The amendment to the Right to Information Act, 2005, introduced under the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023, presents a disharmonious trade-off between privacy and transparency. By discarding existing safeguards that allowed access to personal information in public interest, the amended proviso grants greater secrecy to the government under the guise of protecting privacy. This shift threatens to deprive citizens of their constitutional right to access information in cases involving corruption, human rights violations, and police atrocities.

Under the guise of decolonizing and modernizing laws, the Bharatiya Janata Party-led National Democratic Alliance government has sought amendments in laws governing every aspect of digital communication in India, such as cellular mobile, instant messaging, news, and entertainment. The government has dramatically expanded its power to control and regulate different forms of digital communications, exerting significant influence over what people watch, read, hear, and think. This extensive authority enables the government to monitor, surveil, censor, and shape public mood and opinion, thus placing communications under siege. In today’s world, communication technologies are deeply embedded in our daily lives as we transmit, share, and broadcast information. In India, the enduring legacy of colonial surveillance powers continues to shape and influence the surveillance over digital communications. This Dialogue paper argues that authoritarian surveillance in India is not merely a direct manifestation of the colonial legacy of British rule, but rather a fusion of enduring authoritarian features rooted in the colonial past, and the prevailing authoritarian intentions and practices of the post-colonial present.

To understand the recently enacted Indian Telecommunications Act 2023 and Indian Post Office Act 2023, we must examine the contentious legacy of their legislative antecedents: the Indian Telegraph Act 1885 and the Indian Post Office Act 1893. This legislative note aims to highlight the legal text and practices surrounding surveillance powers under both these laws in colonial and post-colonial India. Under colonial rule, these laws established sweeping surveillance powers, granting the British government absolute discretion to monitor colonial subjects and anti-colonial activists. Post-independence, these powers persisted, often used to suppress dissent. Rather than reforming this colonial framework, the new laws extend the status quo by concentrating unchecked power in the hands of the executive. Instead of being transformative and progressive, the surveillance powers under the new laws are regressive and authoritarian, completely eroding the fundamental safeguards afforded under Part III of the Constitution of India.

The Digital Personal Data Protection Bill, 2022 is contrary to the expectation that numerous versions should translate to a robust draft. Although it prescribes some core data protection principles in the explanatory note, it falls short of incorporating them in the draft bill. This bill can be best characterised as adopting a soft tone for businesses and granting the tiger claw to the state.

India’s communications surveillance regime can be aptly described as a legal mosaic with different provisions in various statutes, yet they are neatly dovetailed with each other. This Conspectus paper examines India’s communications surveillance law and analyses the characteristics of the state’s surveillance power, the nature and scope of the legal restraints and procedural safeguards afforded to prevent arbitrariness, indiscriminate use and violation of the right to communications privacy. It further identifies the key issues and major decisions of the European courts on mass surveillance in post-Puttaswamy years.

This chapter aims to explore the Indian State’s pursuit of personal data, which is implicit in the legal framework, institutional agencies, and governing mechanisms. As well as highlighting the unresolved tension between surveillance and privacy in the legal-juridical frameworks for national security and the new governance initiatives such as Aadhaar, the chapter also attempts to understand the predicaments for a democracy to function on a slippery tightrope between legitimate security and governance purpose along with the expectations to safeguard right to privacy.

This chapter conceptually reconsiders the relationship between the state, surveillance and democracy in India in the light of advancements in modern digital technologies. As data collection has begun to be treated as storable material to rejuvenate governance, democracy and development, the nature of Indian state is retreaded in the twenty-first century. A “retreaded state” connotes how the state introduced new layers of institutional agencies, legal procedures and technological mechanisms to monitor and control ever larger areas of society. The chapter regards surveillance not merely as a technological entity but also as a grand narrative, which has accreted as a cultural entity to reduce fear, insecurity, misgovernance and corruption. Paradoxically, such technologies promise access to speedy public service delivery and welfare. However, in the production of this cultural discourse, the utilisation of “surveilling” technologies for mass surveillance and for state’s ideological and developmental discourse is something outside the grand narrative. Here, the political vocabulary of such a state has been retwined under the rhetoric of security and development discourse. This chapter aims to understand the means adopted by the Indian state to achieve its ends and unravels the different procedures and mechanisms of surveillance. It also examines the counter-effects of deploying surveillance in Indian democracy.

In November 2016, an unexpected imposition of a demonetisation policy in India by Modi’s government changed the role of digital technologies in mundane lives. It was unfolded with a discourse of its potential to generate a trail of long-term benefits; such as reduced corruption, enhanced governance and greater digitizing of the economy which could eventually lead to development of the nation. This road to development was radical, coercive and even authoritarian as it drove individuals to adopt digital technologies. Such a despotic push in one of the world’s largest democracies had consequential effects on individuals’ privacy and altered the nature of surveillance. The grand digitalisation project was veiled and fanatically endorsed with a tunnel vision while any robust privacy legislation to protect the flow of data was absent. This article intends to investigate the political dimensions and consequences. It will trace the contours of a despotic and authoritarian push by the government to digitise mundane lives. Therefore, it will unravel the nature of governance under the new emerging technologies, legalities, and interlinking policies to understand the persistent uncertainty and perpetual fear of insecurity under this Privacyless India.