Reifying Religion: Digitising Identities within Migration Governance in Western India

The digitalisation of state bureaucracies has been positioned as a tool for enhancing efficiency, particularly in migration governance. In India, the fast-track citizenship application for religious minorities from neighbouring countries demonstrates this transformation through the introduction of an online portal and a mobile app. The fast-track application reduces the number of years before migrants can apply for citizenship as part of the naturalisation process. However, it requires applicants to produce and upload an affidavit from their local ‘religious authority’ to verify their religious affiliation, as the fast-track application is only available to those who have arrived in India before 31 December 2014 and identify as a religious minority in India’s neighbouring states.

This paper interrogates how digital systems, designed for efficiency and neutrality, transform the fluid, complex, and socially embedded nature of religious identity into a fixed bureaucratic category. I situate the issues of reifying religion for a bureaucratic framework within a historical trajectory of colonial administrative practices that sought to classify and codify religion as a data point. While successive governments have embraced digital platforms to manage this process, the reliance on a standardised version of religion maintains the same problem of flattening religious diversity and reducing lived experiences to a series of verifiable data points. Utilising ethnographic data collected in western India, I examine how the digitalisation of religious identity verification operates in practice for applicants applying for citizenship through the fast-track application. I consider how digital platforms have changed not only the hopeful citizens’ relationship with the state but also the bureaucrat’s relationship with the state, as I foreground the implications of reifying complex identities such as religion, which are involved in the digitisation of governance.