From Autonomy to Anonymity: Citizens' Right to Privacy and Indian Democracy in the Post-Snowden Era

The prominence of the internet in India’s democracy can be gauged by the growing impact of online social media in political communication, and more broadly, due to the expansion of digital networks across its society since the early 21st Century. While policies concerning the internet and information technologies, have not, as yet, become a subject of intense party political contestations, but debates around citizens' right to privacy now routinely create public contentions within India's democratic polity. In this paper, I trace the trajectory of these contestations around autonomy since the revelations by Edward Snowden in 2013, and place them within a deeper political and social history of IT policy vis a vis citizens right to communication privacy. In particular, I argue that recent debates mark a radical change from an earlier era of 'satellite revolution' of the 1990s, when India's domestic arena was largely out of sync with the global debate around citizens' rights. Especially in post-Snowden era, India has witnessed intensification of demands for privacy as well as claims of citizenship in tune with liberal democracies across the world. Using a comparison between the era of to satellite networks, when an elusive discourse of autonomy reflected the weak institutional response to the challenge of mass surveillance, the more recent deliberations around the regulation of digital intermediaries and online networking platforms have seen a change with greater emphasis on the rights of Indian users. In particular, the paper brings into spotlight the consequences of the politics of surveillance since the Snowden revelations in 2013, and its impact on the structures of IT policy and the recognition of citizens' demand to autonomy in the Parliament and beyond. Snowden-era debates, the paper demonstrates, have witnessed the rise of new ideas of anonymity that act like a ‘coordinating discourse’ (Schmidt 2002, 2008) able to bring about long term change in IT related policy. Moreover, new ideas of 'privacy as anonymity', now routinely cited in policy and civil society deliberations, have also been used to counter the ‘communicative discourse’ (ibid) of ethnic nationalism which constrained demands for citizens' rights to autonomy and privacy in an earlier era. This change is bolstered with the evolving digital economy the country. Using theories of discursive institutionalism and political economy, the paper reflects on the implications of the Snowden affair for citizens' right to privacy and prospects of liberal democracy in India.