Bird's Milk : “Unblocking” Identity and Documentary Citizenship

Milk from a bird is an impossibility. This idiom was used to articulate the nature of documentary requests from NADRA during “citizenship reverification.” This chapter describes how individuals and families with blocked identity cards engage in bureaucratic labor and build documentary evidence of kin ties to unblock their identities. It traces the history of documentary citizenship to the early years of Pakistan’s independence, following how reterritorialization in the wake of Partition in 1947 shaped the landscape of identity documentation.

My book manuscript Technologies of Kinship: Biometric Belonging in Postcolonial Pakistan is a historical ethnography of Pakistan’s National Database and Registration Authority (NADRA). NADRA produces Pakistan’s biometric-based identity card and manages one of the largest national identity databases in the world. At NADRA, custom-made software integrates and verifies data from individuals as well as kin relations, determining who is and is not a Pakistani citizen. This book examines how NADRA developed its database technology and the uneven implications of this information infrastructure for ordinary citizens. It provides an ethnographic view into the ways that Pakistan’s identification regime—developed in the context of the “War on Terror”— disproportionately impacts Pashtun migrants in Islamabad who experience the direct effects of both new and residual forms of surveillance and militarization. Further, it situates contemporary biometric identification within the history of postcolonial and colonial governance. Investigating the history of identification technology through archival research on early information systems in colonial South Asia and postcolonial Pakistan, Technologies of Kinship follows how and why kinship became foundational to the establishment of verifiable individual identity.