ABSTRACT
This chapter traces the history of racialization mechanisms in the governance of modern India. Over the course of time, from the British Raj to the present, the unit of governance has shifted from the population to the individual body. The chapter begins with an explanation of the Aadhaar and then examines the history of the racial order in modern India that has culminated in this system of overt biometric data governance. In the name of safeguarding democratic rights, India has ironically arrived at the creation of Aadhaar, the world's largest biometric ID system, which has enabled the state to apprehend the individual bodies of every one of its residents. The virtualization of race in contemporary India has been two-fold: race has become an index of electronic data in the digital cum virtual realm while also lying dormant at the not-yet-actualized virtual level in the operation of latent sensual and affective differentiation.
