Not long ago, an absurd yet highly metaphorical event occurred in Indian political circles and public opinion.
During the recent Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of voter rolls conducted by the Election Commission of India (ECI), two retired senior diplomats—Navdeep Suri, former Indian ambassador to the United Arab Emirates, and Ramesh Chander, former ambassador to Belarus—found themselves “disappeared” from the voter list. The official reason given was that their names did not appear in the 2003 baseline electoral roll, and they were therefore classified as “doubtful citizens (D-Voters).”
When these two diplomats, who had devoted their lives to India, submitted their passports, voter IDs, and PAN tax numbers, the official response was even more intriguing: “A passport is only a travel document for going abroad and cannot serve as proof of nationality; voter ID and tax number likewise have no legal effect in proving nationality.”
This scene constitutes a highly ironic legal spectacle in the history of modern state governance. The most authoritative official documents issued by a country cannot, within that country, prove that their holder is a citizen of that country.
The Absolute Dead Loop of Proof
To understand the absurdity of this phenomenon in India, one must see the sharp disconnect between the legal design of its administrative system and the country’s actual conditions.
In Indian legal rulings, everyday identity documents have been subjected to extremely strict functional segmentation.
- ID card: The law explicitly stipulates that it is merely “proof of habitual residence” and is not linked to nationality.
- Passport: India’s Passport Act contains an extremely rare exception allowing travel documents to be issued to foreigners, and in judicial practice it is refused as evidence of nationality.
- Voter ID: India holds that a voter ID is merely the “result of administrative registration” and cannot conversely prove the compliance of the registration qualification.
So what, then, can prove nationality? The official standard is: one must provide a birth certificate, land title deed, or school graduation certificate from before 2003.
This standard is not only difficult to meet in reality, but logically constitutes an almost farcical joke, because these three things are precisely the least capable of proving “current nationality.”
A person born in India, who attended school or owned ancestral property, may very well have long since emigrated overseas and acquired foreign nationality; while an ordinary Indian who has never left the country and is native-born may, precisely because they were born in a rural area and never went to school, be unable to produce these three pieces of paper. The authorities deny state documents with immediate legal effect, yet chase after a few old scraps of paper from decades ago that cannot prove the present situation—this “logic of proof” itself collapses into logical ruin.
Needless to say, this directly collides with India’s grassroots social reality. Historical data shows that as late as 2000, India’s national birth registration rate was only 56.2%; in 2005, the proportion of children under five with birth certificates was as low as 26.9%. For the older generation, the poor, and marginalized groups, requiring them to produce paper birth records from decades ago is tantamount to demanding the impossible.
India failed in the past to establish a continuous household registration and population database, yet now it shifts the entire burden and cost of proof left over from history onto ordinary citizens. This logic of “denying the credibility of the whole society in order to prevent a tiny number of fake certificates from being whitewashed” is in essence administrative power’s self-negation of its own credential-issuing credibility.
The Underlying Architecture of Indian Logic
It is not hard to see that this Indian spectacle of “setting up a proposition itself and then locking the logic dead itself” actually showed its first signs as early as two thousand years ago.
Indian Buddhism, with which we Chinese are most familiar, fell into a similar underlying dead knot back then: on one hand “no-self,” on the other hand firmly upholding “karmic reincarnation”; in order to patch over this logical hole of “if there is no self, then who is reincarnating?”, the various Indian schools invented a vast and cumbersome array of conceptual categories to forcibly stitch it together, only to end up spinning completely in abstract speculation. It was not until it spread to China and was forcibly reformatted by Chan Buddhism’s pragmatism of “not relying on words, directly pointing to the human mind” that the logical hole was finally resolved. Unfortunately, by that time indigenous Buddhism in India had already declined.
Today this administrative maze of “issuing certificates itself and then denying the certificates itself” is nothing more than the projection of the same philosophical gene within a modern bureaucratic system: using more complex rules to cover up the failure of the previous rule, and ultimately sinking ever deeper into a legal dead knot of its own making.
If one moves beyond the perspective of a single incident and places this phenomenon in a comparative perspective of transnational governance models, three completely different meta-logics emerge.
What I felt most deeply—and what once confused me most—when discussing in Western communities such as Reddit is the West’s black-and-white A OR B rigid logic, which relies extremely heavily on the law of excluded middle and contractual procedures in order to operate; China, by contrast, is a typical A AND B pragmatic logic, based on dynamic balance and strong state credit endorsement, and when facing data silos it tends to break them through from top to bottom by pooling forces.
By contrast, India displays an A AND NOT-A “quantum superposition state”: in legal texts it pursues the world’s most advanced and cumbersome statutes, in reality it relies on the most primitive and incomplete databases, and in operation it depends entirely on the whole population’s Jugaad (makeshift improvisation and shortcut-seeking). It has neither the procedural certainty of the West nor the administrative integration efficiency of China, and ultimately evolves into a dead loop of mutual deconstruction.
The Power Code of Indian Logic
If something like “prove you are you” were merely a clumsy, lazy bureaucracy, it might just be an administrative joke. But what makes the problem profound is that when this proof system is designed so that “the vast majority of people cannot answer it perfectly,” it naturally possesses the potential for abuse of power and rent-seeking.
Under India’s Foreigners Act, the burden of proof is inverted onto the individual who is suspected. Under the premise that “no single official document can settle the matter once and for all,” whether an ordinary person is actually a lawful citizen of the country falls entirely into the discretionary power of grassroots officials and administrative agencies. When the threshold is raised infinitely high and the rules become infinitely vague, procedure is no longer a guide for getting things done, but becomes a bargaining chip for the bureaucratic system to conduct review, verification, and even rent-seeking.
In the final analysis, when a country’s stamped passport and ID card cannot prove that you are a citizen of that country, the “rule of law” has already become a pure word game. This dead loop of “issuing certificates itself and not recognizing them itself” is not some profound and unfathomable philosophical reflection at all; it is merely the bureaucratic system wrapping itself up in extremely cumbersome procedures, pushing all the cost of proof onto ordinary people, and finally, amid the chaos it has created itself, exercising the power of adjudication from on high.