The Indian surveillance state is not a 2047 prediction. It is a 2026 fact.

1.44 billion Aadhaar enrolments. Roughly 99 percent of the adult population, linked to bank, SIM, PAN, ration, welfare, vaccine, hospital admission.¹ Facial recognition at every airport gate I have walked through this year. Sanchar Saathi, which the government tried to mandate as a pre-install on every new smartphone in late 2025, before withdrawing the order within days under public pushback.² Hyderabad now sits at the top of Comparitech’s global CCTV-per-capita ranking — 79 cameras per 1,000 residents, ahead of every city outside China for which the data can be verified.³

The question is not when the surveillance state arrives. It is who runs it after Modi.

And the awkward thing — the thing this post is mostly about — is that the people who built it, sold it, scaled it, and learned to live with it are not “them”. They are us. They are the Indian middle class. They are me, writing this. They are, almost certainly, you, reading it.

The actual sacred text

Forget 1947 for a second. The document that made India a republic is not the transfer of power. It is the Constitution, adopted on 26 November 1949 and in force from 26 January 1950. Ambedkar chaired the Drafting Committee.⁴ That is his actual monument. And it is the document being unmade in plain sight.

A small honesty up front. The original Preamble did not contain the words “secular” or “socialist”. Those were added by the 42nd Amendment in 1976, during the Emergency.⁵ The Hindu right uses this constantly — secularism, they say, is an Indira-era imposition, not an original commitment, and therefore fair game.

Sure. The words were added in 1976. The structure was not.

The original Constitution chose republican, democratic, fundamental-rights-bound, federal architecture explicitly. Article 14, equality before law. Article 15, no discrimination on grounds of religion, race, caste, sex, or place of birth. Article 17, abolition of untouchability. Article 21, life and personal liberty. Articles 25 to 28, religious freedom for all faiths, including the right to not have a state-imposed one. Article 32, the right to constitutional remedies — what Ambedkar himself called “the heart and soul of the Constitution”.⁶

None of those is Indira’s. All of them are Ambedkar’s, written into the document before the word “secular” ever was. The Hindu right cannot claim Ambedkar’s Constitution without first dismantling the parts they cannot rewrite. And to be honest, that is what the project has been.

What is being dismantled

A list, then. Each item individually arguable. Collectively, a project.

• Article 370 abrogated August 2019. Kashmir’s special status, the autonomy compromise that held the accession together, gone in a procedural manoeuvre.⁷
• Citizenship Amendment Act 2019. A religion-based citizenship pathway. Read it together with the proposed NRC and you have, on the page, a framework that requires Muslims to prove citizenship in a way nobody else has to.⁸
• UAPA amendments 2019. Individuals — not only organisations — can now be designated terrorists. Bail, effectively, foreclosed. Stan Swamy died in custody under this regime.⁹
• PMLA, as interpreted in Vijay Madanlal Choudhary (2022). Reverse burden of proof on the accused. The ED becomes a political instrument with a legal cape.¹⁰
• Electoral Bonds, 2018–2024. Six years of anonymous corporate political donations before the Supreme Court finally struck the scheme down in February 2024.¹¹
• IT Rules 2021 and DPDP Act 2023. Broad state exemptions written into the privacy law itself. Puttaswamy made privacy a fundamental right unanimously in 2017. DPDP Section 17(2) hollowed it.¹²
• Federalism stress. Governors sitting on state bills indefinitely in Tamil Nadu, Kerala, West Bengal. Money powers used to discipline non-BJP states.¹³
• Sedition (Section 124A IPC) repackaged as Section 152 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita 2023. Same scope. Cleaner box.¹⁴

Now — and I have to be honest about this — some of this began under the UPA. Aadhaar’s original architecture. The PMLA’s first broadening. The UAPA’s first expansion. The Constitution has also been amended over a hundred times; it has always been a living document.

That counter is correct on the facts and wrong on the gestalt. None of these instruments operated together, at scale, with a single ideological project pointing them at the same set of people, until after 2014. The pieces were lying around. Someone picked them all up at once. The argument is not “this never existed before”. The argument is “this is what it looks like when all of it gets activated together”.

The Constitution is being eroded slowly enough that no single day is a constitutional crisis. The constitutional crisis is the slowness.

Hindutva and its two oppositions

Here is the thing nobody on the centre-left really wants to say out loud, and which I have come around to slowly.

Hindutva is now the dominant cultural frame of Indian politics. There is no national politics outside it. The opposition does not stand outside the frame. It exists in two forms instead, both of them inside.

Soft Hindutva. The only register that wins national votes now is some form of Hindu accommodation. Rahul Gandhi visits temples. Mamata weaponises Durga Puja. AAP recites the Hanuman Chalisa. Akhilesh leads Ram processions. Congress’s 2024 INDIA-bloc campaign was constitutional defence, not secular defence. The vocabulary has shifted, and shifted on purpose. None of this is opposition to Hindutva in any meaningful ideological sense. It is competition inside it — for who manages it better, more inclusively, with what regional accent.

There is one regional exception worth naming. The Dravidian movement was anti-Brahminical from its founding. DMK is not soft Hindutva. The BJP took zero seats in Tamil Nadu in 2024 and won just one in Kerala — Thrissur, its first ever in the state.¹⁵ Tamil exceptionalism, Malayali secularism, parts of Telugu federalism — those are a different politics entirely. But that is a regional firewall, not a national alternative.

Structural opposition. What contests Hindutva from outside the electoral arena does not come as a politics. It comes as friction.

• Caste. Even subaltern Hindutva needs decades to absorb. The caste-census wedge is reopening it.
• Region and language. The Vindhyas remain a wall. Hindi-Hindu-Hindutva does not translate.
• The K-shape economy. Hindutva can patch with welfare but cannot redistribute. The MSME class is angry and unsolved.
• Female participation in paid, formal work stays marginal even as the headline LFPR has climbed to 41.7 percent — most of it unpaid or self-employed. Pan-Hindu identity does not produce jobs.¹⁶
• Youth unemployment. The demographic dividend is leaking; gig economy and emigration are the safety valves.
• Climate. Heat, water, monsoon. None of it answers to Ram or Ayodhya.
• The Constitution itself. Formally unable to be replaced without a supermajority the BJP does not have.

None of those is a party. None of them votes. All of them persist. Together they are what makes the Hindutva management operation permanent rather than triumphant. Hindutva does not have to defeat either opposition. It has to manage them. Soft Hindutva is how it manages. The structural friction is what makes the management permanent.

This is, to be honest, why I read all of this from the Ambedkarite tradition. Ambedkar is not the named opposition. He is the lens — the standpoint that refuses to genuflect even at the margin, cites the Constitution, refuses the temple, and treats caste as the unresolved fact pan-Hindu identity cannot finesse.

The middle class is the founding partner

This is the part I find hardest to write, because the indictment lands on me.

The Indian middle class is not the surveillance state’s victim. It is its founding partner.

We demanded Aadhaar for convenience. We engineered the stack from inside the office parks of Bengaluru. We watched the Pegasus revelations land — the journalist phones, the opposition MPs, a sitting Election Commissioner, lawyers, activists — and we did not march. There was no government inquiry. No resignations. No Parliamentary investigation.¹⁷ The targets, we told ourselves, were always “those people”.

A precision matters here, because “middle class” in India is a slippery word. When I say middle class in this section, I do not mean the rural Aadhaar-enabled DBT beneficiary. Her relationship to the apparatus is structurally different — she is the object, not the architect. I mean specifically the IIT/IIM-adjacent, English-speaking, tech-employed urban professional cohort that builds, deploys, and most actively benefits from the digital ID stack. That is a much smaller and more specific class than “middle class” in the statistical sense. It is also the class reading this blog.

The numbers, briefly. 1.44 billion Aadhaar enrolments. Around 1.34 billion live holders. Roughly 99 percent of the adult population (UIDAI, March 2026).¹ The NCRB is building, in the AFRS, the world’s largest government-run facial recognition system.¹⁸ Sanchar Saathi, which the government tried to make a mandatory pre-install on every new smartphone in late 2025 before backing off under pressure.² The DPDP Act 2023, Section 17(2), grants broad state exemption from the privacy law it ostensibly creates¹² — even though Puttaswamy in 2017 unanimously made privacy a fundamental right,¹⁹ and even though the 2018 Aadhaar judgment upheld the program 4–1 only over Chandrachud J’s solo dissent.²⁰ The dissent is what got vindicated. The majority is what got built.

The apparatus, on paper, is neutral. The trigger finger is not.

Anti-CAA protesters identified by Delhi FRT. Kashmiri journalists’ phones drained at airports. Beef-related arrests using phone metadata. “Love jihad” cases monitoring Muslim youth. Northeast monitoring. Student protests at JNU, Jamia, Jadavpur. Universal in design, caste- and religion- and dissent-selective in trigger.

And the class that engineered the system, profits from it, and could have organised against it… did not. We optimised our credit scores instead.

The Ambedkar question

The BJP has tried to claim the man. Modi has laid wreaths at Chaitya Bhoomi. There are Ambedkar Jayanti programmes. His Delhi residence was turned into a national memorial under this government.²¹ The Dalit BJP vote rose from 13 percent in 2004 to 34 percent in 2019 — subaltern Hindutva working as designed.²²

Fine. They can claim the name. They cannot claim the writings.

• Annihilation of Caste (1936), refused as a presidential address because the organisers found it too hostile to Hinduism. The text is on the internet. Read it.²³
• Mahad Satyagraha 1927 — Ambedkar publicly burning the Manusmriti.²⁴
• His resignation from Nehru’s cabinet in September 1951 over the watered-down Hindu Code Bill — he wanted more reform of Hindu personal law, not less.²⁵
• The mass conversion to Buddhism at Nagpur on 14 October 1956, three months before he died. Estimates of those who converted that day range from 365,000 to around half a million. The largest mass conversion in modern South Asian history by any credible count.²⁶
• The 22 vows of Buddhism he made his followers take — which explicitly renounce Hindu gods, the caste system, and Hinduism itself.²⁷

The BJP can stand at Chaitya Bhoomi. They cannot read what is on the page. The blog, ultimately, is what is on the page.

Where I stand

I should name this directly, because the blog stops working if I don’t.

The argument above says the middle class is the founding partner of the surveillance state. I am in that class. The reader of this blog is in that class. If the indictment is correct — and I think it is — neither of us stands outside what is being described.

This is uncomfortable. It is also the only honest position the blog can take.

So I am not writing this from outside. My Aadhaar is on file. My face has been mapped by every airport gate I walk through. UPI has my transaction history. I have written software that touches the same digital ID stack the surveillance state relies on. The resistance posture is not available to me. What is available is the record. This blog is the record. Its credibility is that the writer is in it too.

There is a literary lineage for this. Arendt wrote about Eichmann as a member of the assimilated German-Jewish bourgeoisie that Germany destroyed. Solzhenitsyn wrote The Gulag Archipelago from inside the system’s own archives. Adorno and Horkheimer wrote Dialectic of Enlightenment as refugees of the bourgeois culture they were critiquing. None of them claimed to stand outside what they described. The credibility came from refusing the pose.

The Indian middle-class diagnostic blog of 2026 belongs in that lineage. The writer cannot claim to be the resistance. The writer can do something smaller and harder — keep the record honestly, including the part where the writer is also a customer.

So what do we do

The question I get asked most. Also the question I am most reluctant to answer well, because there is no clean answer.

The menu, in order of how easily each option dismisses itself:

Vote them out. Already tried for ten years. 2024 forced the BJP into coalition; it did not dislodge the project. The next post in this series (the 30 percent mandate one) explains why voting alone is structurally weak. Voting still matters at the margin — pushing the BJP below 30 percent has consequences — but it is not the whole answer.

Build counter-institutions. Concrete and within reach. Subscribe to The Wire, The Caravan, Newslaundry, Article 14. Fund Internet Freedom Foundation and the Centre for Internet and Society. Pay for public-interest litigation. Back legal aid for under-trial Muslims, Adivasis, Dalits. Individuals funding directly survive FCRA pressure in a way organisations do not. The most defensible single line item. Inadequate alone.

Refuse compliance, where legally possible. Don’t link Aadhaar to optional services. Use Signal and ProtonMail. Audit your own employer’s surveillance contracts. Stop building eKYC platforms — yes, that one. Hard to scale, easy to dismiss as virtue-signalling. Norms set from the bottom up still matter at the margin.

Build new political alternatives. Aspirational. Most readers will not run for office or organise. The most consequential prescription and the one fewest readers will follow.

Leave. The unspoken option. India’s diaspora is the world’s largest.²⁸ Half my engineering school class is already in North America. Many of you reading this have a Canadian PR application, a UK skilled-worker visa, a US H-1B, an Australian skills assessment, somewhere on your laptop right now. If the reckoning is decades out, exit is rational at the individual level. It is also a vote of no confidence in the country at scale. The honest blog names this rather than pretending it is not the most common middle-class answer of our generation.

There is no clean prescription. The fight is decades long. What is available is not solutions — it is clarity. Knowing what is happening. Refusing the comforting interpretation. Building or paying for the institutions that will record this period accurately. And not pretending the option to leave does not exist.

That is the menu. Pick from it without flattering yourself that any one item is heroic.

I am writing this from Bengaluru, with Aadhaar in my wallet, UPI on my phone, my face on every airport gate, and a foreign skilled-worker visa file I last opened more recently than I would like to admit. None of the items on the menu above are theoretical for me. They are the choices I face this year. The blog is honest only if it admits the writer is in the same room as the reader.

Overall

The reckoning Hindutva is fighting is older than the BJP. It is the argument the Hindu-traditionalist members of the Constituent Assembly lost in 1949. Ambedkar’s Constitution settled it. The current project is to unsettle it slowly enough that no single moment counts as the rupture. The Indian middle class is the bookkeeper of that erosion.

Overall, the Constitution is still there. Some of us are still reading it. By 2047 the document will be unrecognisable in practice, even if it is formally un-replaced. The reckoning, if it comes, is decades further out than that. Until then, what remains is the Constitution, the writings, and the witnesses.

Your phone holds Aadhaar, UPI, Paytm, Sanchar Saathi, and a face you have already lent to the airport, your gym, your apartment gate, and the school you send your child to. You have already voted for everything that is coming. By 2047 the only honest blog left to write will be about whether you ever read this one.

---

Second of three. The first one was about the man the BJP cult misremembers (Patel). The third one is about the system being captured, the math that keeps a 30 percent mandate in power, and what 2047 most likely actually looks like.

Footnotes

1. UIDAI reports roughly 1.34 billion live Aadhaar holders (~134 crore); cumulative enrolments of ~1.44 billion and the “~99% of adults” figure are widely cited from UIDAI data. UIDAI press releases. https://uidai.gov.in/en/media-resources/media/press-releases.html ↩ ↩²

2. India ordered Sanchar Saathi pre-installed on all new smartphones on 28 November 2025, then revoked the mandate on 3 December 2025 after a privacy backlash. TechCrunch. https://techcrunch.com/2025/12/03/after-intense-backlash-india-pulls-mandate-to-pre-install-government-app-on-smartphones/ ↩ ↩²

3. Comparitech ranks Hyderabad the most-surveilled city outside China — ~79 cameras per 1,000 people. https://www.comparitech.com/vpn-privacy/the-worlds-most-surveilled-cities/ ↩

4. The Constitution was adopted on 26 November 1949 and came into force on 26 January 1950; Ambedkar chaired the Drafting Committee. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_India ↩

5. “Secular” and “socialist” were inserted into the Preamble by the 42nd Amendment (1976), during the Emergency. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forty-second_Amendment_of_the_Constitution_of_India ↩

6. Ambedkar called Article 32 “the heart and soul of the Constitution”; the equality, anti-discrimination, anti-untouchability, liberty and religious-freedom articles are in the original text. ThePrint. https://theprint.in/theprint-essential/what-is-article-32-which-ambedkar-said-was-heart-and-soul-of-constitution/546050/ ↩

7. Article 370 was abrogated in August 2019. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revocation_of_the_special_status_of_Jammu_and_Kashmir ↩

8. The Citizenship (Amendment) Act 2019 created a religion-based fast track to citizenship. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizenship_(Amendment)_Act,_2019 ↩

9. The 2019 UAPA amendments allow individuals (not just organisations) to be designated terrorists; activist Stan Swamy died in custody under the UAPA in 2021. Al Jazeera. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/8/16/india-uapa-terror-law-scrutiny ↩

10. In Vijay Madanlal Choudhary v. Union of India (27 July 2022) the Supreme Court upheld the PMLA’s reverse burden of proof and the ED’s powers. Supreme Court Observer. https://www.scobserver.in/cases/karti-p-chidambaram-v-enforcement-directoratereview-of-the-scs-vijay-madanlal-judgement/ ↩

11. The Electoral Bonds scheme ran from 2018 until the Supreme Court struck it down as unconstitutional on 15 February 2024. SCC Online. https://www.scconline.com/blog/post/2024/02/15/electoral-bonds-violative-right-to-information-art-191a-constitution-supreme-court-strikes-down-unconstitutional/ ↩

12. The IT Rules 2021 and the DPDP Act 2023 — whose Section 17 grants broad state exemptions — sit atop the 2017 privacy ruling. DPDP §17: https://www.dpdpa.com/dpdpa2023/chapter-4/section17.html; IT Rules 2021: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_Technology_Rules,_2021 ↩ ↩²

13. Governors withholding assent to state bills (Tamil Nadu, Kerala, West Bengal) prompted the Supreme Court’s 2025 ruling against the Tamil Nadu Governor’s inaction. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_of_Tamil_Nadu_v._Governor_of_Tamil_Nadu ↩

14. Sedition (IPC Section 124A) was recast as Section 152 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita 2023 (effective 1 July 2024) — not Section 150. Drishti Judiciary. https://www.drishtijudiciary.com/current-affairs/sedition-under-bns ↩

15. In 2024 the DMK-led front swept all 39 Tamil Nadu seats (BJP won none), while the BJP won Thrissur in Kerala — its first-ever Lok Sabha seat in the state. TN: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Indian_general_election_in_Tamil_Nadu; Kerala: https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/india/lok-sabha-election-2024-bjps-political-drought-ends-in-kerala-as-suresh-gopi-wins-by-impressive-margin-627778/ ↩

16. India’s official female LFPR reached 41.7% in 2023-24 (up from 23.3% in 2017-18), but the rise is mostly unpaid family work and self-employment, not formal paid jobs. PLFS 2023-24, PIB. https://www.pib.gov.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=2057970 ↩

17. The Pegasus revelations named journalists, opposition figures, and former Election Commissioner Ashok Lavasa among targets; the government rejected a parliamentary probe, and the Supreme Court’s technical committee (2021) found malware but no government cooperation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pegasus_Project_revelations_in_India ↩

18. The NCRB’s planned Automated Facial Recognition System was described as the world’s largest government-run facial recognition database. Biometric Update. https://www.biometricupdate.com/202003/india-set-to-stand-up-worlds-largest-government-facial-recognition-database-for-police-use ↩

19. In Puttaswamy (24 August 2017) a nine-judge bench unanimously held privacy to be a fundamental right. Supreme Court Observer. https://www.scobserver.in/cases/puttaswamy-v-union-of-india-fundamental-right-to-privacy-case-background/ ↩

20. The 2018 Aadhaar judgment (Puttaswamy II, 26 September 2018) upheld the scheme 4–1, with Justice D.Y. Chandrachud the sole dissenter. Supreme Court Observer. https://www.scobserver.in/reports/constitutionality-of-aadhaar-justice-k-s-puttaswamy-union-of-india-judgment-in-plain-english/ ↩

21. Modi inaugurated the Ambedkar National Memorial at 26 Alipur Road, Delhi, on 13 April 2018. PIB. https://www.pib.gov.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=1529092 ↩

22. Lokniti-CSDS data show the BJP’s Dalit vote share rising from roughly 12–13% (mid-2000s) to about 33–34% in 2019. The Quint. https://www.thequint.com/elections/csds-survey-bjp-obc-dalit-muslim-lok-sabha-elections-2019 ↩

23. Annihilation of Caste (1936) was written as a presidential address the Jat-Pat Todak Mandal then declined to host, finding it too hostile to Hinduism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annihilation_of_Caste ↩

24. During the Mahad Satyagraha (1927), Ambedkar publicly burned the Manusmriti on 25 December 1927. SabrangIndia. https://sabrangindia.in/why-did-dr-babasaheb-ambedkar-publicly-burn-manu-smruti-dec-25-1927/ ↩

25. Ambedkar resigned as Law Minister on 27 September 1951, partly over the diluted Hindu Code Bill. https://brambedkar.in/dr-ambedkar-resigns-as-law-minister-a-moment-of-courage-and-principle/ ↩

26. Ambedkar led a mass conversion to Buddhism at Nagpur on 14 October 1956 (~365,000, rising to roughly half a million with Chandrapur), the largest such conversion in modern South Asian history. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dalit_Buddhist_movement ↩

27. The 22 vows Ambedkar administered explicitly renounce the Hindu gods, the caste system, and Hinduism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty-two_vows_of_Ambedkar ↩

28. India has the world’s largest diaspora — roughly 18 million by the UN’s foreign-born count (about 35 million counting people of Indian origin). India TV / UN. https://www.indiatvnews.com/news/world/united-nations-says-india-has-worlds-largest-diaspora-678424 ↩