India's genius has always been synthesis: the Constitution's civic equality as We, the People, interknitted with tradition's cultural depth -- Bharat Mata
With Bihar boiling in ballot battles, identity is back on the burner. Not as just names on voter lists, but as the existential question: What does it mean to be Indian? Our modern state was stitched from colonial census categories: caste as checkbox, religion as registry, region as ruler's rubric. The British built India out of boxes. Aadhaar, in many ways, is that colonial impulse rebooted in code: identity as data, belonging as biometric, democracy as digits. Neutral on the surface, but beneath its biometric bravado lies a philosophical pitfall where belonging becomes conditional on a fingerprint. The Supreme Court's latest ruling that Aadhaar is only one among 15 proofs sounds like an assurance of choice. Yet insightfully, it exposes an unease: in a civilisation as layered as India, can identity ever be reduced to a card, a scan, a number?
The debate over manipulating Aadhaar's role in voter lists may be a political playoff. Beneath its surface however lies a question as old as the republic: what is the Indian identity? The Rigveda does mention Bharata -- but as a clan, not a country. No tricolour, no anthem, just a great tribe seeking the gods' favour. Over time, the term Bharata came to signify a larger cultural grouping, but it was not yet "Bharat Mata", or a national community. The Upanishads ignored passports altogether. They concentrated on the eternal self, not the territorial self. The Puranas, centuries later, gave the first proper map of belonging. The Vishnu Purana is blunt: "Uttaram yat samudrasya himadreschaiva dakshinam, Varsham tad bharatam nama bharati yatra santatih." (North of the sea, south of the Himalaya -- that's Bharata, where Bharata's children dwell.) The Mahabharata adds moral muscle: "This is the land of Bharata where the Brahmins, Kshatriyas, Vaishyas, and Shudras perform their dharma. Beyond it lie other regions of the world, but none are equal to Bharata." Here, Bharata isn't just soil, it's a stage -- a karmabhumi, the land where human duty plays out. Geography is not inert; it is ethical, existential. So being Bharatiya was never about paperwork. It was about participation in place. The danger today is of this heritage collapsing into history, reducing memory to metadata, swapping philosophy for proof-of-ID.