When Keir Starmer was in India last month, an assertion from him got all of the UK worked up. Britain could learn from Aadhaar, he said. For a country that has spent decades sneering at India’s bureaucratic mess, here was the British Prime Minister suggesting that India’s digital identity system might be a model worth studying.
The next morning, headlines in the UK were fast and furious. Most of them suggested Starmer is pushing to copy India’s surveillance state. Privacy groups warned of mass data leaks. Editorials thundered about government overreach. It was the kind of uproar that happens when one side of the world mistakes the other’s reality for a mirror of its own.
But there is a nuance here. When the West talks about privacy and when India does, they are about two very different things.
In the West, privacy means it’s the right to be left alone. So much so that Europe has turned it into regulation. You own your data. The state or a company touches it only with consent. As opposed to that, in India, people have spent decades trying to become visible to the state. For millions of people, the fear wasn’t that the government knew too much, rather it was that the state did not know of their existence.
Aadhaar was an answer to a question of invisibility.
This difference matters. The West began with high state capacity. India didn’t. In countries such as the UK or the US, every birth and death is registered. In India, even today, many people don’t have an official record of birth. Many don’t even know their exact date of birth. So, Aadhaar had to collect more information just to fill in the blanks.
This is why, in India, collecting data is seen as a necessary step to build a functional state. So, when the Supreme Court declared privacy a fundamental right in 2017, the Court added a caveat—this right is not absolute. The state could collect data if the purpose was lawful, necessary, and the method minimally intrusive. Privacy, in that sense, became a question of balance, between rights and liberty on the one hand and delivery and welfare on the other hand. Aadhaar survived because it passed that test.
This is hard for the West to understand. For a pension to reach an old woman in a village, or for a subsidy to land in the right account, someone has to know who the person is. You can’t target welfare in the dark. Some data has to move. The real question is how it moves and what safeguards travel with it.
This is where the irony in the Western world begins to make itself felt. Every phone, every app, fitness tracker, and all else quietly records who you are and what you do. Violations by companies such as Apple and Meta have led to them being fined hundreds of millions of dollars in the EU.
What’s actually at stake here isn’t whether the data leaks, but what kind of data leaks and what purpose does it serve.
The real danger lies when someone can act as you. As the Bengaluru-based Tanuj Bhojwani who describes himself as a storyteller who codes explains, “Biometrics being added to identity can actually prevent identity theft. Authentication channels can be confident that this person is who they claim they are. Not someone who has an identity card that looks like who they claim to be.”
But, he cautions that when leaks happen, they “increase the surface area of a fraud. Someone can pretend to be a bank or a government officer. And if they authoritatively state facts about your life that only these institutions should know, you might believe the scamsters.”
Against this backdrop, how are we to think of Aadhaar? Metaphorically, imagine it to be an email address, not a password. While you may know the address, the biometrics is the password. Without that second layer, the number is just noise. Confusing an identifier with a key is like mistaking a phone directory for a break-in.
So, if people such as Stramer are impressed, it is because what India built with Aadhaar is not a surveillance tool. It’s a social infrastructure that treats privacy as a design problem. The system separates identity from authentication, and authentication from data storage. It’s allowed direct benefit transfers worth hundreds of millions of rupees to reach people without middlemen. Does it need tighter rules? Absolutely. But it doesn’t deserve lazy caricatures either.
The UK’s digital-ID debate is stuck in a loop of Cold War fears — the government as Big Brother. India’s problem was the opposite — a government that didn’t know who its citizens were. Two democracies, two anxieties, two definitions of privacy. That’s the paradox at the heart of modern democracy. While the right to be left alone matters, the right not to be left out matters just as much.