybody (members of any
religious group) should be on board with.
For instance, Shri Dherendra Nath Dutta, a Hindu member of the Constituent assembly
from East Pakistan, began a passionate speech with details of the difficulties that the passport
system had already caused—ranging from cross-border kinship networks to missing cricket
matches—which the Control of Entry Act would only compound. In addition, Dutta pointed to the
important problems of trade and loss of revenue due to the difficulties of moving across the border
between East and West Bengal. In opposing the Control of Entry Bill, Dutta recognized that he had
opened himself up to the risk of being misunderstood. Towards the end of his speech, he stated “I
know it (my position) will be interpreted: ‘that is a propaganda, not for this House; this is a
propaganda not for the State of Pakistan, but it is a propaganda for outside.’” The “outside,” it is
safe to say in the context of discussing control over a border with India,53 referred to India.
Immediately in response, Ghyasuddin Pathan (Minister of State for Finance and
Parliamentary Affairs), who had proposed the Bill, quoted the Bengali saying “thakur ghare ka kola
khaina.” This saying refers to someone who is obviously guilty (specifically of stealing bananas from
53 Moreover, Dutta had already mentioned how Nehru was willing to scrap the passport agreement, and others during the Constituent Assembly debate also brought up the opposition to the passport system in India and that those who were opposing it were risking aligning themselves with India (Ibid., p. 621).
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the household shrine) but denies it even when caught red-handed. In short, Ghyasuddin Pathan
accused Dutta of being guilty of precisely that which he was denying, that is, partiality to India and
lack of loyalty to Pakistan.
Mafizzudin Ahmed, another member of the Constituent Assembly from East Pakistan,
doubled up these accusations against Dutta, arguing that Datta’s position aligned with those in India
and those who wanted “to bring into play chaos and confusion and disorder in the country which
would ultimately undermine the stability and solidarity of the State”54 Instead, Ahmed proposed that
the difficulties of the current system would be ironed out because “thousands of people from
beyond the border are coming. We do not know who are the persons… It was never intended that
this passport-cum-visa system was to stop travel; the only purpose of this system was to regulate
travels, so that the Government may know who are the persons who are coming and who are going
and for what purpose.”55
The interconnected issues of loyalty and security were thus foundational to how
documentary controls were evaluated in this bill. For instance, Mian Muhammad Iftikharuddin
argued that “nobody will differ with the Government, if a Bill like this is introduced to prevent the
entry of spies, foreign agents, and other undesirable elements into our country.” 56 At the same time,
he also argued that the problem of cross-border traffic and by extension of security could be
resolved if minorities in each country were provided adequate safeguards. Then the bill would be able
to serve its purpose, which was against spies and insecurity.57
54 Ibid., p. 619. 55 Ibid. 56 Mian Iftikharuddin was originally a member of the Indian National Congress, who joined the Muslim League in 1945, and was appointed the Minister of Rehabilitation for Refugees in Punjab. See “Remembering Mian Iftikharuddin,” Dawn News, December 8, 2012. 57 Pakistan Control of Entry Bill, Constituent Assembly Debates, November 1952, p. 610.
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Yet this logic of securitization was also questioned as a false justification. The debate of the
Control of Entry Bill included discussion of the Language Movement, a political movement that had
advocated for making Bengali the official language of East Pakistan. While some Constituent
Assembly members argued for increased regulations on the eastern border of Pakistan (between
East and West Bengal) because they claimed that the language riots had been provoked by those
who had crossed in from the Indian side, others like Babesh Chandra Nandy questioned this logic
and argued that the Control of Entry Bill, along with the passport regime, was in fact simply to
control migrants.58 In outlining this debate, I want to highlight how security was discursively
mobilized in ways that then embedded it into documentary controls through the Control of Entry
Bill, which criminalized entering Pakistan without the appropriate documents. The meaning that
security took on during this period was specifically in relation to the “chaos” caused by the
“troublemakers,” as mentioned by members of the Constituent Assembly in favor of the Bill, who
were presumed to be moving between India and Pakistan. It was their movement across the border
that made them troubling. The Control of Entry Bill provides additional insight into how such
documentary controls were crafted, at the level of legislation and policy, to contextualize the
workings of bureaucracy, which, as I have emphasized in earlier sections, are central to
understanding how these questions were worked out on a day-to-day basis.
Debates around the 1952 Control of Entry Bill paralleled, and indeed was connected to,
discussions by bureaucrats in the Ministries of Interior, Foreign Affairs and Law. When determining
the relationship between a document and its entitlement, government officials in the Ministry of
Interior, as well as the Ministry of Law, cited security reasons to justify refusing an individual a given
document.59 For those such as Yad Elahi, who crossed through Khokhrapar, officials referred to
58 Ibid., p. 627. 59 Letter from Deputy Secretary, Ministry of Law with subject “Prosecution under the Pakistan Control of Entry Act, 1952, dated 6 February 1956. Serial No. 80, Citizenship Section, Ministry of Interior, NAP.
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security concerns about the border as it was “fraught with danger possibilities and security risks.”60
Those officials also argued that an influx of bad characters and culprits out on bail were turning to
Pakistan as a means of escape. After the Citizenship Act had been passed in 1951, the Ministry of
Interior could assert that they were not “bound, legally or otherwise, to accept every applicant as our
citizen unless we are convinced that his presence in this country will not constitute any security
risk.”61
In fact, Yad Elahi’s file also contains a report of an Indian spy apprehended through the
Khokhrapar border.62 No mention of this individual exists in the correspondence between the
Ministry of Interior and Foreign Affairs as they debated Yad Elahi’s case. However, the presence of
the report suggests that it was used as proof of the security risks entailed in supposedly encouraging
movement across Khokhrapar.63 When the Ministry of Interior argued that they would treat each
citizenship case on its individual merit, they implied and occasionally explicitly stated the necessity of
assessing each case’s security risk. The Ministry of Interior emphasized screening every individual to
ensure that they had “no questionable antecedents and dark history.”64
Concerned bureaucrats in the Ministry of Interior were preoccupied with the entry of
migrants across the border, not only because of how the movement of migrants squared (or not)
with citizenship laws but also because they believed it would compromise Pakistan’s security. As
evidenced in the cases I discuss (Yad Elahi and Saha) as well as the Pakistan Control of Entry Bill,
60 Letter from Additional Secretary, Interior Ministry in reference to Ministry of F.A & C.R’s u/o dated 15 March 1956. Serial No. 80, Citizenship Section, Ministry of Interior, NAP. 61 Ibid. 62 Letter from G. Murtaza Esq, Assistant Director, Intelligence Bureau, Karachi, with subject “Rao Mehboob Ali, Suspected Indian Agent,” dated 30 July 1956. No. 49/44/54-Poll(I), Serial No. 80, Citizenship Section, Ministry of Interior, NAP. 63 The report from the Intelligence Bureau was more of a complaint as it stated that “apart from the legal difficulties in adopting such a course (externment), it is felt that externment will be no punishment for a man who was indulging in espionage. If such persons are allowed to return to their country scott-free. It would encourage others to come for the same purpose as they will feel assured that on being caught they will be able to go back home safely” (Ibid.). 64 Letter from Additional Secretary, Interior Ministry in reference to Ministry of F.A & C.R’s query, dated 15 March 1956. Serial No. 80, Citizenship Section, Ministry of Interior, NAP.
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security threats were perceived by Pakistani officials to be coming in from the other side of the
border during this formative period of Pakistani state formation. Thus, during this decisive period, a
new relationship was forged between documentary citizenship, securitization and cross-border
migration. While surveillance, espionage and security were doubtless colonial concerns (Bayly 1996;
Satia 2008; Chandavarkar 1998), particularly in relation to movement and mobility, such concerns
became increasingly connected to national borders in the immediate aftermath of Partition. As
Farhana Ibrahim describes in the context of the Indian side of the border between Sindh and Kutch,
“new contours of border management had to be put in place by the newly independent states of
India and Pakistan” (2019, 428). In turn, the question of border management initiated fresh debates
regarding whether to use local residents (with connections to relatives across the border) or recruit a
professionalized force. Those pushing the latter, such as the Chief Commissioner of Kutch (in
India), argued that locals would compromise national security not only because of their cross-border
kin networks but also because they were Muslims and their national loyalties were thus suspect.65
Accordingly, some ordinary residents were seen to be not trusted, as well as others mapping their
borderland citizenship onto concerns with securitization. Even as the border had been demarcated,
the loyalties of the residents of these border lands remained suspect. In a similar vein, while not
physically at the border, Pakistani bureaucrats negotiating identity documentation that would control
the flow of migrants from India had to engage these questions in light of new territorial, and
specifically national, configurations.
Ilana Feldman theorizes how the state practices of securitization generate ambiguity in the
lives of people who are subjected to these practices. She argues that some of the ambiguities in
security relations, which are also social and cultural relations, manifest in the blurriness of categories
that are frequently generated through “unstable geographies” (2019, 491). Crucially, as this chapter
65 Also see Pandey (1999).
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describes, these unstable geographies—in this case the partitioning of the Indian subcontinent—are
tied to the operations of national statecraft. Further, this chapter has brought into relief how
Pakistani state actors struggled to deal with unsettled categories in their day to day work. The
processes they used and precedence they deployed in order to settle categories, however
unsuccessfully, cannot be disentangled from the history of colonial rule. The colonial state not only
shaped what came after through its lasting impact on social and political life; it played a direct role in
drawing the boundaries that produced nation-states in South Asia.66 Accordingly, when we examine
the choices and decisions made by government officials during critical historical junctures—not only
in 1947 but repeatedly again in 1971—it becomes abundantly clear that many of these strategic
decisions re-inscribed (in)security in the lives of ordinary citizens.
Looking at the debates on the Control of Entry Act, as well as the broader discursive
landscape such discussions were a part of—including the Objectives Resolution where the rights of
minorities within Pakistan were the subject of heated debate (Asif 2020)—it is abundantly apparent
that the growing entrenchment of security was not the only possible response to historical events.
Rather, the decision to approach population and territory through the lens of “security” involved
specific political rationalizations, which were integrated with techniques of governance, to impact
not only those across the border but Pakistan’s own citizens. If the issue of citizenship was
imbricated within security concerns in relation to border crossings and the difficulty of marking
insiders in relation to outsiders, this relationship became increasingly complicated once applied to
those already within the territory. The second half of this chapter will focus on how, through
identification practices targeted at security within borders, a national population was continually made
and unmade. In other words, technologies of identification, which depend on the vitality of bodies
66 As David Gilmartin argues, it was Partition, more than independence, that “fixed the territorial definition of the nation-state” (1998, 1089).
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(quite literally, in that biometrics/fingerprints require a living body) and vital statistics (the
information these bodies produce), proved unable to steadily establish the population as a constant
demographic object. In dealing with the shifting nature of populations, in terms of both territory
and kin relations, bureaucrats and politicians struggled to deal with the question of citizenship, as it
was yet again unsettled during the 1970s.
A Second Partition?
The events of 1971—when the movement in East Pakistan against the policies of West Pakistan,
and its brutal repression by the Pakistani military, ultimately led to the creation of Bangladesh—can
be traced back to tensions between the two wings prevalent from the early days of Pakistan, and
some would argue Partition itself. As we saw above, the accusations that the Language Movement in
East Pakistan was supported by India and that demands for regional autonomy and Bengali
nationalism were anti-Pakistan can be traced back to the 1950s.67 Further, the creation of Bangladesh
was especially problematic for the Pakistani state, because it delegitimized its claims to being a
homeland for all Indian Muslims. In this sense, it brought into relief fractures, linguistic, cultural and
ultimately also political, which were perhaps there all along (Saikia 2014).
Naveeda Khan (2010) has pointed to how historians have tangentially addressed the events
of 1971 through a return to 1947, along with a deeper examination of the colonial period as the
formative period for Muslim identity. While the creation of a Muslim homeland was heralded as a
“win” for Indian Muslims, Partition also led to the division of the Indian Muslim community
(Gilmartin 1998). Ayesha Jalal’s The Sole Spokesman (1985) illuminates the tense relationship between
“Muslim identity,” which Jinnah leveraged as the foundation of the demand for Pakistan, and the
67 Member of Constituent Assembly Nur Ahmed alleged this during his discussion of the Pakistan Control of Entry Bill discussion, Pakistan Constituent Assembly Debates, November 1952 p. 630.
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local interests and experiences of Indian Muslims.68 Highlighting the tensions amongst Muslims,
particularly regionally and as they played out in relation to the demand for Pakistan, helps us frame
the events of Partition, the conflict over the structure of the Pakistani state and the issue of
citizenship entitlements after Pakistan was created, in order to apprehend, at least in part, why the
differences of Bengali Muslims in East Pakistan were difficult to resolve for the (West) Pakistani
state.69
Debates around Pakistan’s national origins have centered on whether the “idea” of Pakistan
was sufficiently imagined in territorial terms that dealt with the geographical complexities of creating
a Muslim homeland (Dhulipala 2015). The difficulty of territorializing Pakistan was not least due to
the fact that there was more support for Pakistan in the United Provinces (currently in India), which
given its geographical location, was not likely to become part of Pakistan—as opposed to the
territory that ended up constituting Pakistan, namely Punjab and the North-West Frontier
Provinces, where there was longstanding and vocal opposition to partition as well as the Muslim
League (Gilmartin 1988). This historiography demonstrates how regional dynamics amongst Indian
Muslims contributed to contradictions around what constituted a Muslim homeland and who was
entitled to it even after Pakistan was created. As this chapter demonstrates, the question of who
Pakistan was for as a Muslim homeland informed dilemmas for Pakistani officials issuing identity
documents as they navigated the complex process of refugee resettlement as well as minority claims.
In this vein, this historiographical strain lends itself to reading Pakistan’s difficulties as attributable to
the difficulty of territorializing an “idea.”
68 Jalal’s work has been criticized for its focus on elite politics as well as its instrumentalized view of Islam (Shaikh 1989). While Jalal does not account for how the Muslim League, and specifically Jinnah’s use of Muslim identity played out on the ground, she does provide necessary context for understanding the challenges faced by Pakistani bureaucrats in deciding who would inhabit the new Pakistan, given (as Jalal shows) that it was precisely the divisions between different kinds of Muslim identities (particularly regional ones) that led to Pakistan. 69 Bengali Muslims were continually othered and considered more Hindu than Muslim because of their language, among other things such as clothing and culture, which was seen to have drawn more from Sanskrit, associated with Hindus (Saikia 2014, 302).
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Even as it is clear that support for Pakistan was not, in large part, expressed in territorial
terms—in fact, that was the cause of much of the ambiguity in the Pakistan movement prior to
independence—David Gilmartin argues that for both Nehru and Jinnah, territoriality implied “a
particular notion of citizenship, rooted not in embedded community but in the relation of the
individual to the state” (Gilmartin 1998, 1089). However, this relationship had to be produced. As
we saw during discussions of the Control of Entry Bill, individuals’ loyalties were called upon in
relation to the security of the state. In addition, as the historiography on partition displacements has
amply demonstrated, such an individualized relationship did not neatly map onto existing and
embedded communities in the areas that ultimately constituted Pakistan. This was evidenced in the
conflict in Karachi between Sindhis and muhajirs from India reflected (Ansari 2005). Further, the
meaning of Pakistan and the structure of the nation-state remained contested and malleable (Khan
2012; Iqtidar 2011). One significant experiment in this regard took place in the form of Ayub
Khan’s two-unit policy, which divided East and West Pakistan into two units as opposed to multiple
provinces, effectively taking away East Pakistan’s political majority and contributing to the
resentment and disillusionment that led up to 1971.
While these historical factors emanating from Pakistan’s origins are useful for understanding
the historical continuities and resonances that informed the events of 1971, in many ways they
exacerbate the silence around 1971, its before and it's after, in Pakistan studies (Mookherjee 2019).
While these histories have also generated important and compelling insights into the “meaning” of
Pakistan and its contradictions, there is a paucity of scholarship that provides a way for
understanding the events of 1971 impacted socio-political dynamics in Pakistan, and the structure of
the state, particularly as it deeply entrenched a process of minoritization.70 One of my contentions in
70 My engagement with this period is an attempt to engage with how this period was in fact foundational, yet it is not nearly sufficient for the examination of this crucial period of Pakistani history, its relation to the past, and its implications for the present. In addition to the dearth of historiography and scholarship in general on this period,
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turning to the 1970s period is that political choices were made in the aftermath of Bangladesh’s
creation that shifted the Pakistani state’s focus towards its own citizens as the potential threat to be
reckoned with. Instead of seeing only the outside as a security threat, the state began to see the
inside as a threat, as well.
While internal and external concerns with security are both always at play at all times for all
nation-states, a central aim of this chapter is to describe how technologies of identity documentation
were reconfigured to focus on Pakistan’s own citizens in the 1970s. The implications of this,
particularly as the introduction of this registration scheme in the 1970s allowed NADRA to
ultimately come into being, are significant because they reflect an overwhelming concern with not
only separating insiders from outsiders but also potentially transforming insiders into outsiders. To
underscore: subjecting those who were already inside Pakistan to identification and furthermore, as I
will shortly discuss in more detail, by embedding securitized verification through kinship into this
identification process, meant recasting the status of those who had already considered themselves—
and the state had also already considered—established as citizens. In this mode, building upon the
line of inquiry in Chapter Three, identification technologies during this period generated a quality of
indeterminacy through the very element of re-verifying individual and citizen identity.
This claim comes with a few caveats. First, documentary technology, even when it was
focused on managing the flow of migrants across the border, also worked as an “internal border
making device” (Zamindar 2007, 128), especially to deter the original owners of evacuee property
who could return and claim their properties. Second, as the discussion of the Control of Entry Act
revealed when the “Language Riots” in East Pakistan became a cause of embarrassment to the
government as officials, such as State Bank employees also went on strike in support of the
researchers (myself included) also face significant difficulties accessing historical records for this period, as I explain in the introduction to this dissertation.
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Language Movement, the Pakistan government claimed the protests were “engineered by some
outsiders.”71 This represents a longstanding pattern of blaming so called outsiders for internal
dissent and discontent—one that continues until today.72
My point here is not to create a hard and fast line between internal and external security.
Instead, I want to underline how the aftermath of 1971 signals a technological shift in identification
protocols in the form of an unprecedented national identity registration scheme that explicitly
focused on identifying and tracking residents within Pakistan. As I will demonstrate in the rest of
this chapter, that the technology of the identity card worked to (in its affordances and readiness) to
render insiders as always potentially outsiders. In particular, it was able to do this through
verification of identity through kinship relations. In short, the insider-outsider (to Pakistan) dynamic
remains but the Pakistani state was compelled to reckon with the fact that it had “lost” half the
country. Its primary problems were, hence, internal. While this shift presents itself discursively—in
particular in the notion that Bengals were always outsiders in terms of their Muslim identity (Saikia
2014), their consistent treacherous collaboration with India (Mookherjee 2019) and in the discourse
of government officials as I will shortly describe—the history of identity technology itself reveals the
implications of this shift to internal concerns more prominently than was perhaps even self-
consciously realized at the time.
Passing the National Registration Act and Internalizing Security
71 Nur Ahmed, member of the Constituent Assembly from East Bengal, claimed he did not originally did not support the passport regime. However, he changed his position when he learned that “there were some hands who were working from outside the border” and “that there was even a movement in West Bengal (in India) called “Pakistan chalo.” Pakistan Constituent Assembly Debates, November 1952, p. 630. 72 See Anne Stenersen, “The Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan’s Role in Attacks in Pakistan,” CTC Sentinel, July 2014, Vol 7, Issue 7.
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The creation of Bangladesh resulted in the largest planned mass migration in history (Datta 2011).
This event brought already unsettled questions of belonging—especially around the contradictions
of Pakistan as a Muslim homeland, as discussed above, which refused to incorporate all Muslim
migrants and refugees—to the fore yet again (Datta 2011). At the same time, this particular
territorial reconfiguration and mass migration also produced new kinds of problems for Pakistan.
The Pakistani government, under the newly formed democratic government of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto,
not only had to negotiate the presence and transfer of the Bengali population within West Pakistan,73
but it also had to develop an approach towards potentially disloyal subjects who might threaten the
country in the future.
The fact that West Pakistan did not reckon with the genocidal violence and sexual crimes
committed by the Pakistani military in 1971 (Mookherjee 2015; Saikia 2011), or importantly did not
apologize for these crimes, has had grave implications for not only relations with Bangladesh but
also for understanding Pakistan’s trajectory since this critical historical moment. As Nayanika
Mookherjee describes, in referring to the creation of Bangladesh as a wound that cannot be named,
“instead of an active forgetting, what exists in Pakistan then is a process of ‘apparent amnesia,’ or
what I refer to as a strong sense of remembering what not to narrate” (Mookherjee 2019, 214). Most
prominently, the nationalist narrative in Pakistan used the language of “betrayal” and
“dismemberment” to avoid responsibility for the war crimes committed and the arguably colonial
relationship between the western and eastern wings (Umar 1980).74 Further, rendering what
happened as treachery allowed the Pakistani military, with support from the democratic government
of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, to actively and openly continue eliminating dissent (importantly in
73 Datta (2011) describes how Bhutto used this population, particularly civil servants, to bargain for the release of prisoners of war. In addition, the government devised ways to avoid repatriating the Urdu-speaking/Bihari population in Bangladesh. 74 As evidenced in the very title of General Niazi’s book The Betrayal of East Pakistan (1998).
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Balochistan at the time) and address its militarized approach and securitization measures inwards in
ways that continue to be exclusionary towards Pakistan’s own citizens.75
Nausheen Anwar (2013) describes how the process of determining who belongs to Pakistan
and who does not did not conclude in the decade of the 1970s with the population exchange
between Bangladesh and Pakistan. Rather, Muslim migrants such as Rohingya and Bengali continued
to migrate to Pakistan and, further, they continue to be excluded. While there was a liberal policy
adopted towards Muslim migrants during Zia’s dictatorship, the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP)
governments sought to control this migration stream, especially given that the demographic balance
of Sindh (the PPP’s stronghold) was in jeopardy. Furthermore, since 2002, all Bengali speakers have
been treated as prima facie non-citizens and were asked (along with Afghan refugees) to register
with the National Alien Registration Authority (NARA).76 Anwar argues that Bengali and Rohingya
communities, who had already been deemed illegal and dangerous in existing discourse prior to
9/11, were then incorporated as profound threats to internal security when preoccupations about
terrorist activity within Pakistan heightened. According to Anwar, Bengali and Rohingya
communities came to constitute a threat in ways that signal how the territorial reconfiguration of
1971 had a deep impact on conceptions of internal security, which were ultimately layered onto a
post-9/11 discourse.
In comparison, the discussions around citizenship and the concerns around identity
documents demonstrate how the question of security during the earlier post-Partition period
emerged primarily in relation to external factors concerning the flow of migrants across the border
75 Needless to say, I recognize that this discussion is by no means sufficient for the reckoning that those of “Generation 1971” and others have called for, both on the level of political leadership in Pakistan as well as in terms of historical work. I only see the recognition of how this event fundamentally entrenched securitization and the process of producing “insider-outsiders” as one step in this process of recognizing, dually, the long lasting implications of the 1971 war and of avoiding responsibility for it. See Amjad, Shehzad. “We Owe an Apology.” In We Owe an Apology to Bangladesh, edited by Ahmad Salim, 13–17. Dhaka: Shahi a Prakash, 2012. 76 This is on the basis of Article 16-A, a result of the 1978 amendment to the Pakistan Citizenship Act, which will be discussed in more detail below in relation to the National Registration Act.
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into Pakistan. The creation of Bangladesh significantly transformed such a conception. After 1971,
the potential of an enemy that was already within, who had not crossed any borders but had always
been there, became a reality that was reflected in the decisions of the West Pakistan bureaucracy, as
well as in the discussions of legislators and newly elected members of parliament as a rationale for
making laws and passing acts in the National Assembly. Specifically, security—as an internal
problem—was a central preoccupation for passing the National Registration Act.
The objects of identity registration for the government at the time were in part also to
provide statistical data, to facilitate identification during voting and for evidence in court, to facilitate
birth and death registration, to catch criminals and “provide general security in the country.”77 With
respect to the question of security, in discussions about the National Registration Act in the
National Assembly on July 7, 1973, those parliamentarians in favor of passing the Act, as I will detail
below, cited issues of internal insecurity as one of the primary reasons behind the identity card
scheme.
Sardar Inayat-ur-Rahman Khan Abbasi, a close aide of the former military dictator General
Ayub Khan, argued that there was a large group of people in the country who were “destructive”
(takhrib-pasand), and that this number was only growing.78 He referred to these people as “Ajmal
Khattaks,” a member of the National Awami Party (NAP) who was in self-imposed exile in Kabul
because he was wanted by the Federal Security Force as part of the crackdown on NAP by the
Bhutto government. During this time, Ajmal Khattak, a politician and Pashtun poet, was closely
associated with the Pakhtunistan movement (Caron 2006), which was a movement that sought to
create a territory combining the Pashtun-majority regions in both Afghanistan and Pakistan. Abbasi
reasoned that the only way to identify (shanakht) such persons was through a registration scheme. To
77 Abdul Qaiyum Khan, motion for National Registration Bill 1973, Legislative Assembly Debate, July 7, 1973, National Assembly of Pakistan. 78 Legislative Assembly Debate, July 7, 1973, National Assembly of Pakistan.
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justify this process, he claimed “there is no country in the world whose people, in the form of
groups or individuals, can take steps that are anti-state. But we have seen that day, given that which
has happened to us. Or that which is going to happen to us. Or that which is already happening to
us.”79 It was this set of past, present and future treasons that led Abbasi to say, in unequivocal terms,
that there is no outsider (ghair) who has a hand in this; rather, these ills were caused by insiders and
“our own” (apnay).80 While making exceptions for mothers and sisters who are in purdah,81 Abbasi
argued that registering all Pakistani citizens would be the only way to identify the trouble-makers
within the country.
In a similar vein, when addressing the assembly, Syed Abbas Hussein Gardezi argued that
the Pakistan “was going through a dangerous era,”82 and that this must not be seen as an ordinary
time. He urged the assembly to take account of the country’s exceptional circumstances during this
moment. As the rest of his speech reflects, as well as the following National Assembly session, the
sense of crisis has been brought on by the “dismemberment”83 of the country through the creation
of Bangladesh. While he argued that Pakistan must launch the national identity card scheme to deal
with both internal and external threats, in his justification he claimed that an identity card would
allow the government to distinguish between those who are useful (mufeed) for the country and those
who are enemies of the country.84 He proceeded to liken the registration scheme to a spider’s web,
explicitly detailing that the purpose of said web is to catch moths and flies. At the same time, such a
scheme, he reasoned, would allow for the government to catch the actual culprits and thus also
provide some sense of justice to the people. “Through this identity card we can protect the country
79 Ibid. 80 Ibid. 81 Ibid. 82 Ibid. 83 Ibid. 84 Ibid.
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for our country has a wide and porous border the enemy is embedded within the border. Those who
sabotage us are our enemies. Through the identity card, we will get to know those who are our
enemies and get help from those who are our friends.”85
The moment of crisis, in the wake of Bangladesh’s creation and by extension an additional
“enemy” to account for both external and potentially internal to the territory—as the reference to
Ajmal Khattak demonstrates—was used to rationalize the urgency of the identity card. The
emphasis on the urgency is partly also in response to the objections raised by other members of the
National Assembly who argued that the government had pushed this scheme forward without
adequate debate and discussion. Moreover, the Ministry of Interior had started implementation
without getting the requisite approval from legislators. Others, such as Rao Khurshid Ali Khan of
the People’s Party, were also concerned that the kind of statistical information that the government
would get from such a project is mostly already available through the census, and so this expensive
exercise would be mere duplication.86
A parliamentarian from Balochistan, Dr. Abdul Hai Baloch’s, remarks reflect awareness of
such motivations. He argues that such an experiment had never been tried before, perhaps for the
reason that a country such as Pakistan was facing far more urgent problems such as illiteracy and
hunger. “How would people who have never seen a railway station keep an identity card on them at
all times? What will they even consider an identity card?”87 Dr. Baloch openly stated that the
government was moving the country towards a prison, and disturbing “political people.”88
Otherwise, he questioned, why else would identification be necessary otherwise? Abdul Hai Baloch
was a parliamentarian affiliated with the National Awami Party and with a constituency from
85 Ibid. 86 Ibid. 87 Ibid. 88 Ibid.
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Balochistan where Bhutto, at the time, had launched a military operation in 1973 to suppress a
nationalist movement. Baloch’s arguments come closest to refuting the security logic of identity
registration by calling them out as targeting particular kinds of political persons. However, his
comments did not explicitly address the problem of security. In fact, he brought up the issue of
whether receiving rations would become contingent on having an identity card. He was reassured by
the Interior Minister that this would not be the case. The fact that the identity registration scheme
was explicitly delinked from rations reveals how the purpose of identification, even in its original
form, was not so a modern state could provide services and entitlements, particularly welfare, to its
people but ultimately about security.89 Others too obliquely refer to the registration scheme as a
“controversial matter,”90 but only request more time for deliberation, demonstrating the ubiquitous
acceptance of an increasingly pervasive security logic in the wake of Bangladesh’s formation.
Identifying Insider-Outsiders
Such security concerns emerged in the wake of territorial reconfiguration after the creation of
Bangladesh but became increasingly urgent for the government, as shown above, to the ongoing
resistance movements in Balochistan and the North-West Frontier Province. The creation of
Bangladesh and the unrest that led up to it, particularly in the context of the student movement,
started in West Pakistan (Gordon College in Rawalpindi to be precise) and explicitly targeted Ayub
Khan's regime, calling for a fundamental transformation in rule (Raghavan 2013). Moreover, after
the 1970 election and before the war in 1971, the smaller West Pakistan parties—including the
Jamaat-e-Islami and the National Awami Party (Wali Khan faction)—came out in support of Mujib-
89 As Sriraman (2018) has shown, in the case of India, ration cards themselves served as forms of ID in the absence of a robust and centralized identity registration system. 90 Maulvi Mufti Mehmood and Rao Khurshid Ali, in particular, take this position. Legislative Assembly Debate, July 7, 1973, National Assembly of Pakistan, p. 2655-2666.
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ur-Rehman.91 In this context, while Bhutto had the support of the military at this time, there was
significant opposition that only heightened after 1971. Moreover, as evidenced by the National
Assembly debates reveal, the concerns about militant movements that would jeopardize Pakistan’s
integrity even further were heightened. In short, there was substantial anti-establishment sentiment
and political organization within West Pakistan which the civilian-military establishment had to
return to after the creation of Bangladesh. The preoccupation with securing so called “peripheral”
regions internal to Pakistan was inseparable from external threats and border concerns. One place
where concerns about internal and external security overlapped was in relation to the preoccupation
about “foreigners” being issued identity cards. Yet, all of these so-called foreigners were already
within Pakistani territory.
In 1976, a few years after the identity card scheme had been launched, a summary report of
concrete proposals to address the problem of foreign nationals acquiring Pakistani identity cards was
sent to the cabinet by the Census and Registration Organization.92 While the report was written by
the Census and Registration Organization, the original reports, that foreigners were acquiring
identity cards, were received from intelligence sources.93 The proposal from the Registrar General
sought to address this problem by asking all suspected foreign nationals “settled” in Pakistan to
obtain Citizenship certificates.94 Two main groups were identified: nomadic Hindu communities in
Tharparkar and Afghans in the North-West Frontier Province, as well as parts of Balochistan. While
all applications from Hindu applicants were originally sent to respective police departments in Sindh
for verification (and ultimately to the registration staff directly to avoid delays in this process), the
Afghan question remained open and under discussion. This discussion revealed that it was unclear
91 Raghavan (2013). Also see Toor (2011), Umar (2004) and Ali (2015). 92 Summary for the Cabinet from Census and Registration Organization (Interior Division), “Report on Problem of Issuance of Identity Cards to Foreigners,” dated 17 April 1976. No. ID/5/3/76-Regn(T.I), Secret, NDC. 93 Ibid. 94 Ibid.
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whether all Afghans could even be characterized as foreigners. Moreover, while the citizenship
certificate is referenced here as a means to offer more clarity, the “foreigners” at question here are
already settled in Pakistan and do not seem to have crossed any borders any time recently.
As Chapter Two described, for NADRA, Afghans emerge in the database as “family
intruders,” intruding into Pakistani Pashtuns in NADRA’s familial networks. In turn, as illustrated in
Chapter Three, Pakistani Pashtuns end up “blocked” by NADRA because of their perceived and
lived interconnections with Afghans. In the present, the figure of the Afghan is an undifferentiated
category and primarily a refugee. During the early- to mid-1970s, and prior to the Afghan-Soviet
war, Afghans residing in Pakistan were recognized as an internally differentiated group who would
be apprehended by the identity registration scheme accordingly. For instance, the summary report
identified four kinds of Afghans. First, those who had properties and businesses, even prior to
independence. Some in this group may also have had naturalization certificates and their names
appeared in electoral rolls. However, this group did not possess citizenship certificates. The second
category consisted of those who arrived after 1947, many of whom owned immovable property but
did not have naturalization or citizenship certificates. This group did show up in the electoral rolls.
The third category was very recent arrivals (just a few years prior to 1976) who did not possess
naturalization or citizenship certificates. The last category included “infiltrators” and the nomadic
group Powindas who “cross and re-cross the frontiers frequently but are not apprehended.”95
Importantly, the Registrar General noted the Interior Minister’s recommendation that Afghan
nationals, whose “names are in voters lists and their children are attending schools, should be
precluded from the category of suspected as foreign nationals and should therefore not be forced to
obtain citizenship certificates. These people are Pakistani nationals, to undo this will create
95 Ibid.
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unnecessary resentment.”96
This exemption shows that the government’s concern about foreign nationals acquiring
identity cards did not assign the quality of foreignness equally. The mention of “unnecessary
resentment” here implies an awareness about changing political circumstances. When General Sardar
Mohammad Daud Khan came into power in Afghanistan in 1973, overthrowing the monarchy of
Zahir Shah, Intelligence Agencies in Pakistan expressed their concern to Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto,
terming Daud Khan a “rabid Pakhtunistani” likely to instigate existing Pashtun nationalist and
communist elements in Pakistan.97 Intelligence officials here expressed concern about an external,
regional shift, however, the underlying preoccupation was in relation to the already existing dissident
elements that could turn militant inside Pakistan. The intelligence report identified the following
wide-ranging set of individuals, groups and entities as the primary source of concern: Soviet Russia,
the Afghan Government, “Pathans of Balochistan,” National Awami Party “extremist stalwarts,”
and Niaz Ali Khan, the nephew of Faqir of Ipi who had led an insurrection against the colonial state
in Waziristan and was active in “anti-state” activities.98 Pakistani Intelligence Agencies argued that
“alone these elements would have limited nuisance value but with the support of the Government
of Afghanistan they could create trouble for us. These elements could therefore be expected to
exploit the situation should we fail to successfully counter subversive activities by Pakhtunistani
elements with the support of Afghanistan in the tribal areas as well as the settled district of both
NWFP and Balochistan.”99 In response, the report recommends that instead of further antagonizing
these groups, while keeping a close eye on any subversive activity and identifying trouble makers,
96 Office Memorandum from Brig. Abdul Latif, Registrar General and Ex-Officio Joint Secretary, Census & Registration Organization (Interior Division), 2 June 1976. No. ID/5/12/76-Regn(T.1), NDC. 97 Intelligence Report from Brigadier Mahmud Jan, SQA, Additional Secretary to Cabinet Division. 26, July 1973. No. 352/45/72. NDC, p. 1. 98 Ibid., p. 3. 99 Ibid., p. 5.
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frontier tribesmen should be provided with employment through a fixed quota in government
services and public sector jobs by assigning funds to building roads in remote areas of Balochistan
such as Marri, Bugti and Kalat. This would “ensure that the isolationist tendency in these areas is
effectively eradicated and their integration as Pakistanis accomplished.”100 In this way, concerns
about changes in Afghanistan led the Bhutto regime (under the recommendations of the Intelligence
Agencies) to take action to pacify populations in areas where the so-called Afghans were, in a similar
move, to avoid creating resentment and political foment. These events, in the lead up to the Afghan-
Soviet War, were crucial in who was considered a foreigner as opposed to a Pakistani national.
Moreover, what this means is that despite the passing of the Citizenship Law and the
procedure of acquiring citizenship certificates, as described during the first half of this chapter, the
question of who was a Pakistani national remained open and could apparently be determined by
criteria such as inclusion in voter lists. Earlier, during the period of the 1950s and early 1960s, we
saw how the Interior Ministry construed the border as the locus of control and citizenship as
something that must have limits. In addition, they deployed documentary technology (especially
passports) to stem the flow of refugees and to, at least attempt, designate some individuals not as
citizens. In contrast, during the 1970s—in the aftermath of Bangladesh and prior to the Afghan-
Soviet war—the Pakistani state maintained the ambiguous status of those so called “foreigners” who
were already within Pakistan. This choice was not borne out of benevolence or the decision to
ultimately extend citizenship to them. Rather, it appears to be a decision of political management
motivated by the desire to avoid “resentment” and potential unrest. This position, and the fear of
upsetting a group such as Afghans who had been residents of Pakistan for a substantial number of
years, is a function of the fact that these Afghans already had roots, networks, contacts and
connections in the country and thus had the capacity to cause trouble. This will be evidenced further
100 Ibid., p. 10.
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below in discussions of how such persons might have registered for the identity card in the first
place.
Further, the summary report submitted to the Cabinet explicitly states that “though the
presence of foreign nationals is a serious threat and risk to the national security…obtaining an
identity card through unfair means does not confer upon them the right to claim Pakistani
nationality and thus cannot change their national status.”101 While the Registration Act itself is clear
that only Pakistani citizens were entitled to the identity card, this report identifies a nuanced
position—or, put more bluntly, a loophole: only Pakistani citizens are entitled to the identity card,
but the card does not entitle citizenship. This discussion illuminates how the Pakistani security state
came into formation by not only closing and securing borders, such as at Khokhrapar, but
increasingly came to be preoccupied with security inside its borders. Moreover, the desire to maintain
a certain amount of indeterminacy—such as by not pressuring groups such as Afghans to acquire
citizenship certificates—was itself, as observed in the previous chapter on frontier spaces, a
significant technique of accumulating knowledge and extending control.
Such deliberate ambiguities stood in contrast to forms of legal control aimed at explicitly
signaling distinct entitlements and criteria of citizenship. Further, the timing of such clear legal
designations hint towards the purpose they served. While officials struggled with how to establish
citizenship during the early post-Partition period, they were directed at the goal of resolving
ambiguities. It is curious in this context, where security is explicitly under discussion in the 1970s,
that the amendment to the Pakistan Citizenship Act—outlining provisions for granting, or rather
limiting, citizenship to those who were trying to move to Pakistan from the newly created
Bangladesh—was not passed until March 1978. As mentioned above, the Bhutto regime had already
101 Summary for the Cabinet from the Census and Registration Organization (Interior Division), “Report on Problem of Issuance of Identity Cards to Foreigners,” dated 17 April 1976. No. ID/5/3/76-Regn(T.I), Secret, NDC.
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negotiated a transfer of population after 1971. Additionally, even as there were a number of Bengali
families who faced a hostile environment even as they chose to stay on in Pakistan in the aftermath
of Bangladesh’s creation,102 these individuals and families were not affected by the 1978 amendment.
So then what was the point of passing an amendment limiting Pakistani citizenship in 1978?
Turning to the specific clauses of the amendment, we see that it attempted to clarify who
lost or retained Pakistani citizenship according to the criteria of who was residing where (East
Pakistan or West Pakistan) at the time that war broke out on 16th December 1971.103 Those who
were residing in East Pakistan, or those who were in West Pakistan on that day but decided to
migrate to East Pakistan, would cease to be citizens of Pakistan. Whereas those who were in West
Pakistan, or those in East Pakistan who voluntarily came to Pakistan after that day with the approval
of the Federal Government, would continue to be citizens of Pakistan. In addition, the amendment
required that anyone domiciled (before 16th December 1971) in East Pakistan, even if they were
“under the protection of Pakistan passport,”104 would not be considered a Pakistani citizen unless
they applied for a citizenship certificate to the Federal Government. To underline this, the Pakistani
passport in this context could not determine Pakistani nationality, given that those now in
Bangladesh held the same passport from before 1971. Moreover, by 1978, the group this
amendment effectively excluded were Biharis (or “Urdu-speaking” non-Bengalis) who lost their
citizenship as a result of it.
When this amendment was passed in 1978, Pakistan had still not accepted a substantial
number of “non-Bengalis'' (or “Urdu-speaking”/Bihari) refugees stranded in Bangladesh. Zulfiqar
Ali Bhutto’s regime controlled the flow of people in the aftermath of the 1971 war through
102 See Alam (2001), “My agonizing days and dilemmas in Karachi.” In My story of 1971: throughout the holocaust that created Bangladesh, ed. Md. Anisur Rahman. Dhaka: Liberation War Museum, cited in Datta (2011). 103 Pakistan Citizenship (Amendment) Ordinance of 1978, Sec. 1(2) (1978), Gazette of Pakistan, 18 March 1978. 104 Ibid.
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diplomatic agreements, such as the 1973 Delhi Agreement, as well as tactics including the refusal to
use ships or trains for repatriation, instead relying on expensive flights. In contrast, General Zia’s
regime adopted a relatively liberal policy (Anwar 2013), as Zia had signed a trust agreement with the
organization Rabita Ai-Alam Al-Islami agreeing to resettle 250,000 non-Bengali/Bihari refugees.105 It
is likely that the 1978 citizenship amendment, passed during the second year of the Zia dictatorship,
was a means to settle the citizenship claims of Biharis and close the issue.
At the same time, the exchange of Biharis, who were supposed to arrive in Pakistan from
Bangladesh according to the population transfer agreement under Zia, never occurred. Yet, Biharis
continued to migrate to Pakistan through other means. The delay in passing such an amendment,
even in an attempt to close the issue of outstanding citizenship claims, also reveals that the Pakistani
state primarily dealt with the second mass migration in South Asia through yet another documentary
technology—namely the national identity card—as opposed to clear and unambiguous legal controls
on citizenship.
Building “Verification” into Identity Registration
The element of ambiguity (and contradiction) across both civilian and military regimes in relation to
the tacit or explicit acceptance of some foreigners but not all did not mean that the state was
uninterested in collecting information about the population. On the contrary, as the National
Assembly debates on the Registration Bill reflect, the ability to have identifying information about
the population within the country motivated the project from the outset. A few years later, as the
Census and Registration Organization reckoned with the fact that foreigners had acquired identity
cards, officials evaluated the problems with the registration procedure that may have caused this to
105 This never transpired, purportedly due to funding issues, which in turn did cast doubt on the sincerity of the Government of Pakistan’s intentions. See Sen (2000).
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happen and recommended changes. However, the extent to which these changes were implemented
remains unclear. Yet the recommendations reflect how and why verification procedures began to
rely on kinship and familial information.
There were a multitude of reasons leading to inaccuracies in the identification data collected,
which then allowed “foreigners” to register for identity cards. Initially, according to a report on this
issue, the plan was to carry out door to door registration and divide larger towns and cities into
smaller sectors.106 However, due to the delays this process was causing, the Minister for Interior
decided that everybody who applied should be given an identity card. This increased the applications
per month to 500,000 and made “physical verification” by registration staff impossible.107 In
addition, post offices were asked to distribute blank forms, receive the filled-in forms and then
forward them to registration offices. The report claims that the post office employees did not verify
the applications, and that Passport Agents and Stamp Vendors “started a business”108 by charging
money for falsely attesting applications and forging official stamps. This process, as whole,
generated many inaccuracies and under such circumstances, the Census and Registration
Organization admits: “it is quite possible that some foreigners might have managed to obtain the
Identity Cards by making false statements and furnishing wrong information.”109
The measures “to eradicate the evil”—to prevent foreigners from acquiring identity cards by
enhancing verification—first and foremost recommended direct profiling of the “suspect”
populations.110 As mentioned above, all applications from Hindus were sent to respective police
departments in Sindh and specific officials from the Special Police Establishment Peshawar and
106 Summary for the Cabinet from the Census and Registration Organization (Interior Division), “Report on Problem of Issuance of Identity Cards to Foreigners,” p. 2, dated 17 April 1976. No. ID/5/3/76-Regn(T.I), Secret, NDC. 107 Ibid. 108 Ibid. 109 Ibid. 110 Ibid.
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Balochistan were asked to “carry out the verification of Pathans all over the country.”111 In FATA,
political agents were asked to sign each application and this would “prevent Afghan nationals from
obtaining cards by posing themselves as tribals.”112
Along with this ethnic and religious profiling, which was referred to as “physical
verification,” changes were made to the registration technology itself in order to track discrepancies,
inaccuracies and corruption. Serial numbers were added to blank identity cards to link each card to
the registration staff who issued the card. Those who falsely attested identity cards would be
penalized through fines and arrests, and each identity card was also connected to the official who
attested it as a means to generate accountability. The Census and Registration Organization was
already aware that this would only solve the problem to a certain extent as it was known to them
that influential citizens and members of parliament had in fact attested the registration forms of
Afghan nationals. As a result, census officials suggested adding another column asking for the
applicants’ “mother tongue'' in the registration form as a means to gather more information for
adjudicating “doubtful cases.”113 As Chapter Two demonstrated, the use of mother tongue continues
to serve as a means to approximate ethnicity for NADRA.
At this stage, certain provisions involving the presence of and verification through familial
relations became more central to the verification process than ever before. While the forms for
identity registration prior to this moment already included information about family, specifically
parentage, now a restriction was imposed that either the “Head of Household” or another family
member must deposit the application form in person for any given individual.114 Thus, “the
tendering of a single application form was discontinued and allowed only in cases where the person
111 Ibid. 112 Ibid. 113 Ibid. 114 Office Memorandum from Brig. Abdul Latif, Registrar General and Ex-Officio Joint Secretary, Census & Registration Organization (Interior Division), 17 May 1976. No. ID/5/11/76-Regn(T.I), NDC
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was actually residing alone. This helped the registration staff a lot to segregate the doubtful cases and
reduce the chances of issuance of Identity Cards to foreign nationals.”115 Such verification
procedures deploying kinship reflect the notion (on part of the Registration Organization officials)
that individual identity would best be verified through familial links, indeed by situating the
individual within a kinship unit that was compiled at the level of the district registry. In particular,
for “doubtful cases,” kinship would verify the individual by connecting them to a Pakistani family. A
lone, isolated individual in this schema was more likely to be a foreigner than someone who had a
whole family in the registry. Such a mode of verification corresponds to NADRA’s protocols at
present, which also use kinship as the basis of identification.
While the desire to make data entry an electronic process through computer systems was
articulated by the Registration Organization officials from the early days of the organization—as will
be discussed shortly in the following section—the Registration Organization continued to use paper
forms for the registration system. There were two primary paper forms that had to be filled out,
likely by hand. Form A (Figure 4) had the applicant’s personal information, including address,
photograph and identification marks while Form B (Figure 5) was to be filled out by the head of the
household for all dependents. Form B included the bulk of information about kinship and
functioned as a list of family members who were the dependents of the head of household.
Importantly, it had to include all those who were occupying the same residence as the head of
household. Both forms were required for the application to be complete, and both had to be
attested by a government official.
115 Proposal (V), “Measures to Eradicate the Evil,” Summary for the Cabinet from the Census and Registration Organization (Interior Division), “Report on Problem of Issuance of Identity Cards to Foreigners,” p. 3, dated 17 April 1976. No. ID/5/3/76-Regn(T.I), Secret.
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Figure 12: Form A for ID Card Registration (source: NLP)
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Figure 13: Form B for ID Card Registration (source: NLP)
In my interviews with DGR officials, I learned that these forms corresponded to physical
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registers. The first register, referred to as RG1, consisted of personal bio-data such as one’s own
name, father’s name, address and date of birth. The second register, RG2, was based on family
composition. Every household member was thus recorded across these two registers. Those over 18
had their own personal form on the RG1, and under 18 persons were recorded through RG2. RG2
was constituted through the Form B, which ultimately came to be known as the B-form, ubiquitous
today and commonly used by most Pakistanis for basic needs such as enrolling children in school.
The B-form vertically lists all family members, starting with the parents and then listing all the
children. It needs to be regularly updated as new children are born into a family. This B-form
continues to be an important part of NADRA’s computerized registration process as it verifies the
link between parent and child upon which the entire digital ID card architecture is based. The
relevance of the B-form today, then, attests to more than just institutional and technological
continuity. It shows how kin ties continue to operate as one of the most significant ways of verifying
individual identity.
The Early Days of Computerization
In addition to using familial information as a means to verify identity, there is a recognition by both
officials within the Registration and Census Organization and the Cabinet Division that “the scheme
of registration would not work properly unless it was computerized.”116 In the aforementioned
report, the Minister of Interior claimed that computerized systems would prevent people from
having more than one identity card—that is, it would facilitate the process of de-duplication.
Through this they would be able to cross-check data between distinct district offices. Since the
organization only had funds to purchase an Intelligence Data Entry System, the Minister suggested
116 Cabinet Division Meeting Minutes, “Report on problem of Issuance of Identity Cards to Foreigners.” Case No. 88/12/76, NDC.
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that they hire computers from other government organizations. Once they had covered the total
population, they could purchase their own computers. DGR officials I spoke to—both of whom
had since retired and those had since been integrated into NADRA—mentioned that they had
started using data entry and computerized systems in a few pilot districts in the mid 1990s. One such
official, whom I will call Nadir, now worked as a personal assistant to a high-level NADRA official.
Nadir was originally recruited into a DGR’s pilot project’s “computer center” for a six-month
contract in the mid 1990s. He explained to me during an interview that when he joined DGR “most
of DGR was attempting data entry through a key punch operator. Our work in the pilot projects
was aimed at ‘computerizing’ this process properly. The manual identity card was originally hand-
written. So, we started with the identity card form itself, which used to be called RG 1. Basically, we
were doing what would be called a data entry job now. This was basic computerization. The B-form,
for all persons who were under 18, was also handwritten. The B-forms were in a separate register,
RG 2, and so we started computerizing those two eventually—just for the districts that were a part
of the pilot project.” Nadir ended up getting a permanent position at DGR and did this work for
about four to five years. By that time, in 2000, NADRA was created and DGR employees were
integrated into it. Nadir was quite young at the time and given his experience with data entry he was
retained at NADRA and was ultimately able to move into other administrative positions.
Here, we can observe the nascent form of registration procedures that ultimately lead to
NADRA. From the outset, government officials were looking to computer systems to resolve the
problem of centralization for de-duplication and verification. One of the central problems the
manual identity card system faced was that it was unique, insofar as it had a unique serial number,
but that serial number only worked on the district level. DGR had another register, called the RG3,
which was known as the “population register.” However, the scale of it was localized to the district
level. In other words, the population register was decentralized.
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The problem of decentralization is especially significant for considering migrant cases or
other large segments of the population such as married women. If such individuals stayed in the
same administrative area, their card number stayed the same but they were linked to a new head of
family. This was entered in the population register; it would be written in, saying there was now a
new head of household. If women (after marriage) or migrants moved to a different district, they
could make an entirely new card too—in which case the old card was cancelled, and the cancellation
was reported to the previous office. What prevented people who moved districts from making
multiple cards? Nothing, as far as I was able to ascertain. Thus, the communication between various
district offices, including for purposes of verification and cancellation would happen through letters.
Indeed, even NADRA had to continue to communicate with DGR offices through this medium.
DGR employees that I spoke to recognized the differences between NADRA’s digital
system and DGR’s (and earlier the Registration and Census Organization) “manual” approach. But
they also emphasized certain key similarities. Raja Qayyum, whom I met at a basement office that
DGR retained in Islamabad’s Blue Area, emphasized during our conversation similarities though the
technology of the card number itself. “The original identity card had an eleven-digit unique card
number which combined the individual’s date of birth, date of issuance, zonal code (denoting
district) and serial number. NADRA changed this number from eleven to thirteen digits, but the
zonal codes are still used.” Qayyum stressed that, of course, NADRA’s electronic data entry process
gave them an “edge” as they were able to update information such as level of education,
employment status and so on. However, he also emphasized, like Nadir, that DGR was already on
this. “What NADRA has done was inevitably going to happen… this is the path of technological
progress after all.”
Qayyum told me how DGR, in its own way, was also a path-breaking innovation for its time.
DGR responded to an immediate and urgent aim: to provide statistics at a time when the country
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was operating in “total darkness.” Qayyum explained that “the census took place every ten years,
and it could provide an estimation but was far from accurate and up-to-date data. It was impossible
to plan for the future when there was no sense of man-power—skilled or unskilled labor. Not to
mention, now that Pakistan had democracy, how would the electoral rolls be prepared?” Even in the
absence of computers, officials involved in identity registration—albeit in the face of an obstacle
(the case of foreigners acquiring identity cards)—conceptualized the registration system as distinct
from a simple census exercise.
The summary report on verification procedures discussed above aligns with Qayyum’s
perspective, as it too emphasized how the registration system was a “method of continuous
recording of selected information pertaining to each member of the resident population…thus the
data collected by this system needs updating at a regular interval of time.”117 The registration staff
hoped to achieve this by visiting each and every household. It was these policies directed at
“physical verification,”118 which NADRA built upon and then ultimately departed from, that
produced an information infrastructure that now compels citizens to come to NADRA offices, as
opposed to the other way around. At an earlier stage, however, the report recommended that since
door to door checking could involve contact with hostile and foreign elements, when registration
staff was carrying out verification, they should take a police escort along. In this way, not only was
verification tied to securitization early on but was itself also a securitized procedure.
Other than the importance of statistical information on the scale of national population—a
sentiment echoed in the National Assembly debates too—both Qayyum and Nadir explained that
DGR was set up in the aftermath of Bangladesh. Qayyum claimed that “registration was central to
117 Summary for the Cabinet from the Census and Registration Organization (Interior Division), “Report on Problem of Issuance of Identity Cards to Foreigners,” p. 5, dated 17 April 1976. No. ID/5/3/76-Regn(T.I), Secret, NDC. 118 Letter from Registrar General, Census & Registration Organization to the Chief Secretaries of the Governments of Punjab, Sindh, NWFP, Balochistan, the Azad Government of Jammu and Kashmir, and the Resident and Commissioner of the Northern Areas, 18 May 1976. 116.ID/11/7/Regn/76 (T.I), NDC.
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ensure “general security” in the country. The war with East Pakistan had just happened and, while
this was not the only reason, it was an important reason to identify who was a Pakistani.” Nadir too
suggested that “Pakistan needed to identify its own people after this second partition.”
Conclusion
The impetus for a nation-wide identity registration system was closely connected to concerns about
securitizing national territory in the aftermath of what was termed a “dismemberment,” a “second
partition,” and involved massive reconfiguration in terms of territory, administration and territory.
As the first half of this chapter focusing on the debates over the interconnected significance of
identity and travel documents during the 1950s demonstrated, the focus on securitizing citizenship
centered on incoming migration from the Indo-Pak border, specifically through Khokhrapar. The
second part of this chapter foregrounded a shift in the meaning and implication of “security” during
the decade of the 1970s. Alongside democratic rule and constitutional changes, governance
techniques such as identity registration for the whole population came to be connected in both
ideology and practice to the increasing hegemony of a preoccupation with security. Through
legislative debates as well as in bureaucratic concerns, we see how such concerns were heightened
during the first period of democratic rule under Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, as the civilian regime sought to
control dissident elements in both Balochistan and the North-West Frontier Province. As the
correspondences and reports urging for tightened verification procedures reveal, the fear of an
outsider who may now potentially be inside becomes increasingly entrenched. This explains the role
of strategic ambiguity in creating exclusions, particularly when it is not about turning away someone
at the border but about dealing with an internal outsider already embedded within a population,
within a territory.
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It is in this quest for internal security, which became more and more of a concern through
the 1970s, that NADRA and DGR are more similar than they are different. Further, despite their
technological differences, their similarities are telling. Their common motivation reveals the
increasing importance of verification for identification practices. In other words, the trajectory of
identification thus not only focused on strategies for establishing an individual's unique identity but
also authenticating their connection to a group. As this chapter demonstrates, during the formative
period of producing and stabilizing identity documents, as was the case in Vanraj and many others,
techniques of verification relied on determining individuals’ familial links. Further down the road,
DGR produced registration forms that would use the family as a source of verification, and even in
the case of migrants or students away from home they insisted on using the family as a source of
authenticating identity when it was suspect. This concern with verification came to a head during
NADRA’s identity re-verification program, intersecting with post-9/11 discourse around security
and terrorism. In turn, such concerns are layered onto the pre-existing contradictions that
persistently emerge as the Pakistani state attempts to distinguish between insiders and outsiders in
the wake of multiple territorial reconfigurations and the problems these reconfigurations produce
for securitizing what is supposed to be a Muslim homeland.
As a case in point, in 2017 an amendment to the Pakistan Citizenship Act of 1951 sought to
extend the right of citizenship to men married to Pakistani women. Senator Azam Khan Swati, who
moved the amendment, argued that given this right is available to foreign women married to
Pakistani men, not extending the same to foreign men married to Pakistani women was
discriminatory. In addition, he cited Islamic law as the grounds for why such a discrimination was
problematic.119 However, this amendment was dismissed by the Senate Standing Committee on
Interior Affairs. The Ministry of Interior differed in its opinion on account that such a legislative
119 In fact, in 2006 the Federal Shariat Court took a suo motu notice of this discrimination in the Citizenship Act.
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change would give “blanket cover to the influx of immigrants” and “may also be used by the hostile
country to ingress through marriages and set up an espionage network.”120 It is important to note
that this amendment followed in the wake of pressure from civil society groups and women’s rights
groups who brought attention to the fact that Pakistani women wedded to Afghan men, mostly
refugees residing in Pakistan, reported concern over increasing pressure from various government
departments, including police, to get Afghan refugees to return to Afghanistan.121 In this case, the
question of security took on a gendered element, where foreign men posed more of a security risk
than foreign women. In so doing, it reveals how the question of citizenship for the Pakistani state is
inextricably linked to the question of security.
This chapter has argued that the question of security (especially as it connected to identity
documents) was articulated in the context of internal territorial and nationalist struggles that took on
a distinct quality after 1947. In particular, identifying Pakistani citizens, already resident within the
territory, was a project that was articulated alongside security concerns. This project, directed at
uniquely identifying individuals and verifying their identity through kinship, is intertwined with
concerns that emerge in the wake of reterritorialization. In this vein, the following chapter aims to
show how the colonial state’s interests, even in attempting to manage the mobility and settlement of
its subjects, did not provoke them to uniquely identify individuals in the way the Pakistani state
ultimately did. While the colonial state used forms of ethnographic knowledge to distinguish
between castes and tribes at the level of groups, and this certainly played a key role in governance,
these forms of knowledge production did not overlap to a great extent with concerns with security,
unless it was in relation to criminal tribes and castes. Even at the frontier—spaces of competing
sovereignty—legal measures such as security bonds (Medhi 2020) were used as a means to guarantee
120 Report of the Senate Standing Committee on Interior and Narcotics Control on the issue “The Pakistan Citizenship (Amendment) Bill 2017” introduced by Senator Mohammad Azam Khan Swati on 13 March 2017, Report No. 18 p. 3. 121 “View from the Courtroom: Pakistan’s citizenship law in the limelight,” Dawn News, September 19, 2016
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good behavior. For these contracts, the colonial state primarily engaged with representatives of
groups, as opposed to binding each concerned individual to the contract itself.
This chapter examined how security came to be an “internal” concern: the problem shifted
from anxieties about imperial frontiers or the capacity to limit migrants or refugees crossing borders,
and instead became a problem that manifested from within. The trouble was already on the inside.
At the same time, even as the Pakistani state drew upon new practices and technologies—the most
significant of which were identity card registration and ultimately biometrics and databases—many
of the strategies they used, specifically for individuation, continued to rely on the documentation of
familial networks to authenticate and verify individuals. While this impetus to identify a unique
individual—beyond when the individual was crossing a border or a check post but instead when the
individual the state sought to identify was already within the territory—might have been new in
some ways it required the use of pre-existing tactics, tools and importantly, state infrastructures that
extend into the colonial period.
During one conversation about NADRA’s history, one NADRA official suggested “the
systems set up during the colonial era are the building blocks upon which we (Pakistanis) are able to
build our own systems.” Further, he asserted that what the British did was done well and with the
right intention (angrezon ne jo kaam kiya who sahi tha, sahi niyat ke saath kiya). Such perceptions and
discourses, admittedly tinged with nostalgic notions of an ordered and prosperous past, were curious
precisely because of the significant and marked differences in the practices of colonial and
postcolonial governance as they related to identification technology.122 Comparing how some
NADRA officials disparaged DGR, their direct predecessor, but looked further back to colonial
systems as foundational and even ideal, I began to reconsider how I understood the transformation
122 For one, the very scale of administration, from district (colonial and 1970s) to centralized (under NADRA), suggests a dramatically different ordering of identity registration.
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of identity registration over time. In particular, NADRA’s database architecture both relies upon and
departs from earlier governance strategies in ways that reveal that the register’s continued presence
not in spite of but through a mutually constituting engagement with the database form, which in turn
transforms its functions and material life. Across this chapter and Chapter Two, “Coding Kinship,”
I hope to have shown that the register does not disappear in biometric identification practices. It
takes on a new form—quite literally digitized as a scanned image, but also through subtle practices
that continue to shape ways to know and to record—especially through the practice of using related
persons as sources of verification. Here, I am not only making an argument for institutional
continuity between paper-based identity registration and databased forms. Rather, I want to
foreground how the register itself as well as practices of registration are incorporated into the
database—of course enabling it with different capacities.123 In addition, I question the significance of
the individual as the subject of biometric identification or in colonial technologies of governance.
Rather, I ask, how does the family, taken as a set of relations, enable or limit the state’s ability to
identify and locate the individual? Accordingly, the next chapter will turn to colonial registration, and
more broadly identification practice, to examine how and when nascent techniques of individuation
emerged, and to what extent they present a disjuncture or continuation from what we have observed
in this chapter.
123 As Chapter Two, “Coding Kinship” shows, the register is also reconstituted through its encounters with the database’s unique qualities, such as centralization, away from the locality of the district, and instant searchability.
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CHAPTER 5
The Individual in Colonial Registers
Classification, Identification and Registration in Colonial India
Introduction
My dada (grandfather), contrary to the other family patriarchs, usually looked the other way if a boy turned in poorly calligraphed work. Boys are human, after all. But if by mistake they entered, in place of So-and-So Muhammad Khan, son of So-and-So Muhammad Khan, the name of some other So-and-So Muhammad Khan, and Dada caught it, his wrath was sure to follow. The pens would practically be broken on the offender’s fingers. "You pig! What—you’re turning my grandfather of the purest pedigree into a bastard!" Back then, we couldn’t understand why Dada got so upset over this. All right, we’ll correct the mistake. What’s there to get so angry about? But now I guess I dimly understand the reason for the severity that characterized our people. Separated from its native land by thousands of miles and several centuries, so that it had nearly forgotten its own native tongue, this Pashtun clan was fighting a losing battle to preserve its lineage, at least on paper. (Khan 1998, 245)
Set in colonial India and originally published in Urdu in 1982, Asad Muhammad Khan’s short story,
Ma’i Dada (1998), is an autobiographical account of his family’s employee—a figure called Ma’i
Dada—who was a master of the family’s genealogy but whose own origins remained contested until
the end of his life. This story brings into focus how genealogies and the calculations they entail are
far from restricted to a hermetically sealed, domestic realm.
While Ma’i Dada was officially registered in “police papers, ration cards, state hospital
records, and finally in the register of the cemetery” (Khan 1998, 1) as Abdul Majid Khan Yusufzai—
a name signifying his Pashtun identity—the neighborhood launderers (dhobis) had spread rumors that
he was from the low Hindu caste of oil pressers (telis). Even as Ma’i Dada was not related by blood
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to the author’s family, he was considered an expert in matters concerning Pashtun identity or
Pashtuniyat.1 His insider status in the author’s Pashtun and Muslim family was firmly established. For
instance, he freely expresses outrage at the fact that since Pashtun children began to receive an
English education, they failed to commit even a single murder—an obvious sign of their
emasculation and degeneration. In this way, along with the use of the kin-term grandfather (dada) in
reference to him, he is kin even if not blood. Moreover, in moments like the one described at this
article’s beginning, when children were mandated by family elders to write hundreds of copies of the
clan’s genealogy, Ma’i Dada would step in and facilitate the learning of genealogies.
The urgency in Ma’i Dada’s commitment to the cultural integrity and genealogical knowledge
of the family was a product of their historical moment, suffused with concerns about the loss of
Muslim culture and, specifically, of Pashtun Muslims under colonialism. In this context, lineage and
genealogy acquire an urgent significance, as their very survival is at stake. Detailing the laborious and
repetitive process of producing genealogical texts, Khan’s story highlights the hyper-vigilance against
error amongst patriarchs, aimed at stabilizing and maintaining the genealogical connections required
for producing kin-based identity. In this way, the story of Ma’i Dada allows us to consider the
anxieties about slippage and legitimacy at the heart of genealogies in flesh, blood as well as in textual
form.
In particular, this story foregrounds how genealogies do not always and already exist,
untouched in the wild, ready to be picked up and put to use. They are constantly reshaped and
rendered by specific persons—genealogical experts, like Ma’i Dada—according to a set of both
immediate and historical conditions. In the case of the Mirzakhels mentioned above, Ma’i Dada, as
1 See Fredrik Barth (1965) and Akbar Ahmed (1976) for discussions on Pashtunwali, the “way of the Pashtuns” or tribal code of conduct.
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an insider-outsider figure, provides the labor of genealogical maintenance. In other cases, such an
outsider can be the state itself—making and thus recasting genealogical information.
As Engseng Ho (2006) and Andrew Shryock (1997) demonstrate, genealogies are far from
straightforward representations of lineal descent. Genealogies are difficult to stabilize even when
recorded, reproduced and in some cases standardized by colonial and postcolonial government
officials. For instance, Nadav Samin shows how a “genealogical rule of governance” was inaugurated
in Saudi Arabia through Aramco and British officials who had vested interests in using lineal descent
models of kinship to legitimize territorial incursions (Samin 2015, 176). With several modes and
motivations for reckoning kinship, the continual re-working and maintenance required by
genealogies places them at the heart of the contentious process of producing verifiable and reliable
descent-based identities. In particular, the strategic removals, additions and leakages involved in
tracing descent condition the possibilities and the limits of identification by the colonial and the
postcolonial state in South Asia.
The role of genealogical records in determining identity alerts us to the interconnections
between familial and governmental structures of authentication and even identification itself. The
place of kinship, and the registration of genealogical records in particular, has historically varied
across regional administrative systems in South Asia in ways that maps onto ethnic distinctions and,
crucially, the divergences as well as interconnections between unsettled or “tribal” and settled areas
in colonial South Asia and now postcolonial Pakistan. Further, the question of who is related to
who, or even what makes them related—in other words, kinship—is far more varied in social life
than what gets codified as kinship, and even more so as descent in the form of genealogical records.
Genealogical records serve a scaffolding function and seek to officialize that which is often slippery
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and contradictory in the realm of practice.2 Governments, especially a colonial state seeking
legitimation, thus lean on genealogical sources for the purpose of tracking, governing and
distinguishing between heterogeneous groups as well as discrete individuals. Thus, the case of Ma’i
Dada serves as an instructive point of departure for this chapter for foregrounding the historical
centrality of the insider-outsider for procedures of identification—from the Land Alienation Act to
the separation and maintenance of frontier as an ilaqa ghair, a spatial configuration that worked to
separate and “buffer” colonial territory. Here, customary law and its reliance on kinship and
genealogical records in particular operated as a means to identify who was within, and by extension,
also outside a given community and territory.
I was alerted to the significant role that genealogies played in state operations by a far less
amusing figure than Ma’i Dada, Pakistan’s former Interior Minister, Chaudhary Nisar Ali Khan. In a
2016 press conference, the Interior Minister announced that the National Database and Registration
Authority (NADRA), which produces Pakistan’s biometric-based national identity card, would be
“re-verifying” identity cards as part of a broad national security drive.3 The immediate reason behind
the 2016 press conference and the public announcement of a mass identity re-verification campaign
was an American drone strike that killed Afghan Taliban leader Mullah Mansoor. Mansoor, an
Afghan, was not only killed in Pakistan but was also found to be in possession of a NADRA identity
card and a Pakistani passport under the name Wali Ahmed, an incident that subsequently became a
source of considerable international embarrassment for Pakistan.4 In NADRA’s terms, this effort of
re-verifying identity cards was aimed at differentiating non-Pakistanis from Pakistanis. Chapter Two
and Chapter Three discussed how the figure of the “family intruder,” and by extension the integrity
2 See Schneider (1984) for a critique of kinship as consanguinity and genealogy as biological descent and Bouquet (1996) for a discussion of the “visual imperative” of genealogies. 3 “Nisar orders re-verification of 180 million Pakistani citizens,” Dawn News, May 25, 2016. 4 “Mullah Mansour: The trail of clues after Taliban leader's death,” BBC News, May 24, 2016.
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and authenticity of kin units, is central to NADRA’s databased functions that in turn have vast
implications for Pakistani Pashtuns. Relatedly, the Interior Minister reported at the press conference
that around 200,000 “fake” cards had been blocked. He recognized that some “genuine” Pakistani
citizens might be affected and that they would be given a chance to appeal their case through
NADRA. He listed documents that blocked card holders could show to prove their citizenship. One
of those documents was the shajarah-yi-nasab, a genealogical chart issued by the revenue department.
NADRA’s governance functions are directed at determining individual and citizen identity; it
does not assemble genealogies in the “deep” sense of tracing origins.5 NADRA’s database maps
kinship relations amongst the citizen population, drawing connections between generations that
have registered for the identity card since NADRA’s inauguration in 2000. For years prior, as
Chapter Four detailed, NADRA has a scanned, digital record of the paper-based “manual” identity
card registry set up in the 1970s that preceded NADRA. For ancestral connections prior to the
1970s, NADRA has to draw upon a much older genealogical record which primarily exists in
relation to land ownership present in the shajarah-yi-nasab. This document is readily drawn upon
through the already existing revenue department’s record.
NADRA’s turn to this older genealogical record should not surprise us. Genealogies,
particularly in their written form, often shape people’s sense of who they are (Evans-Pritchard 1969)
and, in turn, the states’ ability to identify them as such (Shryock 1997, 79). NADRA’s decision to
verify citizen’s identities based on the shajarah-yi nasab reveals that genealogical relations, and their
documentation and verification through instruments such as genealogical tables, have long been
5 In South Asia, there is a genre of genealogical texts that outline the origins of ethnic and genealogical communities, for example Niamutullah’s “The History of the Afghans” (1829), which was originally composed in Persian in the court of the Mughal emperor Jahangir and details the origins of the Afghans as well as chronicles the reign of two Afghan dynasties that ultimately led to the rise of the Mughal Empire. See Khoja (2020) for an account of the nuanced differences between Afghan genealogies and how they were deployed to make claims to kingship in eighteenth-century South Asia.
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under the purview of governments prior to the creation of NADRA. In particular, for collecting
long-standing genealogical connections, NADRA calls upon the documentation regimes of other
parts of the state whose administrative apparatus was in large part built by the colonial state in India.
The role of genealogical information in the core functions of the colonial state, including
revenue collection, informs how the postcolonial state identifies but not in entirely predictable ways.
In short, a longstanding relationship exists between not only genealogy and identity, but also
genealogical identity and structures of rule.6 In this chapter, I explore how the colonial state in South
Asia deployed genealogical records for its own purposes in order to trace how these practices
condition postcolonial capacities for claims to identity within NADRA’s database. As previous
chapters of this dissertation have demonstrated, the capacity to verify an identity in order to meet
the expectations of a securitized state continues to hinge, even in the age of biometric technology,
on the ability to evidence familial relatedness.
This dissertation has accounted for the use of kinship in a number of ways, at the level of
relational database structure as well as citizenship verification procedures both current and stemming
for the 1970s. Accordingly, this chapter investigates how kinship, and more specifically genealogical
records, became important to nascent individuation techniques during the colonial period. In so
doing, I argue that beyond the ideological function of genealogy—particularly for stabilizing social
structure through the application of customary law to Indian society—it also functionally enabled
identification on a daily basis in crucial governance operations such as revenue settlement. In other
words, one answer to a central question of this dissertation—why do processes of individuation rely
6 As Paul Dresch (1988) suggests, genealogy has long been tied to governance concerns. Dresch argues that this “stateless” society, namely tribal organization, was in fact a response to a growing state. Similarly, as I will describe later, in the Pashtun tribal areas, genealogies were crucial even as the colonial state saw these areas as outside the realm of governability.
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on relatedness—can be found in the colonial state’s use of information about kinship, especially in
relation to the management of property relations.
In addition, this focus on the domain of genealogical governance offers a way to reconsider
the domain of identification (away from bodily markings and classificatory instruments) and
investigate the colonial state’s interest and capacity for individuation as it emerged through internally
differentiated governance needs. The place of genealogical records, and the registration of these
records in particular, helps us situate the role of a set of other identification technologies in shaping
colonial and postcolonial governance—especially as many such technologies, as I will detail below,
either did not individuate or only did so partially. Ann Stoler cautions that we must be careful in
approaching the “connectivities joining colonial pasts to ‘postcolonial presents,’” and instead we
should follow the tenacious presence of “what people are left with” in the “material and social
afterlife of structures, sensibilities and things” (2013, 9). One such structure, which I would argue is
not a residue but is actively mobilized and reanimated, is kinship as a technology of identification.
However, given that histories of colonial identification have frequently turned to other significant
predecessors, this chapter will first examine the limitations of identification technologies such as
classificatory instruments (including most importantly the census), fingerprinting as a precursor of
biometrics and the collection of vital records. Subsequently, I will turn to the question of
registration, in general, and of genealogical records, more specifically, in order to discuss the
importance of the shajarah-yi-nasab and the role of kinship as information in the colonial period to
understand individuation as a process—that is, the ability to identify an individual within their
community.
The Absence of an Individuated Individual
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The British Empire, the great enumerator of things, spent considerable time and effort counting
people and creating social aggregates across colonial India (Dirks 2007; Ludden 1993; Prakash 1990).
Yet it never created a registry of individual identity across the general population in colonial India.
The pervasiveness of enumerative and classificatory practices that defined colonial governance was
not directed at the identification of particular individuals.7 This conspicuous disregard of individual
identification leads me to consider why the colonial government was seemingly uninterested in
identifying individuals in South Asia through identity registration technologies, including
fingerprinting, vital statistics registration. As I will illustrate below, the colonial state, especially at the
local level, was not driven by a desire to simply accumulate more information about its subjects.
Rather, the decision to identify individuals—or not—was rooted in the logistical concerns and needs
of specific, localized governance functions. In particular, the colonial state’s perception of their own
role in Indian society was informed by the idea that the Indian lacked individualism and was to be
governed by the logics of community life.
In contrast, unlike the colonial state’s focus on enumeration, post-Partition independent
nation states cited their own logistical concerns to develop individuating technologies directed at
both the mobility of populations (most prominently in the form of the India-Pakistan passport) and
at identifying their national populations. These concerns included welfare provisions, security issues
and hardening border regulations of conflicts among neighboring nations. While passports had
already emerged as a technology to manage mobility and the travel of imperial subjects (Torpey
2000; Singha 2013) in the aftermath of Partition, as the previous chapter demonstrated, the passport
became evidence of nationality (Zamindar 2007). Moreover, the postcolonial state was not only
7 As demographer Ravindran Gopinath describes how caste or communal groupings may have been perceived in both precolonial and colonial periods to be a satisfactory proxy for individual registration, resulting in very limited attempts at listing individuals (2012, 299-310). In short, there was no systematic means to identify individuals through individual names or identifying characteristics in these classificatory instruments..
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concerned with who crossed borders but also the alien-insider. The product of these concerns, in
Pakistan in particular, was the creation of a national registry of uniquely identified individuals and,
more recently, biometric based identity database in the form of NADRA. As Chapter Four
describes, the aftermath of the creation of Bangladesh saw Pakistan’s prime minister Zulfiqar Ali
Bhutto establish the Directorate General of Registration (DGR) in 1973. The DGR made the
country’s first national identity card, a techno-bureaucratic endeavor that was driven by Pakistan’s
motivation to distinguish the populations of “West Pakistan” from “East Pakistan” and to deal with
growing preoccupations (on the part of the government) about internal security threats. Three
decades later, NADRA began operations in 2000 by launching a multi-biometric (fingerprints, facial
and iris recognition) electronic identity card. Quickly thereafter, NADRA became a ubiquitous
presence in everyday Pakistani life. The technological and institutional nexuses that undergird
NADRA’s ubiquity were a result of governance priorities for securitized logistics that crystallized in
the aftermath of East Pakistan’s separation from Pakistan and were then reconfigured in post-9/11
Pakistan.
Scholars have argued that biometric identification in contemporary South Asia is a
continuation of colonial systems directed at classifying and thus “fixing” identity (Rao and Nair
2019; Appadurai 2019). Yet, I will illustrate that Pakistan’s current system for individual
identification is distinct from the likely historical suspects: the census and related practices of
enumeration, which classified people according to identity groups, in particular castes and tribes, did
not individuate them uniquely. NADRA is not layered neatly onto a colonial past. What NADRA
does draw upon in its colonial forbearer is the use of kinship for identifying individuals. In this vein,
the current system builds upon earlier registration regimes—particularly the registration of
documents and especially property deeds—weaving together practices and technologies for
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identifying individuals (often still as a function of their kin-based communities) in an uneven
fashion.
To underscore, the history of identification Pakistan can then only be partially understood
through a history of biometrics, that is, identification technologies directed at the individual body,
such as fingerprinting or anthropometry. Instead, investigating colonial registration protocols
highlights the role of local knowledge, kinship and genealogy, as well as the contingencies of colonial
governance, and thus sheds light on the localized operations of individual identification. During the
colonial era, these disparate modes of identification were not consolidated into a single, centralized
system. In other words, the identifiable individual remained ephemeral in the colonial period,
appearing briefly in distinct and disparate locations—be it as a fingerprint or a birth record. From
the vantage point of the present, histories of identification that collapse a history of identification
with the biometrically identified individual run the risk of reinforcing an ideal form of individuation.
As earlier chapters have ethnographically demonstrated, even a unique identity within a biometric-
based identity database is conditioned and produced through its network of relations. Thus, in
response, a history of identification that centers the partiality and limitation of all identification
technologies, past and present—especially with respect to the domain of kinship and genealogy and
its role in governance—challenges the notion of any individual as ever free of its identifying
relations. Furthermore, the colonial state’s interest in individuation was determined by its particular
governance techniques and requirements. In this vein, social aggregates such as caste or tribe may
have functioned as the proxy for individual identity (Gopinath 2012), but instruments of social
aggregation did not in fact produce a uniquely identifiable individual.
Instruments of Classification: The Individual as Category
The historical formation of individual identification in South Asia is distinct from the phenomena of
classification, especially as it has been approached through the colonial census. In general,
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classification has been central in South Asian historiography for the very reason that it provides
insight into the motivations and operations of colonial governance. The impetus to “classify,
categorize and bound the vast social world of India,” according to Bernard Cohn (1996, 5), aligned
within the epistemological demands of imperial rule. Categorizing and classifying both humans and
non-human entities such as plants, animals and land were considered central to the task of
governing.8 In particular, tax revenue assessment and collection led to inquiries into the history of
earlier Indian states and surveys of geographical and other natural features.9
Since the colonial government in India primarily followed the strategy of indirect rule, where
governance worked according to representatives of local communities, the act of describing local
communities through identity categories was essential. In many parts of colonial India, the colonial
taxation system operated by classifying and engaging with aggregates of individuals, as village bodies
(or communities of proprietors) were deemed collectively responsible for the payment of revenue.10
Determining the composition of those groups became key and the census—the ultimate
classificatory schema—was initially conducted in this context. During the earlier years of colonial
rule, these issues of land settlement and taxation remained the dominant colonial projects. The early
censuses (especially before 1870) reflected this concern in their pragmatic and localized treatment of
groups and were directed towards purposes of taxation, as opposed to the more encyclopedic nature
of the later All India Census conducted after the 1870s (Ludden 1988; Saumarez Smith 1985).
This more encyclopedic nature of colonial knowledge finally arrived via the notion of caste
as the key to “Indian mentality,” coming into effect relatively late in this colonial taxonomy
(Appadurai 1996, 127). In Castes of Mind, Nicholas Dirks (2001) argues that the Mutiny of 1857
fueled the British’s desire for more knowledge about India in order to prevent future uprisings.
8 See Neeladri Bhattacharya (2018) on colonial categories deployed for land tenure. 9 See Bernard Cohn (1996) on colonial modalities of knowledge. 10 I will discuss this in greater detail below, particularly in reference to Gilmartin (2015) and Rattigan (1915).
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According to Dirks, colonial ethnographers interpreted the category of “caste” as founded in
Brahmanical notions of purity and pollution. These conceptions were then consolidated and
strategically employed for purposes of the imperial state. As the colonial state began collecting more
and more data through classificatory instruments such as the census, previously dynamic and
internally differentiated identities became further reified into these colonial interpretations of caste.
Caste through the All India Census then became the key site of social classification (Pant 1987). In
this way, the census was not a passive instrument for data collection but, perhaps unintentionally,
hardened categories of identity in ways that Indians had not likely experienced or understood
before.11 Since the goal of British colonial rule in India was not to transform society away from its
original and authentic state but to preserve it according to native custom, the census was considered
necessary for not only knowing which communities occupied British Indian territories but also to
manage, regulate and rule them according to that knowledge.12
In “Number in the Colonial Imagination,” Arjun Appadurai (1996) argues that despite the
attention to the colonial state’s classificatory logic, the actual means by which this classification
operated—namely enumerative strategies—have been largely ignored in the historiography.
Enumeration thus enabled colonial officials to go forward with the trickier task of classification,
typifying the population on the basis of the numbers they had generated through their own
administrative information gathering procedures. In this text, Appadurai explains that enumeration
and quantification allowed for comparisons between places that may have otherwise seemed
11 See Bernard Cohn’s essay, “The Census, Social Structure and Objectification in South Asia” (1987). 12 Colonial rule transformed Indian society in any case, however, to what extent is a contested issue. Sumit Guha discusses the impact of the enumeration of identity in colonial regimes on how identities were “formed, felt and enacted” (2003, 148). Guha also considers the question of whether it was unique to the colonial or even modern state to enumerate and the implications there are significant continuities from the Mughal Empire, particularly in relation to the enumeration of group identities.
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incomprehensibly different, an epistemic redefinition of South Asia for purposes of colonial
governance.
This historiography shows why and how colonial classificatory schemas were central to
colonial rule. Through these historiographical contributions, we know how identity categories like
caste were reified through the census. Moreover, the census and classification practices were
mobilized into governance such as who could own land and, more broadly, into ideas about social
difference in Indian society, such as in notions such as that of martial races. However, even as this
literature delves into the creation of identity categories such as caste and tribe, these authors do not
detail the actual process of individual identification itself. Classification in colonial South Asia was
not only about identifying social units—that is, creating a category that fit a group. It also, more
significantly, involved identifying who belonged to them. For individuals to be grouped together,
and thus collectively classified according to an identity category, they did not just have to be
counted. They also had to be counted as belonging to that category. In this sense, classification
could not happen without a basic process of identification.
The nature of identification, as a formal process, in terms of its degree of accuracy and
verifiability in the context of the census was bound to be limited. For instance, individuals identified
during the census were recorded in an indexed form: “Y” person (by name) was defined as being
from “X” caste. The purpose of this indexicality was not to differentiate one individual from
another, but to group all individuals together under a given category (Dirks 2001). This process of
categorization required only a minimal form of identification to ascertain that a person belonged to
that category. It did not, though, treat or see individuals (in the same category) as unique and distinct
from one another. For instance, if the census counted a given person as a Hindu belonging to the teli
caste, there was no systematic means to verify that an individual person was indeed who they said
they were (or that an individual teli was named Ram). As explained above, the census’s task was to
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group entities together to make sense of them as a category. This practice of classification certainly
relied on identification in a minimal sense, but it did not refine identification as a technology that
would repeatedly ensure the verifiable nature of an individual identity. There was thus a functional
difference between the colonial uses of “identity”—through the enumeration and classification of
caste with exercises such as the census—and the historical development of technologies that could
individuate: to identify discrete individuals in a reliable and verifiable manner.
The Individual as Body
Colonial technologies of identification directed at unique bodily characteristics, such as
fingerprinting and photography, relied on the body as the source of individual identity. However, as
studies of these technologies show, using the body alone was not fully successful in tracking (or
repeatedly identifying) individuals. The lack of success, and indeed inability to scale up fingerprinting
in particular, was due to the absence of information management systems that could adequately
process and manage the data collected through fingerprinting or photography (Sengoopta 2003;
Pinney 1998).13
While the discovery of fingerprinting has been attributed to William Herschel, a magistrate in
colonial Bengal, the impact of his innovation was minimal in India. More precisely, this technology
was of limited use because there was little reliability in the systems used for organizing fingerprints,
making it close to impossible to match unidentified prints with those that were already on record—
for instance, in police archives (Singha 2000). It was thus exceedingly difficult to make effective use
of fingerprinting technology in India, even if a fingerprint was accurately recorded, in a widespread
13 Sengoopta (2003) describes the limits of fingerprinting in both colonial India and in Britain. In Britain, even with more photographs and exact descriptions, the policing system left much to be desired as judges and other officials in police departments expressed that what was truly needed was a means to classify and organize the records of habitual criminals, such as that, “as soon as the particulars of the personality of any prisoner (whether description, measurements, marks or photographs) are received, it may be possible to ascertain readily, and with certainty, whether his case is already in the register, and if so, who he is” (2003, 17). Such a system of information management and organization, however, was simply not available at the time.
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fashion. As Simon Cole cites Alphonse Bertillon, the French police officer who revolutionized the
use of biometrics in law enforcement, “the solution to the problem of judicial identification consists
less in the search for new characteristic elements of individuality than in the discovery of a method
of classification” (2002, 45).
Moreover, a method of classification that creates a system of organization that could enable
an easy match of fingerprints would also have had to incorporate a registry containing lists of
individual names along with their “particulars” (defined below) that could be matched against
individual fingerprints.14 Yet, the colonial state in India did not seriously consider such a mode of
identifying individuals (and, for this project, more importantly verifying their identity) as vital to its
function. This is evident first through the struggles of the colonial state to identify individuals owing
to how limited technologies of identification were.15
Radhika Singha describes that “though fingerprinting was specially meant for criminals of
unknown antecedents, its use in India was not so much to trace the unknown criminal as to extend
police power over groups of people who were already under suspicion” (Singha 2000, 188). In this
sense, fingerprinting continued rather than changed old routines of policing, where registers of local
badmashes and other “suspicious figures” were already in use. When considering the use of
identification technologies during the colonial period—photographs, fingerprints as well as
caste/tribe/kin based information (provincial collections of which were assembled for police
archives)—we should consider how these were directed towards certain portions of the population,
14 The meaning of classification is not the same as that of classification by caste in the All India Census. This census involved the categorization and enumeration of data under identity categories. Sengoopta is referring to a method of classification that would allow for fingerprints to be organized such that they could be matched to pre-existing records. 15 The reader might be wondering about the role of identity documents during the colonial period. As the previous chapter demonstrated, identity documents provide proof of identity but do not replace the function of registries, which serve to firstly authenticate the identity document and secondly, unlike passports or other travel documents are used across the population, not only for purposes of travel. See Sriraman (2018) and Singha (2013).
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whether they were deemed deviant or in need of closer surveillance due to another set of imperial
interests, such military personnel or indentured labor.16
The colonial state’s lack of concern with uniquely identified individuals is evidenced even
more clearly in discussions amongst colonial officials about whether to register vital records—birth,
marriage and death registration—in the late 19th century. Such a choice is surprising given that a
concerted initiative to register vital records would have been the perfect complement to
fingerprinting and photography for a robust identification regime in colonial India.
The registration of vital records generated “particulars,” such as date of birth, place of birth
and time of death, which would have allowed the colonial government, if they so choose, to verify
an individual through a particular piece of information that ostensibly only matched their unique
identity. Vital record registration would have served the function of individuating, as opposed to
solely identifying group identities. Discussions between colonial officials about passing the Births,
Marriages and Deaths Registration Act in 1886 reveal that the colonial state was already aware that
identifying individuals through their particular information (ostensibly unique to each individual) was
a practical possibility. Yet those same discussions also reveal that identifying individuals through
their vital records was not an urgent requirement for colonial rule. Instead, individual identification
was a step removed from how the colonial government perceived its administrative capacity and,
thus, its immediate role in colonial India. In the following section, I trace the implications of colonial
approaches towards registering vital records for how we understand the capacities of the colonial
16 Similarly, the grant of identity documents by the colonial government to Indians was also limited. They were issued primarily in the context of travel, such as for work or study. The compulsory passport regime was instituted by the Government of India in 1916, in the context of World War I (Singha 2013, 292). She suggests that the “international” form of the Indian passport must be examined against various geo-political and economic imperatives of the British empire. She points to the movement of military personnel, particularly in war-time, and the circulation of Indian labour to other colonies, particularly through indenture, as most significant in this regard (Singha 2013, 312). The compulsory passport regime did exempt Muslims traveling for the Hajj pilgrimage, who continued to travel on the “pilgrim passport” that had been created in 1882. This was because through the pilgrim passport, the British Empire gained legitimacy and authority to monitor access routes into Ottoman territory, which pilgrims were passing through (Singha 2013, 307).
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state, the nature of its knowledge production and ultimately its variegated impact in individuating
and reshaping Indian society.
Not So Vital: Registering the Individual in Colonial India
Colonial officials’ discussions around the registration of vital records, and whether or not to use
these records for both Indians and Europeans in India, were fraught with ambivalence and
divergence of opinions. The colonial state’s ambivalence shows us that there was no singular,
directed push to accumulate more information about Indian colonial subjects’ identity as a whole.17
Instead, the question of who to identify and how to do so remained a constant preoccupation, one
shaped by concerns about logistical capacity, efficacy and how the colonial state imagined its own
role in relation to Indian society.
The Births, Marriages and Deaths Registration Act was passed in 1886 and was restricted to
voluntary registration, presumably due to extant challenges by various colonial district
commissioners regarding its efficacy. The Act called for the establishment of general registry offices
across colonial India and the appointment of Registrars General for the purpose of registering
births, marriages and deaths. The Act applied to “members of every race, sect or tribe to which the
Indian Succession Act 1865 applies.”18 The purpose of passing the Act was primarily for maintaining
a record of the lives of British colonial officials in India, not necessarily its colonial subjects. This is
evidenced in the fact that firstly, the Act includes various kinds of marriages, such as those between
17 See Cohn (1996) for an account of the colonial state’s production of knowledge in various modalities, such as museological, ethnological, surveillance, enumerative, historiographic and so on. Cohn argues that the colonial regime was motivated to accumulate more knowledge so as to assert rational control over an otherwise chaotic and incomprehensible space. 18 The Indian Succession Act of 1865 “comprises the law of succession and inheritance generally applicable to all classes domiciled in British India, other than Hindu, Mohammaden and Buddhist, each of which portions of the population has laws of its own on the subject.” Stokes, Whitley. 1865. “The Indian Succession Act, 1865 (Act X of 1865) with a Commentary, and the Parsee Succession Act, 1865, Acts XII and XIII of 1855, and the Acts Relating to the Administrator General, with Notes.” Calcutta: R. C. Lepage, p.iii.
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Europeans in India and Christian Indians, but not Hindu or Muslim marriages.19 Secondly, by 1907,
the General Registrar’s Office in London requested information from the Registrar General in India
regarding marriages between persons of European descent in India.20 In the absence of an
appropriate record, the Office in London was deeply concerned about the state of vital record
registration and was appalled by the haphazard way in which the record was maintained: the paper
was of poor quality and entirely unsuitable for documents intended for permanent record.
In the lead up to the Act’s passage in 1885, there were already worries around the accuracy
and the potentially scarce amount of information that Registration Offices would be able to collect.
These worries, mostly among district commissioners, show how the colonial state did not consider
their own governance apparatus to have sufficient capacity for effectively registering vital records.
Such trepidation was also borne out of what the colonial government saw as their purpose in South
Asia, which was to govern Indian society according to its own customs. The colonial state
considered the Indian and European population in colonial India at the time to have distinct natures
and habits and attempted to modulate its relationship to these groups accordingly.
The opinions of the commissioners of Lucknow and Allahabad expressed little hope for vital
record registration due to the existence of other, non-state institutions already engaged in this work.
Specifically, they pointed out that the European community in India was accustomed to going to
their churches for similar kinds of information, and it would be difficult to change the habits and
trust patterns of these individuals. Accordingly, registration itself was not an exclusive governmental
function or purpose at this time in the 19th century colonial India. The Commissioner of Allahabad
noted that voluntary registration would be “labor thrown away,” as European and Eurasian
communities neglected to register births and deaths even in municipalities where registration was
19 As the mention of the Indian Succession Act of 1865 indicates, Hindu and Muslim marriages were governed under their own customary laws. 20 “Marriage and the Registration of Marriages in India,” 1907, IOR/L/PJ/6/809, File 1440 [BL].
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compulsory.21 It was also believed that Europeans in India were reluctant to even do that which was
obligated, let alone to comply with registration that was wholly voluntary. Colonial officials were also
ambivalent about whether they wanted to take this registration function away from churches and
were doubly doubtful that their own colonial governmental institutions were up to the registrative
task. In sum, all these discussions between officials reflect the limits of the colonial state’s capacity
and its lack of willingness to do bureaucratic work around what they saw as auxiliary to, or outside
of, their direct purpose and strategies of governing a colony: economic extraction, stability of
government and indirect rule.
Even as the Act was eventually passed, the debate and reluctance around this process reveals
that the colonial state, especially at the local level, was not driven by a desire to simply accumulate
more information. The registration of particulars, which would be useful for identifying specific
individuals, was not made mandatory or considered important enough by the colonial state to invest
sufficient resources in order to procure that information. Here we arrive at an important aspect of
colonial governance: it was not entirely possible nor valuable for colonial officials to identify specific
individuals and authenticate their individual identity—even when classifying them or building
knowledge about group identity may have been seen to be crucial.
Even if the colonial government was uninterested in collecting identifying information about
Europeans—as they are the primary subject of the discussion above—was it possible that the
colonial regime was more motivated to identify and track its Indian subjects? Discussions between
colonial officials show the opposite to be the case: colonial officials were not interested in gathering
information about Indians’ particulars, which certainly would have helped in identifying them as
individuals, because they did not see the Indian colonial subjects as ready for the task of vital
registration. Colonial officials expressed reluctance to register the vital records of Indians for “the
21 “Papers relating to the Births, Deaths and Marriages Bill,” 1885, File 1289, IOR/L/PJ/6/158 [BL], p. 25.
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want of proper evidence” in their cases.22 The premise of his reluctance was that Europeans, even
those back in Britain, lagged behind in the registration of their own particulars. This opinion
presumed that institutional practices of record keeping and registration would have to first develop
in the metropole in order to extend to the colony, even though it is clear that was not always the
case.23 Further, colonial officials argued that it was especially difficult to ascertain the accuracy of
information of Indians in India, and that it might logistically take too long to find the right
information to correct any recorded errors.24 This argument relied on an impressionistic, and even
racist, notion of Indians’ propensity towards inaccuracy (Chatterjee 2002; Bhabha 1994). Ultimately,
the development of practices for individual identification was obstructed by the colonial regime itself
due to uncertainties about their own ability to collect the right kind of particulars from Indians.
While colonial officials engaged the Indian as a subject of enumeration and classification in order to
produce an identifiable category of person (such as in the schema of castes), Indians had yet to
become ideal subjects of registration—that is, ideal for the goal of producing an identifiable
individual.25
The supposed inability of the colonial government to acquire accurate information from
their Indian subjects is also situated within the larger colonial debate regarding the role of Western
education and “habits” more generally in Indian society. Famously, Thomas Macaulay, Secretary to
the Board of Control of India during British rule, argued in his 1835 “Minute on Education” that
Indians would benefit from receiving European style education.26 The opposing view, in the vein of
Henry Maine’s thought, argued for keeping Indian society closest to its original, authentic state
22 Ibid., p. 8. 23 See Rabinow (1995) on experimentation in the colony. Further, in a context closer to the subject matter, Herschel developed fingerprinting technology in India, which was then used back in England. 24 “Errors Provision” in the Marriage, Births and Deaths Registration Bill of 1886, IOR/L/PJ/6/158, [BL]. 25 Projit Mukharji (2015), in his discussion of Mahlanobis’s profiloscope, shows how technologies of identification, including statistics and biometrics, came to be deployed not only by colonial officials but also anti-colonial nationalists. 26 Minute by the Hon'ble T. B. Macaulay, 2nd February 1835, Bureau of Education. Selections from Educational Records, Part I (1781-1839). Edited by H. Sharp. Calcutta: Superintendent, Government Printing, 1920.
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(Mehta 1999). According to this more conservative school of thought, British ways of living,
thinking and even governing to some extent (counter-intuitively enough) should not interfere with
native society. The question of how much of an effect British colonial rule was to have on Indian
society informed how the colonial state would identify, by means of classifying, recording and
registering the native population. If the Indian population could not produce trustworthy evidence
for such a system—due to a lack of education in European thought—then any system for identity
registration, no matter how elaborate or fine-tuned that system might be, was bound to fail when
confronted with inaccurate or even fraudulent documentation.
However, with a growing number of those Indians who were called “Macaulay’s children”
(Indians who were educated in English, applied for the Indian Civil Service and became colonial
officials themselves), the colonial government’s ability to record particulars about this kind of Indian
person was also increasing. For instance, the Commissioner of Lucknow, in the discussion on
extending vital statistics to the Indian population, believed that since vital record registration in India
was optional, it remained unclear why Indians themselves should be excluded from this process.
Many Indians, he argued, would be keen to register with the colonial government because it would
help them in their efforts to place their sons in government service. Further, the Legal
Remembrancer thought that Hindus and Muslims in large towns would be glad to register births and
deaths in their communities, perhaps even more than Europeans, because courts of law, educational
establishments and government officers often required clear proof of age which these religious
groups especially lacked.27 This type of an Indian subject was likely to be more willing to provide
their own information and had a greater incentive to register their birth, marriage and death records
with the colonial state. This kind of particular information, which would allow for an individual to
be identified, was not only useful for a colonial state that wanted to accumulate knowledge. It was
27 Papers relating to the Births, Deaths and Marriages Bill. 1885, IOR/L/PJ/6/158, File 1289 [BL], p. 25.
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also helpful for colonial subjects who hoped to participate in certain domains of governance—such
as the Indian Civil Service or even the courts, which required the identity of specific individuals.
In such a colonial context marked by diverging opinions about the role of the state and the
ideal future of Indian society under colonialism, close attention was paid to the differences—
particularly those in terms of honesty and trustworthiness—not only between Indian and European
society and norms but also between Indians themselves. This attention to differences was significant
in shaping the domain of identification and registration, as discussions about registration were
directly affected by an internally differentiated view of Indian society. According to this view, some
Indians may have adopted “European habits” even if they were not “technically” European.
Ultimately, the fact that these discussions explicitly mention the case of Indian civil servants shows
the role of those Indians implicated in the functions of the colonial state for the development of
governance mechanisms more generally. When Indians entered the domain of governing as opposed
to being governed, a slight shift in identification practices emerged: the colonial state began to
identify not just categories of Indians but now unique, individual Indian persons.28
As described above, while some officials doubted the colonial state’s ability to collect
information and evidentiary documents that were not full of errors and inaccuracies, other officials
saw the potential use of registering vital records for Indians, especially for those participating in a
professional capacity in colonial governance. These discussions between colonial officials also
suggest that requirements such as proof of age, marital relations or even domicile remained at the
time only at an incipient stage. We see these requirements during the late 1800s beginning to harden,
as presenting documents for proof of age became increasingly commonplace and routine, especially
as individual Indians moved away from their communities and into other parts of the British
28 This is not to say that categories become unimportant, as the continued use of scheduled castes and quotas shows this is obviously not the case. Rather, my question in this chapter focuses on when individual identity begins to become a priority and in what domains.
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empire.29 Individual identity, with its attached particulars such as age and place of birth, would now
be important for Indians’ ability to participate in various arms of the colonial state.
The colonial regimes’ ambivalence toward registering individuals’ particulars begins to make
sense if we situate that ambivalence within the logistical contexts of who the colonial state was
interested in identifying and why. Furthermore, the disagreements amongst colonial officials
demonstrated the lack of a singular, cohesive ideology of colonial governance that may have
motivated the state to collect more and more information about Indians at the local level. We
instead find a divergence of opinion in response to the question of collecting identifying
information. The instance of registering vital records shows how the practices for determining
individual identity were not the result of an intentional process on the part of the colonial state.
Instead, identification practices developed alongside changes in colonial administration more
generally at the time: for example, the requirement, as the Legal Remembrancer mentioned above, to
produce proof of age in court. Such contingent shifts in colonial policy shaped the dynamic kinds of
identification techniques that were deployed by the colonial state over time.
The above discussion describes how, by the late 1800s, the colonial regime had not yet
developed a rigorous system to identify individuals via registering their particulars. In the case of
colonial India, identification did not then serve a clear function of governance. On one hand, this
lack of clarity explains why the trajectory of individual identification in colonial India was stunted.
On the other hand, it leads me to ask: in what other governance context was identification
imperative in colonial India?
Histories of identification in both South Asia and elsewhere usually consider the practice of
identifying individuals within the context of specific technologies directed at the body or identity
29 This is evidenced in the controversy around the registration of Indians, including eventually women and children as well, in South Africa. This was famously protested and then eventually accepted by Gandhi, see Breckenridge (2011).
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documents (Cole 2002; Caplan and Torpey 2001; Singha 2000; Singha 2013). In the following
sections, I propose a move away from the locus of individual identity in the form of documents and
bodily technologies such as fingerprinting or in the form of registering individual identity through
vital records. Instead, I hope to show, we find a set of ubiquitous techniques for the process of
establishing, recording and retrieving individual identity in the domain of registration. The domain
of registration I turn to is not solely connected to the registration of individuals but of documents
relating to other significant functions of governance, particularly property relations and revenue
collection. The registration of documents was in fact already imbricated with the act of
identification. Looking at the techniques for identification in this domain illustrates how the colonial
regime in India managed the tricky task of determining identity in the absence of something like an
identity registry or even an identity card system.
Relatedly, the story of William Herschel’s accidental discovery of fingerprinting takes place
in the context of registering contracts. Herschel was specifically responding to the notion that
Indians were prone to fraudulent activity—and thus were likely to go back on their word (Singha
2000). Even when both parties could write and sign their names, Herschel wished to use fingerprints
so these presumably cunning Indians would find it more difficult to renege on a signature. Yet for
the colonial state, the registration of a signed contract could never be enough: it did “not secure
absolute proof of identity of the person charged with the breach of contract with the person who
signed the document” (Sengoopta 2003, 72). As fingerprinting was supposed to prevent
impersonation at the time of registration, the histories of registration and fingerprinting are
historically intertwined. The registration of contracts directly produced the logistical need to identify
a person as that particular person in order to then hold them, as an individual, accountable.
However, as previously mentioned, Herschel’s system never quite took off and did not pervade into
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other domains. And so, we return to the same question: if fingerprinting was ineffective as a means
of identifying individuals for the purpose of registering contracts, what was relatively more effective?
Locating the Propertied Individual
Colonial registration regimes have primarily been examined in relation to land, property and revenue
collection (Saumarez Smith 1985; Bhattacharya 2018). At the same time, registration did not shape
property relations alone. Rather, as this section will demonstrate, recording property ownership and
relations were also central to the history of identification as a governmental practice in colonial
India. The documentation of property relations was intertwined with the documentation of
genealogy, and so when individuals had to be identified, they were identified through their relations
to others—not on the basis of a characteristic unique to themselves. Colonial registration relied on
kinship, genealogy, identity categories and local knowledge to determine who was who—both in
terms of group identity and as individuals. In short, since land registration was a primary function of
colonial governance; it enables us to trace a pervasive mode wherein the colonial state actually did
identify individuals in ways that prove to be significant for the trajectory of identification as a whole.
Registration, in general, involves making entries of documents in relation to one another,
refracting through the record a complex set of social and economic relations on the ground, even if
that refraction was not entirely accurate. As I will show below, individuals in the colonial era were
identified by colonial authorities during registration by the relations—or relatives—that came to
vouch for them.30 Further, registration highlighted a fundamental and persistent element in the very
process of individuating identity. As a formal process, an entity has to be grouped with another
30 In fact, this fundamental feature of using relations for identification continues up to the present. See the description of attestation procedures at the NADRA Registration Center in Chapter One, “Kinning Biometrics.”
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person—that is, classified according to some schema of relations—in order to then be separated
(individuated) and thus identified away from them.
This interplay between the individual and the group was central to the meaning and practice
of identification in the colonial context and is best observed in registration regimes in colonial
Punjab. This was because, firstly, blood, or specifically lineage as blood, was deemed by colonial
officials to be the defining element of the social order. The resulting norm of agnatic descent was
considered the structuring principle of society in northwestern India. As David Gilmartin describes
in Blood and Water: The Indus River Basin in Modern History, the Indus Basin was treated by colonial
officials as the “South Asian home of tribal community par excellence,” with communities rooted in
kinship, to be understood through genealogical calculation (Gilmartin 2015, 26). This conception
was not simply an ethnographic observation developed in a scholarly context, but one that informed
nearly all aspects of governance, defining, as Neeladri Bhattacharya describes, “the way property was
transmitted, the village community forged and individual rights specified” (Bhattacharya 2018, 255).
Secondly, the centrality of kinship ties in colonial Punjab meant that the individual and
community were intertwined for purposes of governance. In terms of identification, this meant that
the identity of an individual would be determined in relation, quite literally, to his or her relations.
This relationality should not be taken to mean that the individual was wholly subsumed within the
community, or that it necessarily limited actions taken by the individual. Rather, even where
individual interests were to be expressed, those interests were articulated through the language of
“patriarchal brotherhoods” (Bhattacharya 2018, 253).31 Furthermore, village communities did not
neatly map onto genealogical communities. As Neeladri Bhattacharya argues, “village and agnatic ties
were not always coterminous: village communities were not inevitably tied through common
31 Also see the chapter “In Search of Tenures” in Bhattacharya (2018) where he discusses how the concept of patriarchal brotherhood (bhaiachara) made its way to Punjab, where patriarchal brotherhoods were formed, reified and empowered.
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descent”—this discrepancy drove colonial officials in Punjab towards the difficult task of
determining who belonged where and, accordingly, forced those officials to functionally determine
who was who (Bhattacharya 2018, 286). This process was fraught with tensions. In turn, these very
difficulties that make it possible to track in the historical record, such as through the Punjab
Registration Manual, both how the colonial state individuated persons and how that identification
(in the context of property relations) relied wholly on relations between the individual and the
group.
Thirdly, in Punjab the question of kin-based identification was embedded within a larger
framework of colonial governance, namely land registration. Punjab was a “non-regulation
province.” Regulations in Bengal and the North-West Provinces were not automatically introduced
here after the province passed from Sikh to British rule. Yet as Richard Saumarez Smith (1996) so
effectively illustrates in Rule by Records, the absence of regulations did not mean an absence of
procedural rule or that the village’s affairs were left alone.32 In fact, the record was tightened with the
goal of making it more accurate, even when in practice this goal was not always achieved given the
difficulty of obtaining and recording information, and especially the ever-present difficulty of
managing the work of village accountants (patwaris). Nonetheless, the attempts at tightening had
direct implications for both how individuals, especially those with rights to land, were to be
identified and how those who were left out of the record became subsequently more difficult to
identify. Land registration itself made the task of identifying all the more critical to the colonial state,
as colonial rule was now also driven by the goal of maintaining Indian society in its original form
through genealogical descent groups. Such a goal was built into the organization of property and the
ability to identify an individual property holder and revenue payer.
32 Saumarez Smith (1996) discusses how the colonial government aimed to preserve native society in its original form, as seen in the fact that the land allotments at the time of the 1853 revenue settlement were “frozen” in the pattern they were “found.”
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The Shajarah-yi-Nasab as Individuation Technology
In colonial Punjab, it was the genealogical connection between the individual and the corporate
group, in particular through documents such as the shajarah-yi-nasab, which enabled the identification
of the individual. This relationship became crucial when the colonial regime attempted to regulate
the transfer of property according to its ideal of an agrarian community in colonial Punjab. The
colonial regime in Punjab sought to adjust the balance of powers between the village body and the
individual. For instance, one way they did this was by allowing individuals to sell any part of their
property while making such a sale conditional on a preemptive right of purchase on the part of
fellow shareholders (Saumarez Smith 1996). The Punjab Laws Act of 1872 gave fellow shareholders
a first-look deal to buy land before it could be sold to anybody outside the corporate unit.
For colonial officials to ensure that these “fellow shareholders” were in fact offered this first
right of purchase, officials would also need to know who those fellow shareholders were. In other
words, they would have to determine the shareholders’ identity as both individuals and as entitled
shareholders. Saumarez Smith describes an increasing specification of rights in the village records—
an element of the colonial regime’s push for increased documentary evidence—which was
accompanied by a greater uniformity in how those entitled to rights were identified. Firstly, this
specification took the form of, yet again, the requirement that every party to an official proceeding
be identified by caste.33 And secondly, village records included the genealogy of proprietors, a
document essential for identifying fellow shareholders that was based on genealogical charts, the
33 Saumarez Smith (1996) sees classification by caste as the mortar that linked local administrative practice to both law and general knowledge. Contextualizing this within a history of identification shows that it served a more basic function: identification in the case of verification.
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shajarah-yi-nasab that I discussed at the beginning of this chapter, of families who owned property in a
given village.34
The shajarah-yi nasab is a window into the relationship between governance and genealogy
across the colonial/postcolonial divide. In fact, the shajarah-yi nasab was likely used, even if
sporadically, as an evidentiary document by the pre-colonial Mughal empire (Habib 1999, 150).
During the colonial era, the genealogical record took on a new significance. The colonial state in
India deployed the shajarah-yi-nasab for revenue settlement and the management of property
relations.35 The colonial government did not simply extract revenue from the profits of the land; it
also took it upon itself to determine who was entitled to land and how it was to be distributed
amongst those “rightful shareholders” (Baden-Powell 1892, 85). It became crucial to identify and
record community customs that would facilitate this process, especially where land was owned
jointly.36 An understanding of customary laws, along with a genealogical mode of apprehending who
belonged where, was instrumentalized to manage inheritance and succession.
The colonial state had not always ruled through local custom to this degree. The expansion
of colonial rule aligned with the trajectory of anthropological knowledge about social groups in
colonial India. Specifically, as Karuna Mantena (2010) describes, Henry Maine led the “discovery” of
communal property, which challenged the idea of property rights as individual and absolute.
Mantena illuminates the deep interrelation between the reordering of land during colonialism and
anthropological notions of kin and tribe in India’s villages. As a result of the colonial state’s
preoccupation with the structuring principles of Indian society, revenue settlement was intended to
34 This was not the only document that existed, the khewat khatauni also listed all landlords and tenants existing otherwise in the village. 35 The shajarah-yi-nasab, at its simplest, was the record of the family tree of owners in village land and provided a history of the complete tenure of the village, “giving the subdivisions of the village into tarafs and pattis” (Kaul 1990, ix). In so doing it also “effectively recorded the customs of inheritance actually observed by both Hindus and Muhammaddans in the village” (Kaul 1990, 110). 36 This can be observed in canonical complications by colonial officials that relied on ethnographic material, most importantly Charles Tupper’s canonical Punjab Customary Law (1881).
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map onto the proprietary and social relations of each Indian village. This meant that individual
landholders were located within the larger corporate group: the village body or at times, more
specifically, the genealogical descent group to which they belonged (Smith 1987). However, as
mentioned above, even as the Indus basin was treated by colonial officials as the heart of “tribal
community,” with communities rooted in kinship that could only be understood through
genealogical calculation, this did not mean that all went according to plan after the
“discovery” of this principle of social organization (Gilmartin 2015, 26). Since village communities
were not always bound through agnatic descent, colonial officials in Punjab were even more
motivated to determine who belonged where. Accordingly, this discrepancy forced these officials to
functionally determine who was who (Bhattacharya 2018, 286).
It is precisely the partial nature of this process, and the conflicted and shifting colonial
notions around the question of how to order governance according to native society (not to mention
the difficulty of doing this quite literally on the ground), that lent documents such as the shajarah-yi-
nasab their strength. It was in this context—of collecting revenue while also attempting to maintain
(always partially) an “authentic” organization of social relations—that kinship relations and
genealogical documentation acquired utmost importance. We will now turn to what comprised the
shajarah-yi-nasab and how it came to assume importance in this central task of managing property
relations.
This is in reality, not merely a pedigree table, as its name implies, but a complete account of the tenure of the proprietary body, showing the divisions of the village into “tarafs” and “pattis” &c. (major and minor divisions), resulting from the branching of the family, as shown by the ‘tree’. It accounts also for the measure of interest in the estate, of each co-sharer, whether that be the fraction resulting from the law of inheritance or some share in a well, or parts of a plough, of a bullock &c. (as explained in the chapter on Tenures); or it may be only the actual area in possession which has become the measure of right of each. From this document we can at once tell the brief history and constitution and form of the village, and how it is divided; its total
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revenue; the area of each co-sharer’s holding, with a reference to the numbers in the list of holdings. (Baden-Powell 1892, 564)
The genealogical tree delineated the several branches of the family as well as shares in land
and was thus a document of the “utmost importance” (Baden-Powell 1892, 564). It was a complete
account of the corporate land-owning group, showing how a given village was divided according to
the various “branches” of the genealogy. Correspondingly, the shajarah served two distinct purposes
for colonial governance. First, by accounting the measure of interest in the estate of each "co-
sharer" (Ibid.), the shajarah ensured accountability by identifying who owed the state its revenue. In
other words, through this document, the computation of genealogical connections is used to
calculate, further, the revenue owed and eventually even inheritance shares.
Second, colonial officials considered the village to be the salient unit of Indian society itself,
and the shajarah functioned as a window into the constitutive and authentic form of the village.
There were other documents that could be and were used concurrently with the shajarah-yi-nasab for
the purposes of managing land and collecting revenue. Arguably, they were used more frequently in
the day-to-day operations of the district revenue offices (Saumarez-Smith 1996). Yet, as in the
present, the shajarah-yi-nasab allowed for the colonial state to figure out who belonged where—
beyond the function of revenue collection. The shajarah-yi-nasab, as Baden-Powell described, was an
essential complement to other documents as it enabled a sense of how the village ought to be ordered
according to genealogical principles considered inherent to the structure and integrity of village India
itself.
In this way, as Gilmartin argues, the individual property owning producer and the
genealogical community served as the twin pillars for modern Indus basin governance (2015, 73).
Gilmartin underscores the importance of the village as a container for colonial action, where the
genealogical community served to balance the rights of the individual. He takes note of the fact that
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in fact there was rarely an individual owner, as local claims on land were “embedded” within what
Baden-Powell had characterized as a “bundle of rights” (2015:,73). Thus, Gilmartin proposes that
the “conjuring of the villager as simultaneously a productive individual and contrarily a communal
man” (2015, 76). Yet, if we approach this phenomena through the prism of identification and
specifically individuation processes, this dual image (of the villager as individual and communal man)
is not so contrary or antithetical. In part, this makes sense because of the impossibility of locating an
individual, both conceptually and functionally, outside of Punjab’s village community. If we consider
this through the form of the shajarah-yi-nasab, the individual can only appear (is only a proprietor)
through his genealogical connections.
Moreover, William Henry Rattigan’s (1915) description of the three primary forms of village
tenure in the Punjab reveals the centrality of the village body, in all three forms, for the payment of
revenue. The first is the zamindari where “all proprietors have each their proportionate interest in the
village lands as common property, without any possession of or title to distinct portions of it” (1915,
245). Each share is fixed according to the customary law of inheritance (haq jaddi), and the rent paid
(by each) goes into a collective pool. The second type is the pattidari where village lands are
subdivided into pattis, which “the proprietors usually hold in severalty according to known ancestral
shares” (1915, 246). Even as each individual proprietor (in this case called a biswadar) pays his own
share of government revenue, “for which, however, all the members of the village are jointly
responsible.” (1915, 246). The third type is bhaiachara, where each proprietor’s right is determined by
possession “but the whole village continues liable in solido for the default of any one proprietor to
pay the revenue chargeable upon his holding.’ (1915, 246).37 Given that the village body, as a whole,
in each of the village tenures was responsible for paying revenue to the government, it follows that
37 Rattigan (1915, 245-50) also notes that mixed forms of these tenures also exist, and that there are different kinds of proprietors, those who have full ownership and others who are only entitled to the land in possession.
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the individual proprietor was continually re-situated within this larger group. In short, in addition to
serving a legitimizing function for the colonial government, the village community also ensured the
payment of revenue.
Parallel to Gilmartin’s interpretation about the village community in Punjab, Saumarez
Smiths interprets the shajarah-yi-nasab as a document representative of a synthesis between two views
of Indian society. One saw India as a village community; the other saw it as a collection of a few
well-known agricultural castes or tribes. What Saumarez Smith interprets as a synthesis partly signals
a historical transition: a shifting conception of India as small, autonomous republics with their own
set of regulations (the wajib ul urz and iqrarnama are documents that are a function of this) as
opposed to the village as a collection of properties belonging to a lineage of a single, great tribe.38 In
either case, the centrality of the genealogy of proprietors about questions of inheritance, or even
gifting property, was significant. It increased motivation to identify individuals, specifically those
who held or could hold rights to land.
One of the concrete ways that a colonial officer could determine whether an individual
person was entitled to hold land was through this genealogy of proprietors. It was not simply
enough for an individual to be in possession of a land deed in their own name, as there was no way
for a registering officer to verify either that a signed name on the document was indeed the same
person who possessed the document or that this person was eligible to inherit or receive land as a
gift.39 Identifying individuals—as both unique individuals and the right kind of individuals in terms
of their rights to hold land—was essential for managing property transactions. According to the
38 The wajib-ul-arz recorded rights on common land, forest, quarries, customs relating to village irrigation, tanks, natural drainage as well as rights of all classes of cultivators and dues paid to village servants. James Douie. 1908. Panjab Land Administration Manual. Lahore: Civil and Military Gazette Press. 39 According to Bhattacharya, “Tupper’s scheme, built upon his evolutionary theory of the tribal origins of Punjab agrarian society and the ordering power of the principle of agnatic succession, focused on the questions of transfer of property—through inheritance, adoption and gift—and on marriage” (2018, 199).
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Punjab Registration Manual, when officers were registering documents, they were expected to vouch
for persons more than documents.40 While there were instructions that “every deed shall be
subjected to a thorough scrutiny,” the Manual also stated that “registering officers should bear in
mind that they are in no way concerned with the validity of documents. The registering officer
should just be satisfied that the alleged executant is the person he presents himself to be.”41 The
veracity of individual identity was established through individuals’ kin ties, not the documents they
possessed.
Despite the fact that kinship and genealogy were structuring principles for Punjabi village
society, the actual process of identifying kin relations, along with individuals, was far from a
straightforward matter. Even when colonial officials sought to identify an individual, this process
required that each individual be situated within a broader set of kinship relations.42 The difficulty in
documenting kinship was exemplified by how family members were registered during transfers of
property or when a new member was incorporated into the shareholding community. In these cases,
the registrar had to determine the familial relations that connected individuals to their families by
means external to existing documentation. Saumarez Smith discusses the complex process by an
affine, residing with his in-laws, both belonged to a family but, in being affine, also did not belong.
For the endowing family, to bring affines in as shareholders to a piece of property was functionally
different from bringing in other non-relatives. This double ambiguity was reflected in the official
record of landholdings in the Punjab. Saumarez Smith’s reading of the marginalia on the
landholdings register in Ludhiana District describes how the actual process of identification took
40 Punjab Registration Manual 1910, IOR/V/27/180/33 [BL], p.78. 41 Ibid., p. 103. 42 Even as the context moves from that of property relations, NADRA continues to rely on kinship as it serves the function of identification through individuation and because of the pre-existing regime of documentation of kin relations.
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place: the registrar identifies that “he is the sister’s son of X (the owner) and therefore the land has
been added to X’s land” (Saumarez Smith (1987, 172, fn. 57).
Punjab Registration Manual
The documentation of identity, and the capacity for its future retrieval, is closely connected to
registration protocols. In this vein, as a prescriptive device, the Punjab Registration Manual
demonstrates how the colonial government, under an ideal set of circumstances, intended to not
only register documents but simultaneously identify the Indian population (as individual and group)
as a means to ensure the validity of those documents. The Punjab Registration Manual aimed to
refine the practice of colonial registration of documents in Punjab. We see this intention in the
registration Manual’s introduction, which recognized that “a machinery for the registration of
documents, originally no doubt crude and inculpate, had existed in the Punjab almost from the time
when it came under British rule.”43 Yet this machinery was clearly in need of refinement and
precision. The Rules for the Administration of Civil Justice in the Punjab and the Cis-Sutlej Province
had been published in 1849 when a Central Records Office was established for the registry of deeds.
There were further attempts at regulating documentary evidence, primarily for the prevention of
fraud and forgery. For instance, the Indian Registration Act of 1871 replaced the Registration Act of
1866 for the explicit purpose of tightening the regulations around what could be registered and who
could register it.44
Clearly, the unregulated nature of documentation was becoming an increasingly pressing
concern for colonial governance in Punjab at this stage, particularly in relation to the transfer of
both movable and immovable properties.45 This difficulty was expressed in the 1908 Registration
43 Punjab Registration Manual, IOR/V/27/180/33 [BL], p. 2. 44 Carr (1871). 45 Government of India Legislative Department (1900).
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Act, which consolidated much of the colonial regime’s earlier legislation around registration.46 Such a
consolidation implied an urgent need for more consistent standards for registration, observable in
how the Act called for specific instructions for how to manage the registration materials as well as
the registration process itself. And so detailed rules for registration are provided in the first edition
of the Manual in 1910, which was produced after the Indian Registration Act of 1908 was passed.
From the outset, the Manual stated that it covered the rules regarding the registration of a
range of documents “regarding property, real and person, bonds, contracts, social engagements,
adoption, betrothal and so on.”47 However, the ubiquitous and consistent reference and discussion
about the registration of land deeds in the Manual—written primarily for registration officers in
districts—suggests that property itself was central to the preoccupation with registration. The
constant mention of fraud and property in both the Act and the Manual coincided with the period
of time in Punjab when land was being bought and sold at a rapid rate (Ali 2014), making it
increasingly difficult to keep track of who owned what, adding an urgency to regulating registration
procedures in Punjab. The Manual also reinforced the idea that one of the primary concerns of the
colonial government in India was property, not only for the purposes of revenue collection but also
due to the colonial state’s obsession with the organization of the Indian social order—especially in
relation to land.
As a result of the colonial state’s preoccupation with the structuring principles of Indian
society, revenue settlement was intended to map onto the proprietary and social relations of each
Indian village. This meant that individual landholders were located within the larger corporate group:
the village body or, at times more specifically, the genealogical descent group to which they
46 Regulation XX of 1812 (prescribing procedures for persons registering deeds and for keeping an account of fees received), Act XXX of 1838 (for the establishment of sub-registry offices) and Act XVI of 1864 (dividing documents into two classes, ones that it was compulsory to register and those it was voluntary to register). See “The Indian Registration Act, 1908. File 3217, IOR/L/PJ/6/889 [BL].” 47 Punjab Registration Manual 1910, IOR/V/27/180/33 [BL], p. 55.
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belonged (Saumarez Smith 1987, 231). However, the colonial government still required individuals
to be identified within this schema, where groups appeared to be the most salient category because
the grid of official landholding categories—categories of who or what kind of entity held land—
concerned villagers as individuals rather than groups.48
As a result, when the colonial state attempted to identify the individual in this context, that
identification was always routed through their social and kin-based identity. As Saumarez Smith
explains, those identified in the records of the first settlement were identified by their personal
name, father’s name, clan (got), caste (qaum) and religion (Saumarez Smith 1985). While collecting
such information was part of the “knowledge making” motivation of the colonial state, Saumarez
Smith mentions (in a passing footnote) that such details in the land register were surely unnecessary
for the purpose strictly of identification (Saumarez Smith 1985, 230). But we can consider Saumarez
Smith’s interpretation from a different perspective: what other means did the local colonial officials
have to identify those individuals found in the land register? The Punjab Registration Manual also
instructed colonial officials that regardless of what was being registered, “the register book/diary
should contain information about the person’s house, date, description as well as the “name,
parentage, caste, residence and personal appearance.”49 These descriptors, which constituted the
same type of information that would be collected for classification and enumeration under the
census, were also used for the purpose of identifying individuals precisely because they contained a
fair amount of information that could be matched to a particular individual. Collecting a broader
array of information—such as those characteristics (religion, caste and so on) mentioned above—
may not have been unique to a singular person. However, such classificatory information still
48 The process by which this came about was wrought, yet again, with internal contradictions on the part of colonial officials, along with tension between pattidari as the founding category as opposed to zamindari for tenure categories. See Bhattacharya on the discussions between colonial officials on this question, and specifically about how the village body was constituted as coparcenary brotherhoods and the role of ancestral rights in land (2018, 121). 49 Punjab Registration Manual 1910, IOR/V/27/180/33 [BL], p. 66.
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provided a larger number of characteristics that could be used to match documented information to
individuals, and thus to verify identity. What may have seemed to be classificatory categories (and in
fact were in a different context) functioned as information to identify specific individuals where it
mattered, namely for land registration.
Nonetheless, from the Punjab Registration Manual, it is evident that this information was
not quite sufficient for identifying individuals. The colonial state placed an immense amount of
significance on local channels of information that served to further verify individual identity. As the
section on “Procedure” in the Manual emphasizes, “when the registering officer is not personally
acquainted with executants, he shall require them to produce persons to testify to their identity who
are personally known to him or to some other person whom he personally knows or of whose
identity and reliability he is otherwise fully satisfied with.”50 Personal knowledge of who the person
was should have been known to either the registration officer or to another who could testify.
While the role of local knowledge was considered important for identifying individuals,
according to the Manual, too much proximity—and a potential conflict of interest (such as being
employed by the person one is then called to identify)—was seen to be dangerous, increasing the
chance of fraud to occur. The Manual stated that stamp vendors and petition writers should never
be allowed to identify executants whose deeds they themselves had written, and “the registering
officer should not accept persons of this class to witnesses of identity nor should they have recourse
to their own peons for this purpose.”51 Instead, preference was given “where possible to witnesses
living in the executant’s neighborhood and of his class of life.”52 Local channels of information,
properly solicited based on trustworthiness and reliability, operated as sources of identification in
50 Ibid., 94. 51 Ibid., 94. 52 Ibid., 94-95.
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this context.53 If a registration officer cross-examined a witness who knew the executant personally,
that officer could verify the information regarding caste, religion and kin. This verification step
added yet another layer of accuracy through which the specific identity of the individual was further
authenticated.
The absence of a registry or record of individually-identified persons was, in part, explained
by the presence of existing mechanisms, including classificatory forms of information as well as
reliable figures who were able to use personal recognition and local channels of information to
determine identity. In addition, the Manual instructed officers in charge of registration to record the
thumb mark of any person who presented a document for registration. This thumb mark was
commonly used as a signature to hold people accountable (Sengoopta 2003). But in the absence of a
fingerprint registry of the population as a whole (against which it could be matched), it remains
questionable how effective such a measure was against potential deceit or fraud. In fact, as
mentioned earlier, this inability to classify and match fingerprints was precisely the problem that
Herschel faced when attempting to hold traders who had signed contracts accountable through their
finger and handprints. Alternatively, the registering officer’s personal acquaintance with the person
coming to register a document would have offered a much better method to determine whether a
particular person was who they said they were. The process of registering documents enables insight
into how individual identification operated in the colonial period—especially in the absence of a
formal identity registry.
53 These concerns parallel what Bhavani Raman notes in relation to an earlier context, early 1800s Madras, attestation practices emerged in the wake of heightened concerns about native duplicitousness and propensity for fraud. Raman shows how attestation came to hinge on signatures, which in turn made documents and attestation increasingly vulnerable to duplication (Raman 2012, 242). Thus, during Company Rule, the process of controlling documentation, specifically to deal with Indian duplicity, had already begun. As Raman shows, first, the problem with authenticating documents relied on authenticating the identity of attestors (among others). In Punjab, we see how this came to rest on increasingly detailed regulations on activities such as registration and further had to rely on localized knowledge and interpersonal contact, which the “Punjab school” of governance famously relied on.
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By pointing to these identification “solutions,” I do not want to suggest that the colonial
regime considered identification to be an easy or uncomplicated task. The discussions around
registration in the Punjab Registration Manual often circles around the question of error and
accuracy of the information collected, suggesting that the difficulty of identifying—with certainty—
was a constant preoccupation of the colonial government. Accurate identification depended on
following bureaucratic procedures closely. This, in turn, relied on establishing administrative
authority at the local level.
Despite the significance of local connections and knowledge for identifying individuals at the
local scale, it was key for the colonial regime to both establish authority through registering officers
and maintain the right amount of distance between the governing and the governed. On one hand,
colonial governance depended on a careful negotiation between having substantial knowledge of the
local population in order to properly identify who was who. On the other hand, colonial officials
needed to ensure sufficient distance in their interactions with the public to avoid other conflicts of
interests—for instance those borne out of family connections or personal friends. The Manual
instructed registering officers to keep a watchful eye over Indian officers, emphasizing that they
maintain as much distance from the public as possible. Here, the Manual also emphasizes the
authority of the officer, which partially depends on his ability to control Indian staff in the office,
i.e., who are likely to have more interaction with the local population.54
The Manual brings into relief the localized nature of determining identity and the
appropriate distance for ideal bureaucratic procedure. In the context of managing property relations,
identification relied on the relationship between the individual and the genealogical descent group
they were attached to and could be identified through. However, this relationship could only be
apprehended at the local level where those kinship relations became fully apparent and could then
54 Ibid., p. 98.
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be tracked. Identifying kin through local information came into tension with the colonial state’s
ideology, as it is reflected in the registration rules—an ideology that emphasized a form of rule
where colonial officers were supposed to operate with an appropriate amount of distance from
Indian society, even as they needed an intimate knowledge of social norms in order to maintain the
society’s authentic form. Governance in the Punjab and the North-West Frontier was thus
characterized by an internal unevenness, both in terms of the role that kinship and custom was
supposed to play, well as in the form of documentary records that sought to encapsulate and record
these structures.
Challenges to Kinship in the Canal Colonies
In fact, there was no pre-existing proprietary body in the canal colonies—the areas of Western
Punjab cultivated through the construction of canal irrigation system starting in 1885—and entire
villages were relocated to settle these areas as a means to “stabilize” these new communities and
assimilate them into the broader pattern of the rest of Punjab (Gilmartin 2015, 166). Even with
these new technologies of environmental control, Gilmartin argues that the resettlement process
“did not displace the old structures of legal authority that lay at the heart of colonial statecraft, nor
did they displace the linking of individual property to village genealogies of blood” (2015, 145).
Thus, even in the canal colonies, individual proprietors were constructed through both status and
contract. While Gilmartin views the function of status as primarily ideological, in that it served to
legitimize colonial authority, I would argue that the use of genealogical blood relations was necessary
for the function of identity and the day to day functions of identifying individuals itself—most
evident through the shajarah-yi-nasab.
In this section, I turn to the canal colonies to explore how they raised new challenges for
governing through kinship and genealogy. Further, I examine how specific individuals were selected
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for re-settlement in the colonies, and the ways this process both reproduced and fractured existing
relations. While the government in Punjab wanted to rule through local custom, they did not always
do so. The settlement of the canal colonies in Punjab reveals that they did not follow key customary
norms, such as those concerning inheritance and succession, for reasons of profitability and
efficiency. This seeming discrepancy is significant because it foregrounds the challenges around
maintaining kinship as the guiding ideology and opens up a question regarding new norms that
might have emerged around the figure of the individually successful agriculturalist. The process of
selecting these agriculturalists reveals this dual tension.
The canal colonies in Western Punjab covered approximately four million acres and were
settled to relieve the population pressure from districts in Punjab that were reaching their capacity. It
was decided that the bulk of the land would be allotted in twenty-eight acre holdings to small
peasant farmers of “the best Punjab type” while some areas were also set aside for agriculturalists
called “yeomen” and a smaller number of non-agriculturalists.55 In a lecture to the Royal Society of
the Arts in 1914, Sir James Douie, a colonial official who served in several important posts in Punjab
and also had a significant role to play in passing the Land Alienation Act of 1900, described the
precise process by which these new colonists were selected and subsequently re-settled in the canal
colonies. Selecting new settlers involved assessing individual ability as well as debts and
landholdings. Douie draws on reports form a settlement officer in Amritsar, J.A. Grant, to describe
the prototypical selection procedure. Once Grant had decided on an appropriate village from which
to recruit settlers, he would send notice to the patwari to provide details (verbally) on the land owned
in the village. Grant would also meet with the village headmen prior to explain the terms on which
the land would be granted, and that “any deceit or personation would be punished by refusing to
55 Douie, James M. 1914. “The Punjab Canal Colonies.” Journal of the Royal Society of Arts 62, no. 3210, p. 614.
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give any land to that village.”56 To underline, fraud by any one specific person would lead to the
entire village being passed over. In fact, the village headmen were required to expose any deceit,
name the bad characters and those who might be too embarrassed to disclose their own debts.
Following discussions with the headmen, the future settlers were composed into a body. I will now
quote the passage where Grant describes how he makes the exact selection, as it provides details of
how the selection process identified an individual with respect to their kin relations as well as
determined suitability through individualized characteristics.
“These (the settlers) I would first separate into wards (pattis) and make the men of each patti sit in a long row, the fathers next to their sons, and brothers next to one another. Walking down the row I could then easily see the men who were physically unsuitable. Many old dotards and mere boys would be brought up in the hope of thus securing an extra square for the family, though they had no intention of going and would do no good if they did. His color would often betray the habitual opium-eater and his general appearance (more especially his hands) the shaukin and the jawan who had been in the army or in Burma and who, cutting his name after a few years spent with a regiment, had come home to the village but had never done a hand’s turn of honest work behind the plough… Then with the patwari (village accountant) and a munshi at my elbow and attended by the headman of the patti, I would go down the line and take down the names and the area of each man’s hare, his age, parentage and got. This process would expose those who already had sufficient holdings of who had mortgaged a considerable share of their land, and these too were weeded out… Thus the original crowd of applicants would be reduced to a band of men all connected by common descent, all physically fit to take up a life in a new country under considerable difficulties… No file of any sort was made out, except the list of men selected and entered in the register.” (Settlement Officer J.A. Grant)57
According to Douie, Grant’s process was consistent with how most settlement officers
selected new settlers. Importantly, selection involved identification practices that relied on pre-
existing land records. In addition, the settlement officers prioritized both the element of common
descent as well as individual’s capacity as agriculturalists to make their selections. Lastly, this process
56 Ibid., p. 615. 57 Ibid., p. 616.
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produced its own record in the form of a list that was entered into the register. Thus, while the
kinship structure that informed land holding in these older villages informed the new settlements,
the family unit was also occasionally fractured by selecting certain family members (the able-bodied)
over others (the old or the very young). Most importantly, while the selected agriculturalists could
become permanent tenants, and pass on occupancy rights, there were initially no proprietary rights
attached to the resettlement. The canal colonies were a test-case for practically managing the role of
kinship in social and economic life, and for property relations in particular. For the purpose of
setting up the canal colonies, in terms of identifying potential settlers, there was an attempt to move
towards a more individualized model that did not do away with the kin-group but did end up
undermining it both through the selection process and through the limitations on inheritance. At the
same time, the customary norms surrounding kinship, specifically in relation to property, emerged as
points of contention only a few decades after the new canal colonies were settled.
Douie described how each newly settled village was mapped out into rectangular figures
divided into fields of approximately one acre, which allowed for contiguous farming area and
prevented scattered fields. “Moreover, in a country where each son takes an equal share of his
deceased father’s property, the rectangle containing twenty five equal rectangular fields can be
divided accurately, easily and cheaply.”58 While this served as a convenient spatial configuration,
seemingly adapted to local custom, in fact the rules of canal colony settlement did not allow for
equal inheritance. Even as families, and occasionally entire villages, were re-settled in their entirety,
the ability for all successors (male agnates) to inherit equally as per custom was only selectively
permitted after the 1907 riots that raised the question of succession among others as a central point
of discontent with the patriarchal and dictatorial rule of the settlement officer.
58 Ibid., p. 614
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In 1907, the colonists protested their right to own the property they were cultivating, which
was arguably aligned with how the ideal property regime was envisioned. In fact, Douie (1914)
accepted that a provision enabling the colonist to become a full owner was part of the original canal
colony scheme as envisioned by James Lyall and Mackworth Young. The primary reason for
avoiding inheritance at the early stage was to “protect” the new settlers “against themselves by only
conceding a permanent tenant right” (1914, 617), in accordance with the lessons learned from the
pitfalls that had befallen the small peasant proprietor elsewhere in the Punjab due to the unrestricted
right of alienation. Yet, this danger was alleviated through the Land Alienation Act of 1900. The
decision to allow Chenab Canal peasants to buy land (at a highly concessionary rate) was not
finalized until after 1907. In his lecture on the success of the canal colonies, Douie glossed over the
“troubled spring of 1907,” arguing that “it is ill-work to rake up the embers of seven years ago, and
that is the only reference I shall make to the subject” (1914, 617).
The troubled spring of 1907 was in fact central in provoking changes to inheritance law, and
the character of governance in the Punjab more broadly. Initially, colonial officials in the Punjab
dismissed the protests and claimed that they were caused by urban troublemakers such as Lala
Lajpat Rai and anti-colonial dissidents such as Ajit Singh (Barrier 1967). While the experiment in the
Chenab Colony appeared to be an economic, administrative and social success by the early 1900s
(Barrier 1967, 356), eventually a complex set of issues had begun to emerge. A central concern on
the part of the colonial government was the problem of fragmented landholding as occupancy rights
(not inheritance) came to be subdivided amongst a given tenants’ sons.59 In addition, tenants began
to evade the residency requirement and the government’s response to issue fines led to legal battles
59 Annual Report for the Chenab, Jhelum, Chunian, Sohag Para Canal Colonies, 1903 (Lahore: Civil and Military Gazette Press), p. 8.
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over the issue. Surprisingly, when colonists contested these fines in court, the court passed
judgements in favor of the tenants, putting the authority of the colonization officers in question.
In response, in order to legalize the issuing of fines, the Punjab Government drafted a new
Bill, which disallowed the transfer of property by will and only allowed succession by primogeniture,
in consultation with the Canal Officer. However, in the aftermath of the disturbances of 1907,
which questioned the paternal authority of the Colonization Officers in Punjab in unprecedented
ways and involved local Zamindar organizations (Barrier 1967, 367), the Government of India
ordered a reversal of policy that bypassed the position of the local Punjab government—an event
that represented an aberration in the history of colonial Punjab’s governance that had relied on the
paternal figure of colonial officials such as Henry Lawrence (Bhattacharya 2018).
The most significant reversal was the decision to allow the purchase of proprietary rights to
colony settlers from 1909 onwards. In other words, the canal colonies too became subject to
customary laws, and the government now had less control over succession and inheritance in the
case of peasant grants. At the same time, the ability to acquire proprietary rights remained dependent
on the particulars of each case, and each colony. For example, the colonization officer Mr. Q. Q.
Henriques noted in relation to the acquisition of proprietary rights in Jhang district that colonists
realized the colony’s dependence on the government for the supply of water and thus feared that
proprietary lands (as opposed to government lands) would face a reduced supply of water. This,
Henriques posited, explained the delay of peasant grantees in acquiring proprietary rights.60 In
addition, he noted that he had “withheld the right to acquire ownership in 21 villages which have a
particularly criminal record.”61
60 Annual report on the Chenab, Jhelum and Chunian, Sohag Para Canala Colonies, 1910 (Lahore: Civil and Military Gazette Press), p. 11. 61 Ibid.
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In addition, the colonization officer for the Jhelum canal colony noted that evasions of the
primogeniture condition took the form of what was called bhaiwali, which involved the sharing of
profits between the grantee and his brethren in their return for helping to till the soil. The
colonization officer advised that it would be undesirable to interfere with this arrangement. Another
version of bhaiwali included providing a mare or a loan and taking an annual share in return.
However, the colonization officer was not too alarmed by this, proposing that prosperity in the
colony—especially considering that the colony was recovering from the plague—would soon put to
an end to the latter form of the arrangement. “While, therefore, the family bhaiwali is inevitable and
almost unobjectionable, the bhaiwali based on bonds and deeds will soon, I believe, be stamped
out.”62 In this way, the sharing of labor between family members was considered natural and thus
unobjectionable, and the only concern was about indebtedness. After 1907, colonization officers
appeared wary of overstepping their bounds and cautioned against interference. The
interconnections between kin relations and the agricultural economy in the Punjab meant that the
individual settler continued to be imbricated within a broader familial structure, if not directly in the
form of property ownership then through arrangements such as bhaiwali.
The one site where colonization officers were particularly concerned about the abrogation of
the primogeniture condition was for horse breeding grants, specifically in the lower Jhelum Colony,
as horse breeding required the maintenance of large land holding. While the Assistant Colonization
Officer in the Jhelum Colony was pessimistic about the future of primogeniture, the Financial
Commissioner advised against encouraging the idea that agitation might lead to the abrogation of
the rule. Instead, they emphasized the value of the contract under which settlers had been allotted
62 Annual report on the Chenab, Jhelum and Chunian, Sohag Para Canala Colonies, 1908 (Lahore: Civil and Military Gazette Press), p. 25.
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land in the first place.63 “So long as the horse breeding experiment is under these conditions
successful and so long as these conditions are essential to its success nothing should be done to
disturb the arrangement… in the Financial Commissioner’s opinion, when they are convinced that
there is to be no wavering policy on the part of government and learn to appreciate the elementary
principle that a contract is ac contract, they will settle down to an acceptance of the situation.” Here,
we can observe government officials explicitly pushing against existing customary law—indeed even
emphasizing the value of contract-based relations as opposed to status-based entitlements, including
that of property—primarily to ensure the profitability of grants and since the horses were used in the
military. Embedded in such an approach is the notion that ultimately, the grantees would come to
see the benefit of such a policy, against the pressures of their own social and familial structures. The
debate over inheritance in the canal colonies sheds light on the internal unevenness within the
colonial state’s use of custom, specifically concerning kinship and genealogy, in Punjab.
Simultaneously, it reveals how colonial officials’ own understanding of how agricultural production
could be maximized, alongside notions about property relations should ideally evolve—resulting in a
single, individual owner—were both reconfigured in the face of active intervention by Punjab’s canal
colony settlers.
The confusions regarding transferring property relations, other than in the case of the canal
colonies, were compounded for those within Punjab’s rural landscape who came to be termed
“outsiders” or “strangers” by the colonial government. These strangers, or those who were not seen
by colonial administrators to fit within the village body at the time of land settlement, upset the
colonial regime’s harmonious ideal of agrarian society (Bhattacharya 2018, 288). As Neeladri
Bhattacharya describes, where the village as a founded territory overlapped with the conception of
63 Annual report on the Chenab, Jhelum and Chunian, Sohag Para Canala Colonies, 1911 (Lahore: Civil and Military Gazette Press), p. 1.
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kinship as the spatial boundary of the village, “the colonial understanding of North Indian agrarian
society was not disturbed. When the two spaces diverged, as was more often the case, the officials
were thoroughly confused” (Bhattacharya 2018, 288). The Land Alienation Act of 1900 attempted to
resolve this very confusion by prohibiting the sale of land to persons who were classified as “non-
agricultural”—those strangers who were considered outside the village community and the
occupation of agriculture. Since the 1860s, village enquiries in Punjab had shown that increased
indebtedness amongst landholders and the rising values of land in the region led to large scale land
transfers to persons outside the “village community.”64 While colonial officials saw the sale of
agricultural land to these outsiders as tearing at the integrity of the very fabric of Punjab’s traditional
agrarian society, these same officials also feared that this transfer of land would disturb local
relations and, by extension, destabilize British rule. Yet, the question of who exactly embodied the
category of non-agriculturist outsider still troubled the colonial government. Suspicion centered on
the Hindu money lender, as images of angry peasants burning account books of banias from 1857
lingered in the imagination of colonial administrators (Bhattacharya 2018, 289-294; Van den Dungen
1972). Accordingly, the opposite of “non-agricultural caste”—the “agricultural caste”—also
emerged out of this already fraught landscape of categorical definitions.
The Land Alienation Act deployed the language of agricultural castes to get rid of an
ambiguity that had earlier allowed anyone who possessed land in the village—for even as little as a
year—claim status as a “co-sharer,” and thus be able to buy land and preempt sales to others.65 With
the Land Alienation Act, mercantile and lower castes could be excluded from holding land as they
were characterized as non-agriculturalist. “Among the agriculturalists, claims (to land) were graded in
64 The aim of this Act was to “retain power to prevent such men from buying up land in a village where they would come in as outsiders and constitute a foreign element in the village-community,” GOI Rev. & Agriculture (Rev.), October 1895, A 72-3; Singh, S. Gurcharn (1901), p. xix. 65 See Chapter Four, “The Formation of Shareholding Groups” in Saumarez-Smith (1987).
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accordance with the degree of agnatic relationship that the pre-emptor had to the owner of the land
being sold” (Bhattacharya 2018, 290). Even as genealogical relations remained salient, this shift to
agricultural castes undoubtedly had profound implications on who in Punjab could own land, who
could not own land, and thus impacted the province’s entire network of social and economic
relations.
For the purposes of identification, the act of determining if an individual belonged to a given
caste or not (and whether or not that caste was “agricultural”) would have to continue to be routed
through genealogy and kinship. Caste here was not an identity category held by a singular person,
but instead was shared amongst kinsmen.66 As described above, this shared, kin-based identity,
articulated through documents such as the shajarah-yi-nasab, happened to be the most thoroughly
documented form of kin-based identity already in place.
The Punjab Registration Manuals of 1910 were written after the passing of the Land
Alienation Act of 1900. In the 1910 and 1919 (reprint) Manual there is a special section devoted to
the “Duties of Registering Officers in refusing or admitting registration of instruments alienating
rights in land.”67 Here, the registrars were told to consider factors outside of whether the executant
is who they claimed to be and to ascertain whether registration would infringe on the rights of
persons not party to the registration process. Registering officers were thus asked to acquaint
themselves with the meaning of the term “agricultural caste,” a conceptualization used in the Land
Alienation Act itself.68 The Punjab Government sent notifications to district colonial administrators
regarding who the tribes and members of the tribe were in each district. However, the burden of
identifying the individual—by name and as a member of the tribe they claimed to be a part of—still
66 Sengoopta (2003) describes how even the most detailed knowledge of the physical and cultural characteristics of each caste could not help determine whether an individual member of a caste was pretending to be another one. 67 Punjab Registration Manual 1910, IOR/V/27/180/33 [BL], p. 125. 68 GOI Rev. & Agriculture (Rev.), October1895, A 72-3 and Singh, S. Gurcharn (1901).
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lay with the registering officer. As the Punjab Registration Manual illustrates, through its emphasis
on local knowledge, the registering officer was only able to identify an individual through previously
held localized knowledge of who was who in their district. Accordingly, the ability to do one’s job
necessarily relied on the officer accurately determining familial affiliation from this knowledge.
The creation of the new category of “agricultural caste” to prevent land alienation clearly did
not resolve the predicaments in identifying individuals. Identifying the individual would have been
necessary to regulate the sale of property. Precisely because the category of caste in Punjab at the
time the Land Alienation Act did not map onto how identification actually operated—that is,
through kinship—colonial officials had to consider kinship as it was the means by which individuals
historically could be identified. Accordingly, the colonial land registration system relied on kin-based,
genealogical descent groups and identification of individuals occurred within this context. I argue
that the creation of these “agricultural castes” was ultimately unhelpful in identifying individuals
because the machinery that had already been in place for identifying individuals, as described in the
Manual above, was through documentation of genealogical lineages.
The dilemma of how to register land in the context of preoccupations about land alienation
demonstrates how identification worked in Punjab more generally. This dilemma also illustrates the
conceptual difference between identification as individuation and identification as the process of
creating identity categories (including demographic and classificatory instruments such as the
census). The historical literature on colonial South Asia has long emphasized the significance of
caste in relation to identity, while the role of kinship for identification practices remains under-
examined.69 In evaluating the role of kinship and genealogical relations in colonial Punjab—while
69 Mir (2010) and Gilmartin (1988) discuss the role of regional, tribal and kin-based affiliations in shaping identity formation. My argument here is in relation to not identity formation, but the technical practice of identification itself.
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registration did not produce a registry of identified persons in the context of property relations—the
process of individuation as a mode of identification nonetheless emerged through this process.
Colonial registration regimes allow us to glimpse important steps in the trajectory of
identification practices in South Asia. By examining colonial officials’ ambivalence towards
registering vital records and the shifting intersections between land registration and
genealogical/kin-based relations, I hope to have demonstrated how the function of identifying
individuals in the 19th and 20th century South Asia was tailored to the purposes and needs of
colonial governance in distinct domains. In this vein, the colonial state, especially at the local level,
was not motivated to simply accumulate more information about its colonized subjects—such as in
the census or in an ethnographic mode—but was also rooted in logistical concerns about its own
capacity and its role of the colonial state in Indian society.
In addition, to underscore the particularities of the individuation process, the pervasiveness
of enumerative and classificatory practices in colonial India did not extend to the identification of
particular individuals themselves. Neither did specific technologies directed at the individual, such as
fingerprinting, single-handedly determine the history of identification. Instead, colonial registration
protocols highlight the role of local knowledge, kinship and genealogy, as well as the contingencies
of colonial governance, to describe the localized operations of individual identification. Moreover,
during the colonial era, these disparate modes of identification were not consolidated into a single,
centralized system. Accordingly, the seemingly odd and conspicuous absence of the individual in the
history of identification shows that this history cannot be understood by tracing a bounded entity or
phenomena (such as an identity document or a single technology) across time. Instead, a disparate
and uneven set of identification practices congeal, are redeployed in crucial moments and come to
be folded into the configuration of the 1970s, allowing us to apprehend the nature of identification
in the present.
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Yet, the key moments in the history of identification must not be seen as causally connected.
Instead, it is precisely the internally differentiated nature of identification as well as its
documentation that produces unevenness across regions for how citizens, inter-generationally,
develop practices, even habits of approaching the state. Ultimately, in a centralized institution such
as NADRA, which aims to standardize its practices across the nation, officials experience friction
when they come up against these variegated practices and conceptions. NADRA constantly works
on its strategies for encompassing this complexity. In the following two sections, I describe how the
tensions generated from such historically uneven governance systems unfold and trace their
implications for those who occupy the peripheral space of the carefully constructed frontier. The
historic deployment of kinship and genealogical relations by precolonial, colonial and postcolonial
regimes on the frontier map onto territorial notions in ways that condition the possibilities of those
genealogical success and failure. I illustrate how NADRA, given its descent based concerns, opens
itself up to polyvocal articulations of genealogical identity, extending beyond the official genealogical
record it requires.
Tribal Genealogies and Rule on the Frontier
NADRA experiences difficulties verifying the genealogical records of those from the Federally
Administered Tribal Areas, which have for long (centuries) been subjected to a form of frontier
governance, distinct from the rest of colonial India. The areas constituted as FATA in Pakistan were
considered autonomous and never brought fully under the territory of British India. Until recently
(late 2018), the system for preparing revenue records, of the sort described by Baden-Powell in the
context of a settled property regime in the Punjab, was absent.70 The tribal areas continue to be
referred to as ilaqa ghair, which translates to land unknown or even strange. This referent is salient to
70 “No man’s land,” report by United Nations Development Programme, Pakistan.
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the earlier discussion in this chapter of the figure of the stranger or the outsider to the agricultural
community, who was in fact central to how property relations were organized in the Punjab. What
would it mean then for an entire region to be constituted by outsiders, or even the character of the
unknown? In fact, this region (the unsettled frontier) was fairly well understood but continued to be
placed in a state of indeterminacy through forms of governance.
In particular, Pashtun tribal structure relative to Punjab was fairly well-documented, but this
knowledge was used to limit direct control and governance. This is evidenced by the fact that only a
few districts on the frontier were brought under revenue settlement and included within British
territory. Ethnographic knowledge produced by colonial officials, which justified the tribal area’s
“independence” and limited British interference, relied on characterizing Pashtun tribes as
ungovernable.71 Instead, the colonial approach to governance in the tribal areas was shaped by a
romanticized notion of a “seductive and elemental confrontation between British officer and native
warrior” (Tripodi 2011, 11). Personal contact and intimate knowledge of the unruly tribesman were
considered the most effective ways to manage this region.72 In this sense, the paternal authority of
colonization officers in the canal colonies of the Punjab resembled that of the political agent on the
frontier. However, in moments when the question arose of annexing tribal areas beyond the settled
districts of the frontier, which would bring the region directly under British control,73 they ultimately
decided not to because, unlike Punjab, the tribal areas were largely not an agricultural heartland and
thus would be a financial “burden” (Spain 1963, 118).
71 See the monographs written on frontier tribes by political agents such as Merk (1898) and Howell (1931). 72 Along with Tripodi, see Haroon (2007), who argues that the ethnographic rendering of Pashtun tribes’ fierce independence was key to the forms of rule they were governed under. 73 An example is the September 1895 Pamir Boundary Agreement with Russia, which established the international boundaries of Afghanistan. Further, the decision not to directly rule over these areas should not be taken to mean that the frontier was irrelevant to the colonial political economy. On the contrary, this region was a central part of colonial circuits of capital circulation and accumulation, as evidenced by infrastructural development in the area, specifically the Khyber Pass Railway connecting Peshawar to the Afghan border. During these discussions of infrastructural development in the area, colonial officials negotiated tribal hierarchies and centered questions of customary law (Medhi 2020).
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Genealogy was intimately tied to landed property relations in Punjab, and to some extent in
the settled districts of other areas such as the Peshawar district,74 which came to be the North-West
Frontier Province.75 In the “un-administered” tribal areas, however, genealogical definition was
situated along a different set of axes. While in Punjab the tribe was dispersed across villages and
possessed minimal indigenous political organization, the frontier tribes were seen to have a cohesive
political form and effect through their system of segmentary lineages.76 In short, despite the
definitional ambiguity of tribe or biradari,77 the colonial state in Punjab attempted to define a tighter
structure of rule around it through record keeping, documentation78 and administration.79
In contrast, and perhaps counterintuitively, “tribe” had a far more specific meaning and
purpose in the absence of regular government on the frontier. The explicit overlap between
governance strategies and ethnographic knowledge about tribes in the making of the frontier
74 A curious aspect of frontier colonial governance was that it did not rely entirely on ethnic differentiation (Nichols 2001). The Peshawar colonial land settlement conformed to the established Punjab model, with some reforms catered to Pashtun tribal society to assert colonial moral authority. As Andre Gunder Frank (1992) shows, the move from nomadism to settlement was not a transitional, historical move. Rather, specialized pastoralism was likely a reaction to ecological and economic exigencies by agricultural peoples who had once been settled. Nichols draws on these insights to challenge the settled and tribal distinction in the Pashtun context. While the distinction is far from binary, the administrative structures it led to in turn shaped varying levels of imperial influence and effects. 75 Colonial officials like Tupper found kinship, not caste, to be the operational category of social organization in Punjab. This did not mean that hierarchy, or “caste,” did not exist. Rather, its presence was irregular and inconsistent. For a discussion of caste amongst Indian Muslims, see Lindholm (1985). 76 On segmentary lineage, see Dresch (1986). In addition, even as the agricultural frontier was extended from the Punjab to areas such as Peshawar or Kurram, the unevenness of the colonial documentary regime (specifically around property relations and revenue) was in part a function of the ways in which the colonial state differentiated between inhabitants of the plains and upland areas. In other words, where revenue settlement did take place, the social and political structure of the tribe was reflected in land and revenue policy (represented in discussions of Yusufzai qualities in the settlement of the Peshawar Valley), but in non-agrarian areas, the tribe was the source of political authority, particularly for adjudicating disputes between tribes or with the colonial state itself. In his study Ruling the Savage Periphery (2020), Hopkins views this unevenness in colonial rule functioned as a form of “sovereign pluralism” that incorporated native autonomy in ways central to colonial power. 77 A descent group, according to Hamza Alavi (1972) is a collection of households related through patrilineal kinship, where links of common descent can be traced in the paternal line regardless of the number of generations. Yet, this term sat uncomfortably with other terms used alongside it, such as nation (qaum) or sub-caste (zaat). 78 Such records were included in the village record of rights known as the wajib-ul-arz. After 1873, they were compiled into separate volumes, or rivaj-i-aam. These were prepared through oral questionnaires posed to local gatherings of influential tribal or village leaders. 79 David Gilmartin explains how the British “by their very nature of their position as culturally alien rulers, could make little claim to legitimate authority on the basis of religion” (2015, 6). They could, however, use customary law to structure their rule.
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illustrate, as Sana Haroon argues (2007), that the region’s demarcation as semi-autonomous (outside
of “settled India”) was a sociological one. Colonial engagement with the ethnographic notion of the
tribe informed both colonial governance on the frontier and the forms and value of genealogical
knowledge. In turn, colonial textual representations and solicitations of genealogical information
likely affected tribal conceptions of their own genealogy-based identity (Lindholm 1996). Thus, the
colonial government shaped the motivations for tribal groups themselves to subsequently take up
genealogy (Haroon 2016) and the means by which they did so. The intersection of tribal genealogy,
ethnographic knowledge, and colonial governance on the frontier reveals how the meanings of
genealogy and tribal affiliation were concretized in ways that, through their very internal dissonance
and unevenness, continue to resonate in interactions between tribal Pashtuns and NADRA officials
until today. This can be apprehended through the internal differences between how colonial
officials, occasionally the same ones across Punjab and the North-West Frontier, governed the two
spaces.
Even as recording and compiling customary law in Punjab involved wrestling with
innumerable particularities and contradictions at various stages, the attempt to encapsulate and
codify “tribal custom” for the purpose of revenue settlement on the frontier appeared tenuous even
to the settlement officials involved in the exercise. This is reflected most prominently in Bannu’s
first land settlement, which was one of the last districts that was brought under a regular settlement
in the North-West Frontier Province.80 The author of the first settlement report, S. S. Thorburn,
began by recognizing that an inadvertent benefit of such a late settlement was that it “prevented the
recording and perpetuating of several harsh so-called “customs” which obtained at annexation and
were the outcome of the old law.”81 For example, Thorburn claimed that women would have had no
80 S.S. Thorburn. 1879. Report on the First Regular Land Settlement of Bannu in the Derajat, Division of the Punjab (Lahore: Central Jail Press), p. 213. 81 Ibid.
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rights and the custom of preemption (define) would have been non-existent. In this way, Thorburn
acknowledged the rapidly changing and dynamic nature of “custom,” which would have been
different even twenty-five years ago. Second, he emphasized the incompleteness of what in his view
appears to be a teleological process of establishing customary law: he argued that “many of the so-
called tribal customs in respect to rights in landed property are still in a transitionary stage.”82
In particular, in the abstract of the tribal code in relation to questions concerning the
inheritance of property, the refrain “there is no fixed custom” repeatedly emerges. For instance, the
question is posed: if a man dies without male issue, “up to how many degrees in the ascending scale
do agnates succeed to the exclusion of daughters and their issue? And who are near agnates?” In
response, it turns out that while earlier any agnate, no matter how distant, could succeed, since
annexation this practice has become less common. Instead, a daughter or her descendants have in
fact been able to succeed. In this way, it is concluded that “no custom can be yet said to have been
established.”83 In Bannu’s case, it also appears that the changes brought about by the colonial
property system put customary practices into flux before they could even be codified—that is,
following the colonial conceit that there was any condensable and pattern-based customary practice
in the first place. As a result, the Bannu settlement report’s assessment of tribal custom served at
best as a collection of most common practices. The case of a late settlement such as Bannu
illuminates how the project of settling land on the frontier through tribal custom remained
incomplete and partial given that custom itself was difficult to define and in flux in these areas. In
addition, Bannu demonstrates the internal differences the colonial state had to account for while
adjudicating property rights through custom between Punjab and frontier spaces.
82 Ibid., p. 215. 83 Ibid., p. 218.
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How did the unevenness and the partiality of recorded custom translate into documentary
record-keeping in frontier districts, particularly for property records that followed tribal custom?
Furthermore, how did the conditions of governance on the frontier shape documentary practice in
ways that ultimately impacted identification procedures? If Bannu was the last district to be settled,
the Final Report of the Peshawar Settlement provides information about the more longstanding
issues concerning tribal custom as well as record-keeping. The settlement officer claims that the
most important of the property records was the register of mutations, which lists the changes in
property ownership of each parcel of land and the rent roll. He recommended that the register of
mutations should be “specially subjected to local scrutiny and testing.”84 For both the Punjab
districts as well as other frontier districts, this kind of reporting was notoriously difficult and
inaccurate. In this way, while it did necessitate the identification of individuals—by identifying all the
successors to whom the property was passed on—its accuracy and up-to-date state was hard to
maintain. The primary group to be blamed here were frequently the village accountants (patwaris).
Keeping with this trend, the report of the Peshawar Settlement too details difficulties with patwaris,
and details how the Extra Assistant Commissioner had to be deputed to the district as Revenue
Assistant to “brush up the patwaris.” In fact, the village staff had to be full reorganized, as many
patwaris were residing in cities due to “supposed danger of the frontier circles.”85
The Peshawar settlement also makes special mention of the shajarah-yi-nasab and, in a way
that highlights its significance of a “continuous conspectus of the proprietary body of the estate.”86
The genealogical tree had been prepared horizontally (not vertically) so that it could be bound up
with the record with ease. In this horizontal form, additions could be made with ease. Furthermore,
where an estate was held by a body of occupancy tenants, or when such tenants were numerous, a
84 Louis W. Dane. 1898. Final Report of the Peshawar Settlement. (Lahore: The Civil and Military Gazette Press). 85 Ibid., p. 52. 86 Ibid., p. 42.
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genealogical tree extending back to four generations was added. This was done specifically for
“succession cases” where a “table prepared and attested before a particular suit arose” was
considered necessary.87
Despite these changes to the form of the genealogical chart, the Deputy Commissioner,
Louis Dane, makes note of how the record was inaccurate in part due to the unsatisfactory way in
which the mutations (of successive land ownership) had been neglected. He attributes this “partly to
the neglect on the part of the patwaris to write up the mutations and partly to the difficulty of
ascertaining these with a suspicious and stiff necked population such as that of Peshawar.”88 In the
case of Tarakzai and Halimzai Mohmand estates, for instance, the owners refuged to attest any
mutations. As a result, the Deputy Commissioner decided to distrain the property share of the
produce until they could ascertain who was entitled to it. It is through such measures that Dane
claims that “by degrees the people were made to see… that it was to their own advantage to have a
correct record.”89 It is important to note here that the difficulty of collecting an accurate record was
attributed to the recalcitrance of the population of Peshawar district. In turn, the process of re-
verifying and recording who sold what to whom was fundamentally dependent on a cooperative
population, which varied to a great extent between Punjab and the Frontier—not because of some
inherent difference between the two populations but in large part due to the distinctions that the
colonial officials attributed to them, specifically in the form of governing and juridical structures.90
Further, as I will detail shortly, those frontier tribes belonging to “unsettled” districts occasionally
87 Ibid., p. 42. 88 Ibid., p. 43. 89 Ibid., p. 44. 90 Even during the first settlement of Peshawar district, the settlement officer made explicit note of how the local population did not appear conducive to taking up the plough or investing in the land’s productivity, attributing this to the proclivity to violence and tribal feuds. Even as colonial officers went forward with resettlement, they spatially reconfigured the administrative divisions to deal with the supposedly unmanageable Yusafzai tribe. Hugh R. James. 1865. Report on the Settlement of the Peshawar District (Lahore: Dependent Press; E. G. G. Hastings. 1878. Report of the Regular Settlement of the Peshawar District of the Punjab (Lahore: Central Jail Press).
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had land and family in settled districts. The process of settlement, along with frontier crimes
regulation (FCR) as I will detail, excluded them from entering these settled spaces. This inflected
how the settled population was willing to cooperate and provide information.
Even in areas where direct colonial rule (including, crucially, revenue settlement) was absent,
frontier tribes and their genealogical formations were hardly left alone (Beattie 2002; Tripodi 2011).
Self-consciously distinct from the rest of British India, “regular government” on the frontier was
replaced by a system of officers concerned with managing the area as a critical geopolitical space for
the security of colonial territory. This included interactions with the Afghan government across the
border as well as Russian imperial interests (Simpson 2015), which meant crafting a system to
manage the “troublesome” tribes on the frontier. Here, tribal genealogy was deployed copiously to
codify legal and judicial actions against tribes. At the same time, such codification worked through
the control that the colonial government did have in the settled districts of the frontier.
Collective Punishment and the Evasion of Individuation
A significant difference between the juridical structure of the frontier and the Punjab took the form
of the Frontier Crimes Regulation (FCR). Even as it comes to be deployed in parts of the imperial
borderlands that are “unsettled,” and is deployed to manage (as opposed to govern) independent
tribes beyond the settled districted, the FCR was intimately connected to the logics of a property
regime. As Benjamin Hopkins (2015) describes, while FCR took on several iterations in other parts
of the British Empire, such as Kenya and Somaliland, it was an outgrowth of land settlement on the
North-West Frontier, particularly the Hazara district Settlement Rules of 1870 (2015, 379). In
particular, the use of jirgahs to settle disputes was codified during this settlement alongside the
payment of monetary compensation for settling injuries. More broadly, Hopkins places juridical
innovations such as the FCR and revenue settlements within a shared colonial project: “by creating
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judicial linkages, and exclusions as the FCR did, these laws bound the frontier tribes to the colonial
economic sphere” (2015, 379).
Moreover, as described above in the case of Punjab, collective punishment followed notions
of codified tribal custom that too emphasized collective succession (by male agnates) and revenue
payment, up to the scale of the village. At the same time, there were crucial differences. The FCR
codified blockages on tribes, physically barring entire groups from entering the settled districts. This
excluded tribes not only from colonial markets but also their own agricultural lands (Hopkins 2015,
380). In short, while there was a common emphasis on tribal custom that extended across the
Punjab and the North-West Fronter, the FCR produced a distinct juridical space for frontier tribes,
both independent and those in settled districts such as Peshawar and Bannu. Moreover, while this
had distinct territorial effects, as Hopkins notes, the law was applied to a group of people “frontier
tribes” as opposed to a specified territory.91
One of the territorial implications was that colonial officials could prevent independent
tribes from entering settled districts by using measures such as fines and blockages. For certain kinds
of crimes, such as cattle lifting, even if it could be determined who the specific culprits were,
culpability fell on the tribe as a whole. Yet, it was within the settled districts that political authority
was exercised. It is when things go wrong that by barring tribesmen from access to district, and
seizing them when they are there, that the FCR was in fact enforced.92
This should not be taken to mean that it was impossible to identify or apprehend individuals.
Rather, such an identification process relied on the tribe itself, such as through an identification
91 The Pakistani government in 1951 amended the FCR by repealing it from certain areas such as the urban areas of the North-West Frontier Province and parts of Baluchistan. It also omitted the sentence “belongs to a frontier tribe” stating that this provision made the FCR “tribal in its application, not territorial.” Frontier Crimes Regulation Bill 1951, Serial No. 282, Judicial Section, National Archives of Pakistan. 92 This emerges in reference to arguments for creating a separate (from Punjab) North-West Frontier Province, and whether such a province could effectively exert control over the independent tribes. Report on the North-West Frontier Enquiry Committee, 1922, IOR/V/26/247/1 [BL].
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parades that required tribal leaders to bring forth suspect individuals.93 For example, consider the
following incident from Dera Ghazi Khan that involved the Khetran tribe regulated through the
FCR, which gives insight into how culprits were identified and punished through. In a report to
Colonel Bruce from Dera Ghazi Khan, a number of complaints are reported regarding the Khetran
Tumandar’s (tribal chief) “obstructionist” attitude.94 One is in relation to an incident where a lorry
driver Ilahi Bakhsh was stopped and robbed of his vehicle’s fuel by two Khetran tribesmen. The
driver escaped to Sakhi Sarwar, a nearby town and informed a sub inspector who then deputed a
head constable.
At the time, a local fair was happening in Sakhi Sarwar where many members of the Khetran
tribe were present. When the Tumandar’s assistance was requested in bringing forth men from his
tribe for an identification parade, he told the police officials that the whole affair was a plant against
his tribe. “His whole attitude from the very beginning was one of obstruction and evasion. When
asked to assist in the investigation of the cases under enquiry, he said that he could do nothing until
and unless he received orders from his own officers.” He was reminded of his duties as a Tumandar
of the tribe in the matter of assistance to the administration and was asked to produce Khetrans
present in Sakhi Sarwar for the purposes of an identification parade.”95 The Tumandar apparently
continued to “evade responsibility” and had to be reminded by the magistrate of the instruction
given to him the previous day about his duties.
Ultimately, out of the hundred and fifty Khetarns present at the fair, about thirty-two were
produced by the Tumandar. Two of these were identified by the witness as the culprit and arrested.
The person arrested was in fact the first cousin of the Tumandar, who was supposed to maintain the
93 Identification parades were in general a common procedure by police for identifying a culprit amongst a group of suspected individuals, but with high rates of inaccuracy. In fact, it was the prevalence of inaccuracies that were one of the motivations for Bertillon biometrics in Europe. See Sengoopta (2003). 94 Notes on the Tribes of Balochistan, 1930. Mss Eur F163/57 [BL]. 95 Ibid.
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peace. Instead, according to the complaint, “his tribesmen, including his relatives, have caused a
grave disturbance of the peace, attacked a police post… and rescued a prisoner form police
custody.” What becomes clear through this incident is that the local police in frontier districts was
quite dependent on tribal chiefs, not only symbolically but also practically, to “keep the peace” and
facilitate. Crucially, in the absence of a regime of identity documentation that would allow the police
to carry out an independent identification procedure, a parade such as the one described above
could only be successful if locals were willing to cooperate and share information—that is, if the
Tumandar and others could identify specific individuals on the basis of their familiarity with their
own tribal members.
Additionally, in spite of the absence of revenue settlement, and importantly the documentary
record keeping system it produced, there was substantial documentation of frontier tribes including
individuals, their distinguishing bodily characteristics, where they lived and what activities they had
been involved in. In a sense, these documentary records appeared as rosters of individual identities,
but tailored towards the goal of assessing the “fighting strength” of various tribes and identifying
troublemakers.
For instance, colonial officials’ documentary “summaries” of frontier tribes that included
lists of villages, houses, fighting strength, revolvers and country rifles.96 These summaries, according
to tribal sub-section or clan, include individual descriptions of people along the lines of who is to be
trusted or not. For instance, for a summary of the Mahsud and Wazir tribes, positive characteristics
included “done a lot of contract work” or “always well behaved,” while negatives ranged from “vain,
excitable” and “fond of intrigue” to an entire section devoted to miscreants (badmashes) who give
“trouble from time to time.” The details of a person’s identity were provided through a list of who
they are related to, primarily in terms of their brothers and cousins. “Amir Khan is the son of Lal
96 Summary of Notes on the Mahsud and Wazir Tribes, 1926, Mss Eur F163/38 [BL].
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Khan, one of the old Patonai Maliks and belongs to the Bariam Khel sub section. He lives at
Sirogha… Amir Khan is quite an efficient contractor. Believed to have been one of Lt. Dickenson’s
murders. His information is fairly reliable. Fazal Din is married to his sister. A relation of his Saiyid
Ghulam is a lessee of government lands at Sheikh Tattar in the Tank Tehsil.” In addition, these
summaries also held information on where specific individuals (presumably as heads of households)
can move depending on summer and winter, as well as blood feuds that may prevent them from
accessing land they own. In this vein, this summary of the Mahsud and Wazir tribes provides a list of
each sub-section’s villages with detailed directions. For example, “close to Sorarogah Post across
Tank Zam” or “three miles west of the Barora Khulla and 2 miles from the road via Ahmadwam.”
For each of the villages, along with the households and individuals concerned, it details who the
maliks are, the primary means of livelihood is and a comprehensive list of arms. The details of
personal and individual identification are often in reference to fighting strength. For instance, within
the Haideri sub-section, M. Hamzanir is “a dwarf” while M. Mirat Khan “has a wood leg. Of little
influence.”97
But the question stands, does this constitute individuation? Summaries such as this one
would have been helpful in identifying specific individuals but were limited in terms of a systematic
record keeping device that link an individual to proof of identification. The reason for this is
precisely that these individuals were grouped under their sub-tribe (khel) and, further, were dealt with
(through blockades or fines) on a collective basis. Here, it was important to know whether a specific
individual belonged to a group—these summaries assisted in this classificatory function—but
whether they were that specific individual was less important than preventing a group as a whole
from entering a region. In this sense, in comparison to genealogical charts that the colonial officials
sought to maintain, keep up to date and accurate—in a systematized fashion through local officials
97 Ibid.
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such as patwaris—the identification of groups and individuals that is recorded through these
summaries reflects a set of concerns emblematic of frontier management (Hopkins 2015).
NADRA’s demands for the shajarah-yi-nasab reflect these internally variegated, prior
administrative formations. In Punjab, genealogical documentation was driven by the idea that tribal
lineages mapped onto agricultural land. On the frontier, tribal genealogy was instrumentalized to
produce the space as a frontier—a geopolitical buffer for imperial interests—as opposed to a settled
place of belonging. As a result, the “tribe” in the colonial imagination was always more than a set of
genealogical and social relations on the frontier: it was a form of political organization that must be
dealt with politically. Frontier tribal genealogy came to be deployed for signaling reputation, alliances
(albeit shifting) and signifying political stakes for groups in relation to border zones. In this instance,
the genealogical computations informing tribal governance were not reified within a documentary
process of making claims or proving identity, particularly in relation to settled land and territory.
It is this tribal genealogical imagination, both for “tribal” Pashtuns and government officials,
which intersects with the contemporary Pakistani security state. The colonial state’s concern with
tribal genealogy on the North-West Frontier was more so a function of security, articulated as a
defense of the frontier districts that were settled, as opposed to revenue. For instance, in discussions
about the formation of a separate (from Punjab) North-West Frontier Province, the government
position in an enquiry report states that “the ultimate object of our whole frontier policy is the
security of India. The immediate object of our North-West Frontier policy is to control the
transfrontier tribes as to secure lives and property in our frontier districts.”98 Crucially, colonial rule
on the frontier set into motion a system of governance—alongside practices for how tribes learned
to interact with this particular governmental form through the political agent—that continues to
produce dissonance, especially when residents of tribal areas move to places like Islamabad.
98 Report on the North-West Frontier Enquiry Committee, 1922, IOR/V/26/247/1 [BL].
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NADRA’s identification practices fold in genealogical conceptions that are tied to land and
documentation, as they function as evidentiary sources of individual identity. However, NADRA is
somewhat flummoxed, however, when a “deep” genealogy is brought in as proof—such as through
long-winded explanations of genealogical connections in NADRA’s registration centers, as I will
describe in the next section.
While NADRA incorporates the ongoing system of political officers on the frontier to
authorize connections to tribal people, and while it seeks alternative means of documentation, it
constantly comes up against problematic ambiguities when dealing with the documented identity of
tribal Pashtuns. NADRA is faced with a limited form of documentation, a result of the exceptional
state of government described above. Moreover, and more significant to our purpose here, when
NADRA asks, “Who are you?” residents of the tribal agencies are forced to take on this burden of
proof in ways different from others. In response they articulate genealogies whose meanings lie
outside of what the technocratic postcolonial state is demanding. As I have argued, this should not
be read as a simple misunderstanding but borne out of a rehearsed relation where one’s genealogy
has held a particular meaning in relation to one kind of security state (the colonial) and is now asked
to take on another. During my fieldwork, shajarahs were often recited. When I asked my
interlocutors if they had a genealogical document, the answer would never be a simple “no” or
“yes.” It would always be, “Of course, we have a shajarah,” followed by a recitation of one or at least
the names of a few ancestors and places. The simple fact of the lack of documentation, a source of
ambiguity that potentially questions the legitimacy of lineage and belonging itself, in fact produced a
need to reassert one’s genealogy, affirming the value of its existence.
“Musakhel Is a Place but It Is Also Who We Are”
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During my fieldwork at the NADRA Registration Center, I frequently accompanied a data entry
operator called Ashraf in the afternoon shift. Ashraf had come to data entry through a circuitous
career path. He enjoyed the job, especially the ability to half seriously-half mischievously interrogate
the citizen-applicants who came in. A staunch supporter of the current Prime Minister Imran Khan,
he once joked with a young woman who had come in to change her address that he would only do it
if she promised to vote for Imran Khan. While not malicious, Ashraf was aware of the small powers
he held over people.
A young man accompanied by elderly parents and a small child was called up at Ashraf’s data
entry station. This man, who I will call Hassan, was twenty-eight years old but registering for a
NADRA card for the first time. Initially, Ashraf gave him grief for how he, as a responsible adult,
could be registering at this late age? Then Ashraf asked him for documentation to show proof of
age. Hassan produced a laminated middle school certificate. Ashraf held it up between his thumb
and forefinger, sighing exasperatedly, muttering “do you see the state of this thing?”
Ashraf asked Hassan if anybody in his family already had an identity card, and Hassan
replied that his parents and brothers did. Ashraf looked up the fathers’ record through his identity
card number, and finally said “your brother’s date of birth is 1980. According to the school
certificate, you are the same age. Now, you tell me, unless you are twins, is that possible?” The
family went to the side and discussed this dilemma in Pashto, counting months and years, listing off
other siblings. Ashraf, who did not speak Pashto, yelled at them “you don’t have to get into a fight
about it!” They looked confused. Ashraf meanwhile told me he had to be careful in the case of
Pathans. He did a background check in NADRA’s records for fraud by clicking on a link titled
“digital impounding.”
Eventually, Hassan returned to Ashraf’s desk and told him that his date of birth was in fact
1982. Ashraf sighed, complaining that the lack of proof around the year of birth created such
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“inefficiencies,” but then proceeded with registration. While taking down the permanent address
from Hassan’s parents’ cards—both cards were in front of Ashraf—Ashraf looked up confused and
asked "What is Musakhel? Is it a district, a street, what is it?" Hassan explained that the family’s
permanent address was in the tribal agency of Mohmand. Musakhel was the name of their village,
but Ashraf could not find this in the drop down menu of his address library.99[1] “But what is
Mushakhel?” he asked with annoyance as he scrolled through the names of districts on the drop-
down list.
Hassan responded to Ashraf’s question, attempting to describe Musakhel in terms of
geographical scale. “It is like this whole area: Pindi and Islamabad.” Simultaneously, his father told
both Hassan and then me that Musakhel was the name of their tribe, using the Urdu word qaum. In
an act of complex genealogical computation, making multiple relations equivalent to one, Hassan’s
father turned to Ashraf and emphatically declared, “Musa was the father of all of us.” Musakhel was
a place, a person and a way of signifying genealogical connection. Hassan’s father explained that
Musa came before his grandfather, and his grandfather’s grandfather, and so on. He proceeded to
list a number of other names from their genealogy, punctuating each of them with the exclamation
“and he was also our father!”100 Hassan attempted to do some damage control and explained that
“Musakhel is a place but also our ancestor.”
Ashraf, by this point, was rolling his eyes behind his screen. The thorough explanation of
lineage was irrelevant for Ashraf. All he wanted was the spatial category that “Musakhel” fell under.
At the same time, Ashraf was not unconcerned with who Hassan and his father were in terms of
99 NADRA’s address library is populated through categories of places drawn from the Revenue department. It is possible, given there was no direct settlement of Mohmand agency (until recently), that this village was not included in the library. 100 “Places, like persons, have individual identities: they possess proper nouns that others have bestowed upon them” (Ho 2006, 141), yet the problem of duplicate names is acute. As a result, genealogical experts devise ways, such as alphabetization to systematize biographies on the basis of names themselves rather than places, time or generation (Ho 2006, 143). In the case of Musakhel, the place name itself is a means for all belonging to the clan to both identify one another, as well as spatially locate themselves.
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their kin relations. Yet his examination of kinship at this data entry stage was shallow. Ashraf had
asked for Hassan’s parents’ identity cards, confirming that Hassan was related to them. He had
double-checked the dates of birth with Hassan’s other siblings. Ashraf was concerned with the
immediacy of relatedness to authenticate identity—the authenticity of horizontal kin connection—
and not deep, or rather steeply vertical, genealogical details of the sort that he had been provided.
Here, the decision to perform genealogical computation came from the citizen-applicant themselves.
In particular, the elderly father considered this an important aspect of his identity and thus how he
understood an identifiable person to be made. The genealogy represented how he understood
himself as well as what had already been recognized and validated by the state, namely that which
marked him as from “Musakhel,” the place and the link that tied the family to their place of origin in
Mohmand.
After the Musakhel confusion, Ashraf led the family to his senior, the assistant manager who
sat upstairs. It was clear he had not wanted me to come along, and so I did not follow. A few
months later, I ran into Hassan and his father outside the Registration Center. They recognized me,
we exchanged greetings and I asked them whether they had managed to get Hassan’s card. In
response, Hassan’s father flew into a rage. He explained that NADRA had not approved Hassan’s
application because they claimed he did not have enough proof (sabut). He said “it should be enough
proof that we have lived in Fauji Colony in Islamabad for so many years, that he (Hassan) was born
here. They keep asking for more proof, and for documents we do not have.”
One of these documents was the shajarah-yi-nasab. I asked him whether he could return to
Mohmand and get these documents. He explained, “God has given us plenty of land,” but it was
jointly owned with other family members. Moreover, there was no record of land transfer through
generations. In the absence of revenue settlement in the federally administered tribal areas, including
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during the colonial era, it made sense that this was the case.101 Hassan’s father emphasized yet again,
as he had the first time we met, that this did not mean he was without lineage. He explained that
they were Musakhels and that I could go to Mohmand and ask anyone who they were, and they
would tell me who Musakhels were. In the absence of documents that could authenticate
genealogical ties—authorized or even produced by the state—Hassan’s father was unable to “show
the work” of genealogical computation, not because it did not exist but because it did not match the
requisite form. He could only rely on his own ability to recite his ancestor’s names, put forward a
deep genealogy and use tribal affiliation as a means to authenticate citizen identity. I later found that
this was not Hassan’s first attempt at getting an identity card. He had tried before and failed, as the
information he did provide could not definitively determine that he was not Afghan.102 While
Hassan’s failure was partly a function of the black-boxed nature of the technology at hand—the
obfuscation of the precise moment at which Hassan’s identity registration did not proceed
forward—a key point of failure (based on the encounter during registration) rests on the mismatch
between genealogical forms.
My conversation with Hassan and his father clarified why the elderly man had been so
insistent about orally detailing his lineage that first day at the Registration Center. Since Hassan’s
family belonged to the tribal agency of Mohmand, and the Mohmand tribe inhabited both sides of
the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, the emphasis on Musakhel was intended to signify that they were
on this (Pakistani) side of the border and were thus entitled to an identity card. The presentation of
this “real” genealogy was supposed to fill the holes of absent documentation.103 Given that Musakhel
101 The frontier was settled in that the Peshawar valley was brought under colonial revenue administration. However, this land settlement did not extend to the non-agrarian tribal areas (Nichols 2001). 102 The neighborhood that Hassan and his family lived in also had Afghan residents. Further, the tribal agency they belonged to, Mohmand, was also a tribe that extended across the border into Afghanistan. This generated a problem that could perhaps only be resolved through a genealogical claim that could also be spatially asserted: the place and lineage of Musakhel. 103 Marshall Sahlins offers a useful conceptual tool for understanding kinship: it is the “transmission of life capacities among persons” (Sahlins 2013, 29). The reader may have noticed that Hassan’s father does a lot of the talking. He is
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is a territorially defined subdivision of the Mohmand district in Pakistan, Hassan’s father was
simultaneously emphasizing a genealogical claim and territorial affiliation.
Techniques of governance have long intersected with genealogies, especially in relation to
authority and legitimacy, but not always in an even fashion. There are moments when genealogical
memory, such as in Hassan’s encounter with a data entry operator, is mobilized but fails. In its
failure, a conjuncture comes to light: one kind of genealogical understanding and articulation, as a
form of social knowledge, reveals itself as misaligned with the mode of governance it intersects.
Instead of approaching this as a misunderstanding or misstep, historicizing this dissonance enables
insight into how the body politic is fractured, along the lines of historically constituted power
differentials. People like Hassan are then perpetually responding, and frequently have to reassert
their genealogical identity, precisely in response to these lines of internal variegation.
Conclusion
In a similar vein, Ma’i Dada’s emphasis on the value of genealogical expertise, alongside loud
proclamations about his own status as a Pashtun, hint towards an identity in crisis. Genealogies
become significant in times of need. Throughout Khan’s story, there are oblique references to the
murkiness of Ma’i Dada’s own shajarah. As mentioned earlier, Hindu dhobis claim that he is not a
Pashtun at all but an uncircumcised Hindu. When the author accidentally stumbles upon the truth of
this rumor, he is deeply conflicted. What does this mean for his family, the entire clan of Mirzakhels,
if Ma’i Dada who taught them who they were, was in fact not who they thought he was?
As the truth of his genealogical origins is discovered, Ma’i Dada, nearing the end of his life,
experiences a mixture of resignation and despair. “Oh, well—a teli’s son will always be a teli’s son.
trying to make their lineage work for Hassan, so that his grandchild can be enrolled in school, so that Hassan can get work, and avail the life capacities, broadly conceived, that genealogical success within NADRA’s databases allows.
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He doesn’t become a Pathan even if Pathans have reared him” (Khan, 256). Ma’i Dada’s words, and
the author’s conflict about his discovery, bring to the surface tensions that lie at the heart of
genealogical processes and relations. Again, Ma’i Dada shows us when and how genealogical claims
become important to assert.
Much like in Khan’s story, in the contemporary context of internal displacement from tribal
areas to cities such as the fortified capital of Islamabad, tribal Pashtun families struggle to re-
establish the legitimacy of their genealogies. They attempt to make themselves visible as holders of
authentic genealogies—fractured as these claims might be through the troubled experiences of
migration and colonial pasts—in the hopes that this would translate into holding an authenticated
identity. It is in this context that deep genealogies come to the surface. The need to practice and
excel at genealogical computation is generated out of the experience of not having a verified identity
document, producing an anxiety about the legitimacy of belonging to the here and now—not to
mention, how one is seen by an outsider, especially the state. What people like Hassan and his father
present to the state is a sense of the genealogically authenticated person, informed at least in part by
a history of colonial ethnographic knowledge production. Yet, in the absence of official
documentation—also a function of colonial history—what other means of assuring genealogical
success do they have?
The relationship between genealogical claims and evidentiary sources—between truth and
documentary proof—is fraught not only because of complex forms of social organization but also
because of how governments deploy genealogical information, producing exceptions layered within
historically uneven power relations. While the colonial and postcolonial states’ intersection with
genealogical matters significantly informs the latter, their effects are not unilateral. The difficulty of
managing or stabilizing genealogies—a quality that in fact creates the need for expertise—means
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that there are leakages and unexpected turns, ranging from forgotten relatives to marriages between
refugees and nationals, within the genealogical tree and even in NADRA’s database.
At the very end of Khan’s story, the author’s father, who likely already knew this secret of
Mai’ Dada’s identity, makes a crucial intervention. The author’s father creates an opening through
which Ma’i Dada, even as a teli, can be accepted. Yet, Khan’s realization and appreciation of the role
that an outsider played in the formation of the family’s identity is coupled with the need to deny and
erase Ma’i Dada’s outsider status. In this sense, the Pashtun migrants with whom I am engaged are
involved in a form of genealogical computation that is not only reworking the past to bring it into
the present—be it an ancestor (Musa) or an old neighborhood friend—in order to remake and
reassert themselves in a new context. They are also deploying genealogical relations to build and
nurture kin relations to enable movement into the future. The author’s father’s last words to him
about Ma’i Dada in this regard might elucidate this further:
“Whoever he was, he loved you and wanted you to learn to live with honor and dignity like
your forebears. And that’s what you should remember. Understand? Now, go play.” Then, just as he
had started to move, he broke his stride, turned around and snapped angrily, “And listen, don’t let
any son-of-a-bitch tell you he wasn’t a Muslim! Don’t let anyone say he wasn’t a Pathan!” (Khan,
256).
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CONCLUSION
In the Absence of Identity
Naqeebullah Mehsud left Waziristan with his family and settled in Karachi after the Pakistani
military began their Operation Rah-i-Nijat in 2009. On January 13, 2018, he was shot dead by
Karachi Police. The police claimed that Naqeebullah had links with terrorist organizations such as
the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan, Lashkar-e-Jhangvi and the Islamic State of Iraq and the
Levant (Daesh). His friends and family denied these links, arguing that he was a hard-working
laborer who was waiting to catch a break so he could open his own clothing store. His fans, who
followed his popular Facebook page, protested that he was far from a terrorist: his photos evidence
his aspirations for becoming a model. Mehsud’s extrajudicial killing sparked protests all over
Pakistan and mobilized the Pashtun Tahaffuz Movement (PTM).
I was in Islamabad when the PTM organized a protest march on January 26, 2018, starting
from Dera Ismail Khan, a city where many who were displaced from South Waziristan during the
Pakistani military’s operations were relocated. The march passed through other cities in Khyber
Pakhtunkhwa including Peshawar, Charsadda, Mardan, Swabi as well as the neighborhood of Tarnol
in Islamabad, one of my field sites. Ultimately, PTM held a sit-in that was called the “All Pashtun
National Jirga” outside the National Press Club in Islamabad.
When I arrived at the Press Club on the second day of the sit-in, I found that it was in full
swing with chai stands, food stalls and the PTM anthem playing loudly from the sound system. The
ground in front of the Press Club was packed, and most of the people there were energized and
engaged. I saw this energy continue at the protests and marches over the next few months in various
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locations. Most prominently, the crowd would passionately respond to the central refrain and
question of the PTM anthem, “what is this freedom for?” (da sanga azadi da?) with the following:
Zwanan mu qatal kegee Our youth is killed
Korona mu wraneegee Our homes are destroyed
Pakhtun pa k gharkegee Pashtuns are sunk
Da sangaazadi da? What is this freedom for?
PTM’s twenty-six-year-old leader, Manzoor Pashteen, questioned “this” freedom—the one
purportedly provided by the independent Pakistani state—if it was unable to provide a life with
dignity to all its citizens. The preoccupation with dignity was reflected in Pashteen’s statement after
being released from prison on bail after he was charged for sedition. He said in a light-hearted tone,
“prison was a lot better than my home. Its walls were intact. No one had stolen its iron and bricks.
The walls were high. No one entered it without permission and violated its sanctity as is done with
our homes. There were no landmines there. It was safe as [opposed to] our homes” (Shah 2020).
PTM also emphasized the question of dignity through their demands on the Pakistani state
and the military, in particular. These demands include an end to harassment of Pashtuns, particularly
Mehsuds, Wazirs and other groups from the tribal areas by police and military personnel at
checkpoints. Additionally, when I attended the PTM protest in Swat, I saw the sheer numbers of
families who had come from various parts of the tribal areas and had joined PTM because they had
family members missing. In a conversation with one woman whose son had been disappeared, she
told me at one point that “I would rather they would just tell me that he is dead. Not knowing is
killing me.” It is the ambiguity and obfuscation of events that was identified as part of the violence.
The frontier emerges at PTM rallies in moments such as this one, as the site where even the most
egregious acts of violence, such as disappearance, can become indeterminate when bodies are not
found and accountability seems impossible.
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Figure 14: Woman with placard of her missing son’s ID card at the Pashtun Tahaffuz Movement protest in Swat (source: photo by author)
While the specter of spectacular violence continually lurks behind securitized identification
technologies—in the form of detentions, interrogations and disappearances that are all too
common—in this dissertation, I sought to first understand the pervasive ubiquity of structural
violence that is bound up with people’s capacity to make their everyday life possible and livable.
I wanted to grasp how Pashtun migrants live within structures of exclusion, how they negotiate
inclusion and how all this comes to constitute an ordinary existence in Pakistan. From that vantage
point, we can now consider how an identification system like NADRA intersects with the brute
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violence of a securitized state, and more specifically, how it intersects with the kinds of political
claims it generates at this juncture.
First, the photograph above, taken at a PTM rally, illustrates the use of identity cards to stake
a claim and demand accountability from the very government which issued them. They function,
through the particularity of photo and name, as an individuating technology, to identify the person
that once was but is now missing. The identity cards are held, yet again, by kin.
The identity card emerges in yet another context at PTM rallies, that is, in the form of a
concrete demand. The Pakistani military instituted an identification mechanism parallel to NADRA
in Waziristan in the form of the country (watan) card, which all residents were required to have in
order to move within the tribal areas.1 The PTM has demanded that the watan card be abolished, and
this demand was ultimately met by the government by late February 2018. In this sense, one of
PTM’s demands was to be treated like other citizens of Pakistan, not like residents of the frontier.
In considering the watan card alongside the identity card, we can see how it functions to
classify people from Waziristan as a population that is to be marked and separated from other
groups. It is precisely this act of classification that PTM takes issue with. In Afrasiab Khattak’s (a
senator from the left wing Pashtun party, the Awami National Party) speech at the PTM sit-in at
Islamabad, he critiqued the watan card by asking, “if the British did not manage to colonize us (tribal
Pashtuns) then who are these people (yeh kaun hote hain)?” He pushed further and said that if the
watan card was not abolished, then tribal Pashtuns should throw away all forms of identification.
Khattak directly connected the watan card to colonial rule based on how it classified tribal Pashtuns
and exposed them to discriminatory treatment, distinct from other Pakistani citizens who are, as this
1 As Mohsin Dawar, a Member of National Assembly from Waziristan, and prominent leader in the PTM, describes in The Nation “One can say that “Watan Card” is like a visa for the residents of North Waziristan. The logo of Khyber Pass with NWA written under that shows the stupidity of the designer of the card as they have no relation to each other.” https://nation.com.pk/21-Dec-2016/returning-to-north-waziristan.
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dissertation has shown, subject to individuation technologies in the form of NADRA’s identity card.
In listening to political speeches as well as in conversations with PTM activists in Islamabad at PMT
rallies I was struck by how their poetic and poignant demands for accountability (from the Pakistani
military in particular) were consistently tied with their calls for the specificity of individuation—
something the Pakistani military blatantly denied in its use of blanket and indiscriminate violence.
Consider the fact that in a political speech, a PTM activist argued that “the tribal” (qabaili)
had been used by both the colonial and the Pakistani state, especially in wars such as the one in
Kashmir in 1948 and again against the Soviets in Afghanistan in 1979. In using “the tribal” in the
singular, this activist foreground how a classificatory schema worked to flatten and diminish the
value of the many tribal persons who had lived through this violent history. In this vein, he said “he
(the tribal Pashtun) is a ‘militant’ when alive and becomes a ‘terrorist’ when he dies. Give us the
names of these terrorists, tell us who each one of them were. Do not leave their bodies unidentified
and do not disappear them.”2 This demand, directed at the Pakistani military, points to the
devaluation of each life, as the collective bodies are disappeared and mutilated beyond their
recognition as individuals. The absence of accountability and of accounts themselves (hisaab), in
terms of bodies left unidentifiable and missing persons, was continually brought up at PTM rallies.
Furthermore, in an interview, Manzoor Pashteen recalled that when he and a group of
students first started protesting against the military’s conduct in Waziristan, he received a call from a
military official who asked him to stop the protests. While requesting this, the official used the
Pashto proverb “if a forest catches fire, the dry wood gets burnt with the wet” (key cheray jangal ke aur
markaray, vich largay da loond sara sohay). This was the officer’s response to the PTM’s protest against
the indiscriminate violence that was killing innocent civilians along with the Taliban in their military
operation in Waziristan. In short, during military operations, establishing the innocence of specific
2 Author’s video recording at PTM Rally.
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individuals was an impossibility. In admitting as much, the army official classified all residents of
Waziristan into the same group, one that was going to have to suffer through the fire where both
dry and wet wood gets burnt.
In Manzoor Pashteen’s speeches, the impossibility of living with dignity for Pashtuns—in
the tribal areas or even in places like Karachi if people like Naqeebullah Mehsud are murdered on
the streets—is intimately connected to the problem of indiscriminate discrimination. Misrecognition
and an absence of individuation—a gross classification as a “Mehsud” who must be part of the
Taliban—is reflected in the decision to govern Waziristan residents through the Pakistan military’s
watan card. This creates, in Khattak’s words, a colonial relation where the tribal person has to ask the
question “are we not part of the rest of Pakistan?” To be clear, the watan card still identifies
individuals uniquely but towards the goal of locating them to specific villages in Waziristan, such
that Waziris no longer feel free in their own home.
This realization, and the related demand to abolish the watan card, emerged under conditions
of displacement. PTM originated from a group of young student-activists in Dera Ismail Khan (a city
in South Punjab where many Waziris displaced during the military operations relocated), and then
dramatically grew as a movement in response to the extra judicial killing of Naqeebullah Mehsud in
Karachi—both spaces outside the tribal areas. The regime of frontier governance is thus challenged
most powerfully in a moment when the frontier moves with frontier residents to places where they
should be citizens but are not. Quite simply then, the PTM’s call is a call for de-frontierization, and
beyond, a decolonialized relationship with the state.
PTM is thus good to think with for articulating and thinking through politics that has the
potential to reconfigure the role of identification technologies in social and political life. On one
hand, the watan card signaled tribal Pashtun identity in a way that subjected Pashtuns to
discrimination, a lack of freedom in their own homes and violence. Yet, as this dissertation has
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shown, even in the absence of an alternative ID that links an individual to a particular locality (and
instead scales to the national level), NADRA deploys database technology in ways that produces the
exclusion of tribal Pashtuns. Individuating and classificatory forms of individual and group identity
create a related but distinct sets of exclusions, and approaching this issue through the lens of the
PTM can be productive: they are an organized political movement with directed goals. PTM has
clear asks from both the Pakistani state and the military. In short, PTM is asking for a “thinner”
identification, one that does not explicitly signal ethnicity or locality but still serves as an
individualized identity. In other words, PTM wants a process of identification that distinguishes but
does not discriminate. Moreover, in making this demand, PTM brings into relief the fraught
dynamic between identity as a category and identification as a process.
Yet how do we think with and through those who do not articulate their experiences with
identity and identification in these explicitly political terms? To answer this question, I turn to
another ‘outside’ to NADRA’s identification practices through the experiences of someone I call
Zainab. She was introduced in Chapter One in the context of a failed attempt at registering her for a
NADRA identity card. Zainab’s identification story is, unlike PTM, difficult to think with in part
because there is no clear, actionable politics behind it. Instead, her case provides a complex terrain
for thinking through questions of identity, identification as well as misrecognition. If NADRA
simplifies complex relations by consolidating them into a unique individual, then it is precisely the
density and heaviness of Zainab’s web of relations that prevents her ‘thin’ identification. I will trace
each document that could potentially have led to a source of identification for her—birth, marriage
and death certificates—to show how each possibility of identification is embedded within a broader
social, historical and familial milieu that ultimately makes this impossible. NADRA’s kinship-based
attestation procedures, which rest upon an uneven terrain of documentation, make ordinary citizens
into archival workers. NADRA generates a mode of active historicity; the more problematic
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individuals and families are within NADRA’s schema, the more they have to “historicize”
themselves. Inadvertently, the process of authenticating identity compels families to produce a form
of Pakistani history, in the form of a history of their relationship to the state as well as to their own
families. In so doing, Zainab’s circumstances articulate how identity—in this case the experiences
and conditions that make one who they are—and identification can be directly at odds with one
another. In this manner, Zainab and PTM, side by side, offer us ways to think through how an
identity is never something to be had, which can be captured through the process of identification.
Rather they collectively reveal how slippery the notion of identity is, and how it is often at odds and
not on a continuum—either in the realm of experience or in politics—with demands or attempts at
identification.
The Marriage Certificate
On the day of her wedding, Zainab had to travel all the way from Chakwal, a small town eight hours
away where she had grown up, to Islamabad. Her wedding dress was so heavy with all its bead work
on it that she could not walk by herself. It was July and stiflingly hot. She felt suffocated in the car,
and when she drank out of a water bottle at her wedding, her sister-in-law reprimanded her “what
kind of a bride drinks straight out of a bottle?”
The day I met her for the first time, Zainab had brought some documents with her: two
vaccination cards for her children, one official death certificate from the neighborhood Union
Council with her husband’s name on it, a photocopy of the dead husband’s identity card and a birth
certificate for her daughter, which was from the hospital and so not quite “official.” I asked her if
she has a marriage document (nikahnama), and she responded that when she got married at the age
of sixteen, she never knew that she might need one. She was now in her early twenties. How was
Zainab supposed to keep track of paperwork on the hot, terrible day of her marriage? She did not
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even remember signing anything, let alone asking questions about it later. Not to mention, she
remembered a story about another female relative who had insisting on registering her marriage, and
people had maligned her in all kinds of ways. They suggested she was trying to get a divorce, get a
hold of her husband’s property or was having an extramarital affair. Now, Zainab told me, “I
understand why that woman might have insisted.”
Zainab told me about her wedding day the very first time I met her, which was at a sewing
center, a vocational training center of sorts for women, in the Alipur Farash neighborhood in
Islamabad. Rehana Bibi, a middle aged community leader who more or less ran things at the sewing
center, was at the forefront of organizing for housing rights in Islamabad. I had met Rehana prior to
fieldwork before graduate school. Rehana Bibi was one of those people that many people in the
neighborhood, especially women, turned to for assistance with all kinds of issues. Rehana and I were
in the middle of a conversation when she abruptly stopped, slapped her forehead and yelled over my
shoulder to a woman I later learned was Zainab: “Oh! You! Pathan girl! Zehra, I asked this woman
to come today because she’s been having a hard time trying to get an identity card made. Her
children won’t be able to go to school next year. The public schools need a b-form, which you can’t
get without a parents’ identity card… You know how it is.”
At that point in my fieldwork, I had looked at enough documents to know that Zainab did
not have what was required for an identity card. In fact, she had no document in her name. Perhaps
more importantly, she had no kin who could be a viable source for her identification. Everything in
her hands at the time belonged to someone else, such as her dead husband or her young children.
Or it referred to her obliquely, or worse, unofficially—for instance, her elder daughter’s hospital-
issued birth certificate that said “Zainab Bibi” under “mother’s name.” This birth certificate was not
an official, state-issued document. It served only a supporting function. It did not, for instance,
connect Zainab to a unique set of biometrically verified fingerprints, which would confirm that she
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was who she claimed she was. I agreed with Zainab after that first meeting to meet her at her house
to see if we could find other alternatives, perhaps a marriage certificate (nikahnama) that her mother-
in-law might possess.
Over time, Zainab and I became friends. I always parked my car in the same spot, next to
the chicken shop where I had parked the first time I had visited Zainab’s house. Her house was the
second one on the street. The side gate was always open. The first time I visited, I knocked but
Zainab had already seen me walking from the street and was standing on the stairway that was
immediately to the right of the side gate. Her face was half covered by her scarf. She observed purdah
and covered her face from the rest of the men in the household. One of her nieces would always ask
me why I didn’t cover my head. Didn’t I know that the devil (shaitan) would urinate on my head?
Zainab would defend me: the devil has bigger concerns than urinating on women’s heads.
Zainab’s home, and the complex interpersonal and structural dynamics between kin that
shaped the space of the house, made it clear to me how it had become so difficult to ask for a
marriage certificate or get any other documentation at all. The documents and other sources of
identification, such as the kin themselves, were thus imbricated within these complex relationships
which were simultaneously intimate and yet so strained. I will attempt to elucidate this through a
description of how the home was organized, and how the different individuals positioned
themselves within it.
The gate opened up into an enclosed courtyard. The first floor was occupied by Zainab’s
eldest brother-in-law and his family, including at least five children. At least two of the young men
of this family were married with children of their own. Over time, I would get to know one of the
daughters in this family. She was getting married at the end of the year and would be diligently
working on sewing her wedding outfit, embroidering doilies and quilting. I would usually say a quick
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hello and go upstairs to find Zainab, accompanied by a large number of small children who I
eventually got to know by name but found difficult to keep track of whose exactly they were.
To get to Zainab’s room I had to walk through the kitchen but if I kept going up the stairs, it
would open up to a large terrace. I would occasionally find Zainab here if not on the third floor,
where the tandoor—a clay oven for making bread—was. The youngest brother-in-law and his family
lived up on the third floor too. If I was ever intercepted on my way to Zainab’s room by Zainab’s
mother in law, who everyone called mother (adday), she would drag me to her section of the house.
It was located on the second floor but towards the front with a balcony. She would then order
around Zainab and her sister in law to bring me tea and pull various snacks from her closets,
insisting that I eat everything. I could tell that Zainab preferred our one-on-one conversations, for
she could not share everything about her childhood and her inner thoughts in front of these other
relatives.
Zainab’s room, which she shared with her two young children, was on the second floor. The
only furniture in her room were the toshak, floor cushions with back rests upholstered in red cloth,
lining the walls on three sides. There was no window. Often, at the hour I arrived, Zainab would be
lying on her side on the carpeted floor. At times, the door to the storeroom would be closed and she
would be in complete darkness with her head covered with her scarf. A sign that she was having one
of her “mind blood” episodes (zehni blood), as she called them. A kind of mental pressure, a weight—
full of blood—was on her mind. When the electricity went out, and the single fluorescent bulb on
the wall or the television could not be turned on, the only other source of light was Zainab’s cell
phone. The cell phone did not actually have a chip in it, as Zainab was too hesitant to ask her
brothers-in-law for one, but it did allow her to play the video game Candy Crush. One day, while we
drank tea, a campaign advertisement for the politician Imran Khan’s “million tree tsunami” came
on. Zainab rushed to the adjoining storeroom that had a skylight of sorts. She showed me a pot full
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of chilies and described how she had learned to grow things in her childhood home. Zainab’s stories
of her childhood home and her relationship with “her own” (apnay) conveyed a sense of freedom, of
movement and growth that seemed to no longer exist. At the same time, Zainab shared that she
hated being outside on the street, and she even dreaded interacting with her children’s
schoolteachers. The house, with all of its problems, was still a safe place. It was a container for kin.
It held multiple families, and its spatial layout was a representation of a fraught set of kinship
relations between its various occupants (Bourdieu 1990; Carsten and Hugh-Jones 1995).
Zainab and the first wife of her now deceased husband both lived on the second floor, their
rooms across from one another. Even after the husband’s death, she continued to have a terrible
relationship with the first wife. As soon as their relationship seemed to improve, another petty fight
would break out—for instance, over the dice of Ludo (the best board game ever invented) that their
respective sets of children would quarrel over.
The first wife was her husband’s cousin. She was an insider to the family; her affines were
also her own kin. Zainab, on the other hand, came from a different tribe altogether. She described
how, even as they were both Pashtuns, she spoke a different dialect of Pashto. She remembered her
first week in the house when someone told her to get a plate and she had no idea what they had
asked but was too terrified to ask. The same thing happened with an egg, and then again with a
chair. Zainab explained to me that her brothers had agreed to giving her hand in marriage knowing
that her husband was already married but her maternal uncle had disagreed. Zainab was fifteen or
sixteen at the time, and herself had agreed to the match. Her parents had passed away by the time of
her marriage, and while she did not say it I believe she felt she was a burden on her brothers. It was
during our very first meeting, when I had asked Zainab if her parents had identity cards, that Zainab
had told me that her parents had died when she was quite young. They had both passed away due to
complications from illness, her father first and then later her mother. She had then been cared after
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by her elder brothers as well as her mother’s brother. This uncle, whom she had been very close to,
still refused to speak to her because he had not approved of her marriage to her husband.
Yet, Zainab did not seem to harbor resentments against her husband. She said he had never
wanted to marry his cousin, the first wife. He had shown nothing but kindness to Zainab. She
described how he took care of Fatima (their daughter) when she was born, something a man did not
have to do. One day, when Zainab was playing Candy Crush, she mentioned that her husband used
to play Snake, a game that was on the old, not-smart phones of the early 2000’s. It would make a
sound that would irritate her to no end, and so he would deliberately play it to annoy her. She
described the small fights they had because it was the only thing after leaving her natal home that
was reminiscent of her own family, her childhood home.
Zainab’s husband is dead but she continues to live in the house she came to when she
married him. She told me that her children “belong” to this house, that is, to their patrilineal descent
line. It would not be right to root them out of this place, away from their kin. In part, Zainab
continues to live here because it is expected of her, but also because her ties to her natal family are
fragmented and tenuous.
The Birth Certificate
“Looking at this birth certificate, I can smell ‘the complex’ again—the hospital where Fatima was
born. I had first gone to Dr. Shakeela’s clinic, here in the neighborhood. She said it would be a
complicated case, because I was so young, and suggested I go to a hospital. My mother-in-law and
eldest brother-in-law took me to ‘the complex’, and the doctor wanted to keep me in the hospital
overnight. I refused and came home.
That night when I came back from the hospital, Fatima’s father came back home late from
work. He was very upset that I had refused to stay at the hospital. I remember that two or three sets
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of dirty clothes were lying around, and I started to wash them. I was worried they would make me
go back to the hospital and, if God forbid I died there, everybody who would come to pay their
condolences for my death would say that I had not even bothered to do the laundry before exiting
the world. Leaving my mess to be cleaned up by others. When Fatima’s father was reprimanding me
for not taking care of myself, and not staying at the hospital, I could only half hear him. All I could
think about was the sight of dirty laundry at my own funeral.”
I asked Zainab why she would be so concerned about the state of her house in such a
pregnant state. She explained that it was not about pregnancy but that she was worried she might die
leaving her house dirty. And then what would people say? “You and I might not be so judgmental to
care about the personal hygiene habits of a dead person. But you have no idea what people are like. I
am speaking from experience. I was probably around fourteen when I attended my first funeral. I
had always felt strange around death. My heart would shake, and I could not bear to look at the dead
body. But my brother had forced me to go to this funeral, as those relatives had come to my
mother’s death. When we arrived, I noticed that two women had gone into the dead woman’s room
and were looking through her cupboards, commenting on their disorderly state. They then picked up
the floor mat (chittai) in her room and pointed to the amount of dirt under it. When they sat down,
they quoted some hadith from the Prophet Muhammad, which emphasized the importance of
leaving one’s affairs in order before death. Adding how terrible it was that this woman—who had
just died—had left a mess to be cleaned up by her family members.
I did tell them, right there and then, I really hope that none of you come to my funeral. How
can you be commenting on such things so soon after a woman’s death? Who knows, her spirit is
probably still in this room. She is probably listening to all this and you can imagine how hurt she
would be, that too, after undergoing death. Anyhow, this was all in my head when I was washing
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those clothes. Ayesha’s father kept telling me to stop.3 He said he would wash them later, and I did
not have to worry about it. I, of course, did not tell him what I was thinking—about dying during
childbirth and these overly hygienic and critical mourners who would come to my funeral—but kept
washing. And then later ironing too.”
Zainab had a strong affective connection to all the documents I asked her about. At first, I
found this strange and somewhat at odds with our collective purpose of figuring out how to get her
or her children registered with NADRA. Yet, the documents continually brought out strong
associations with events and experiences (Navaro-Yashin 2007). More often than not, the memories
Zainab related were connected to embodied experiences that then impacted how she decided to
relate to the future of her documentation—with apprehension but also not infrequently with a sense
of humor. None of this should be too surprising. The kinds of documents that are most often used
to prove identity come under the category of “vital records,” namely birth, marriage and death
certificates. Documents related to crucial “life events.” I was told by NADRA officials that it is by
keeping accurate records of these events that they can generate increasingly accurate identification.
In this sense, embodied information and memories come to be folded into vital records, which in
turn are deployed for the purposes of identification. But what if those events are what make the
identification impossible?
Death Certificates
One day when I arrived at Zainab’s house one day, her children were leaving for their Quran class.
Zainab asked me to sit down and made a darting gesture with her eyes towards the children, and I
understood that I should not let it slip that Zainab and I would be leaving the house while they were
3 It is quite common for women in Pakistan to refer to their husbands as the father of their children, and hardly ever directly by name.
371
away. As soon as they went down the stairs, Zainab went to find her mother-in-law who was
supposed to go with us to the NADRA office. Adday entered the room and greeted me but then
started puttering around, opening closets, going into the kitchen and then returning again. Adday
then stepped outside the house to ask the next door neighbor to come with us as well. I began to
feel a bit nervous, as I knew we had a limited amount of time until Zainab’s brothers-in-law returned
from work.
In the meantime, Zainab tried on a burqa she had gotten stitched. She normally didn’t wear
one but thought it might be useful in this context. The kind of clothing Zainab and her family wear,
pleated dresses over a loose pair of pants (shalwar), seems to have suggested to NADRA officials that
they are not Pakistani Pashtuns but Afghans.4 Others in the neighborhood had told Zainab this.
They had told me this, too, at times also suggesting that clothing is often not an inaccurate marker
of these nuanced ethnic differences. As we were walking to my car, Zainab tells me that the family
used to have a car which her husband had bought. It was the car that he died in.
During our thirty-minute drive over to the NADRA office, Adday explained to me that her
NADRA card was made on the basis of an older manual identity card. This “manual” card was
produced by a bureaucratic organization called Directorate General of Registration that was paper-
based (not data-based) and had preceded NADRA. As it turned out, there had been some confusion
at the time Adday had taken this older manual identity, which in fact belonged to Adday’s mother, to
the NADRA office for the first time. They had understood Adday herself to be the person the card
belonged to. As a result, her date of birth on her current NADRA card was 1910. That would make
her far too old to have given birth to her son, Zainab’s husband. Clearly, we would not be able to
4 While all Pashtuns trace their genealogical roots back to Afghans, the Durand line drawn by British colonial officers has functioned as a somewhat arbitrary border dividing the two populations. After independence, and the creation of Afghanistan and Pakistan, there is movement and exchange between the two populations and it remains difficult to distinguish some tribes (as Pakistani or Afghan) in particular due to their shared tribal names. See Lindholm (1996).
372
present her NADRA card for the connection that was required between her and Zainab’s children,
Adday’s grandchildren. I asked Adday how the officials could have possibly thought that she was that
old? Zainab told me that in that moment she had gotten nervous that this mistake might lead to
Adday not getting a card at all, so her grandson who was accompanying her at the time told the
NADRA official that Adday had grazed cows and goats for most of her life. The exercise and time
spent with nature had kept her this young. Adday explained to me in the car that she was anxious
that this whole process, of trying to produce the children’s b-forms through Adday’s card, may put
her own identity card into jeopardy. I understood her point, and so we all agreed that we would try
to find another way to get Zainab an identity card.
This was the third time Zainab and I were going to the government office that made identity
cards in Islamabad. It was getting risky. Her brothers-in-law were not fond of these trips. As I
mentioned in Chapter One, the Assistant Manager told us that the only way to make an identity card
would be to get copies of Zainab’s parents’ death certificates from the municipal office of the
district where they had passed away. That would be in rural Punjab, about seven hours away. I heard
Zainab snort at this suggestion. She whispered into my ear “we might as well get our own death
certificates while we are at it. They would lose their mind if we went by ourselves.” The last time we
had had to go to NADRA, they had gotten upset with her and her mother-in-law, and told them
that they could not just roam around as if they were the “master of their own wills.”
I knew, according to NADRA rules, that technically someone in Zainab’s situation could
request a non-relative to vouch for them through their CNIC. I asked the Assistant Manager about
this possibility, and whether I could provide the guarantee for Zainab using my own CNIC. In front
of Zainab, he explained that since there was absolutely no document in her name, that would be
impossible. Then, he took me aside and asked, “How well do you know this woman? How do you
know she isn’t an Afghan?”
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Identification and Misrecognition
Surprisingly enough, this was the first time over the course of my fieldwork that I had been put in
that position and asked to identify someone else. The question was: was I seeing Zainab for who she
really was? I knew that Zainab’s late father-in-law’s second wife was an Afghan, but intermarriages
among ethnic Pashtuns living in Pakistan and Afghans were common, so it possibly meant nothing.5
I knew that Zainab had grown up in Chakwal, I had heard innumerable stories about this so in this
sense, she was definitely Pakistani.
At the same time, there was something about his question that unnerved me. While I
dismissed this constructed nationalist separation, I did think to myself: what does it mean to truly
know someone in an ethnographic context? Even though Zainab shared intimate details of her life
with me, I found, especially after the NADRA official’s question, I could not get myself to just
outright ask her about her citizenship status. It felt like a breach of trust and of boundaries that had
not been vocalized but had been set. This boundary forced me to reflect on the nature of
ethnographic knowledge and of anthropological practice: how do we know what we know, and at
what cost do we acquire that knowledge? I felt like I was being a bad anthropologist by not doing
my best to fill out all possible missing pieces of information. This question, of this kind of an
identity and its documentation, circled around some of the central themes of my dissertation
research. In other ways, however, it seemed extraneous to what was at stake in terms of Zainab’s life
and world. I saw the bizarre paradox of what it meant to be a person both enmeshed, almost
5 As mentioned earlier in this dissertation, Afghans are not eligible for NADRA cards, as they are under refugee status in Pakistan. Since Pakistan and the United Nations High Commission for Refugees began the repatriation process in 2010 to return Afghan refugees to Afghanistan, NADRA facilitated the process of creating an Afghan refugee registry and produced a refugee card to serve as an identity document. NADRA terms Afghan refugees in its system as “intruders” into the database. As a result, the NADRA official’s suspicion that Zainab’s might be Afghan—despite the fact that she was born and raised in Pakistan—made it extra difficult to procure an identity card with ease.
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trapped within kin relations and yet without the ability to transform this relatedness into verifiable
identity.
Close to the end of my field work, we had decided on a new strategy: to get official birth
certificates for the children as a place-holder until the b-forms from NADRA were arranged for.
The local union council issued birth certificates and, on an earlier visit, we explained the situation to
them. They had less stringent rules than NADRA and agreed. They gave me two forms which I took
to Zainab so that we could fill them out together. Zainab could read and write but not very well, and
did not understand the formal Urdu on the forms. Moreover, as I mentioned earlier, after extended
months of fieldwork at NADRA offices, I had become a local consultant of sorts for many people’s
bureaucratic problems. However, unlike any of the NADRA procedures, this paper form had a line
for “sub-caste/tribe.” When Zainab dictated the name of their sub-tribe, a voice from outside the
room yelled down the grate in Pashto, and Zainab whispered, “don’t.”
There are several dialects of Pashto, and the one I had learned was not spoken in their
household. In fact, Zainab spoke a different dialect from her in-laws, too—something that had
caused anxiety and eventually amusement during the early years of her marriage. Zainab liked to
speak to me in Urdu and in Punjabi despite my efforts to practice my Pashto. The point is, I perhaps
understood a bit more than I wished I had at that moment. Zainab’s elder sister-in-law, who
presumably listened to all our conversations, had told her that if I put the tribal name Zainab had
initially given me, the government was likely to think they were Afghan. I did not indicate that I had
understood this statement and quietly made the change on the document when Zainab asked me to
without asking any questions.
Did this incident mean that Zainab and her family were Afghan? I find it very difficult to
say. As the case of the parliamentarian Hafiz Hamdullah, described in Chapter Two, exemplifies,
despite Hamdullah’s genealogical roots in the Noorzai tribe, NADRA was ultimately not justified in
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cancelling his identity card according to the final ruling of the Islamabad high court. In this case, like
many other Pashtun interlocutors, Zainab and her family were aware of how they were
(mis)understood as Afghan and the kinds of things that may suggest this. This was not the only
moment where this self-awareness came across. As mentioned earlier, Zainab also bought a burqa
for the specific reason that her pleated frock shirt made her look “too Afghan.” The burqa was the
best possible solution since she found the side slits (chaak) of the more common shirts (kurtas)
uncomfortable and likely immodest.
Such moments of potential misrecognition, alongside the awareness on the part of the
subject of that misrecognition, bring to the fore the complex relationship between identity (national
or personal) and the fraught process of identification. The three evidentiary marriage, birth and
death certificates—as they provide narrow points of entry into Zainab’s complex and capacious life
world that always ultimately extends past these moments—foreground how documentary existence
is woven into a world of kin, and yet that does not generate a straightforward process of
identification. On the contrary, kin and traumatic life events associated with those kin are precisely
what make the possibility of identification—now in multiple senses of the word—a near
impossibility. Zainab made herself and her world abundantly clear to me, even with vulnerability,
perhaps more than any of my other interlocutors during fieldwork, and yet the impossibility of
accessing the possibility of identification “thinly” continues to bother me.
Zainab’s identification becomes elusive for NADRA as well. This is not only because of the
absence of the three documents I mentioned above. It is also, as I have attempted to illustrate
through the description of the events and circumstances that produced and surrounded the absence
of these documents, because of how Zainab’s kin network was structured and shaped by events such
as marriage, birth and death. As I have shown through the dissertation at various moments,
documentary and identification technologies are embedded in the very ways that people’s relations
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are organized. In the case of Zainab, which I hope will not be read only as a story about how
patriarchy obstructs women’s entitlements (which it certainly does), her “identity,” as it was
informed by her life experiences is, in a sense, in excess of NADRA’s requirements. Its
complications do not serve the parsimony of their system that relies on the complexity of
relatedness but not this kind of complexity to produce singular, unique identities through a
composite of verifiable relations. It is the texture of Zainab’s life that imbues her identities as
orphan, widow and mother—not just the fact of death and estrangement—which altogether
produces the impossibility of her identification by NADRA.
Tobias Kelly and Sharika Thiranagama propose that “the bond between the state and its
citizens is never complete, as it is mediated by a host of contradictory affiliations to kin and social
groups and can be overruled by wider ethical obligations” (Thiranagama and Kelly 2010, 3). This
bond describes Zainab’s circumstances uncannily well, especially as her relationship to NADRA is
only one of many, and the contradictions of her other relations are folded into her interactions with
an identification regime. By bringing the domain of the modern state and the domain of intimate kin
relations into the same frame, Thiranagama and Kelly show how intimacy and violence are not on
opposing sides of the spectrum but are in fact co-constituted. They argue that in contrast to the
colonial period, when there was a space of “nonidentity” (through racial difference) between the
ruler and the ruled, new fault lines of identity emerged in the postcolonial period. It is not otherness
but sameness or likeness that presents itself as the source of anxiety, discomfort and ultimately
violence. “The traitor is a continual potential self.” (Thiranagama and Kelly 2010, 10) It is this focus
on sharply defining what is within, as well that which is outside, that produces practices of
individuation—as this dissertation has demonstrated. Yet, this tense relationship with the state
cannot be situated in contrast to some nebulous notion of a community that is within its bounded
parameters harmonious. On the contrary, I have invoked the interconnections between intimacy and
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violence precisely to show how the fractures that emerge in the lives of women like Zainab, as they
are potentially always outsiders within their own homes, are not only equally important to attend to
when launching a critique of how a security state identifies, but that they are part and parcel of this
relationship.
The security state is, in this way, but a single node in all the other kinds of structural and
spectacular forms of violence and impossibilities. In other words, how does someone like Zainab,
and the impossibilities that she presents, sit with the political claims and movements of the Pashtun
Tahaffuz Movement? While PTM’s demands are clear, Zainab’s are not. Zainab produces more
questions for the relationship between identity and identification by illuminating that the conditions
that make you can also immobilize you. By bringing Zainab into consideration, we can see how self-
sovereignty remains fleeting, and how violence and care (Varma 2020) are co-constituted both at
home and in governance regimes. PTM’s demand to be like any other citizen is an urgent demand,
and in this respect the abolition of the watan card is crucial. This dissertation has attempted to show
how the NADRA card is not the opposite, but the other side of the watan card; in providing an
authenticated identity, the securitization of identity comes forth, in its most ubiquitous forms, as
care. It enables citizens to live their life, seemingly equally as the other with the same NADRA
identity card. Yet, in enabling, it also limits. Zainab, like many others in this dissertation, is an
example of such constraints. At the same time, I have chosen to conclude with an impossibility, as it
is articulated through Zainab’s life and experience, to bring into relief the fact that sites that produce
the relationship between identity and identification are not only those recognizable in the political
domain political but equally those that condition the possibility of articulating the self in relation to
others.
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