ABSTRACT
This chapter engages critically with some emerging issues of mapping through an analysis of the Aadhar identification programme in India. This programme of biometric mapping, increasingly prevalent in governance systems across the world, raises fundamental questions about what is at stake for the body of the human and the body of the nation in these developments. The Aadhar Programme, run under the auspices of the Unique Identification Authority of India, frames a techno-political set of ‘terms and conditions’, transforming traditional ideas of politics and citizenship. These are discussed in terms of four conceptual framings that seek to draw out the intended and unintended dynamics of the regime and the speculative alternatives inherent to it: triage, providing mapping with an indefinite ground of extension; the glitch, providing a more distributed and contingent framing for the intensification of the regime; the platform, the interface between regime and population; and finally, subtraction, a speculative call for imagining possibilities otherwise, already mapped by the Aadhar project.
