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Late colonial juridical practice in India was prone to bureaucratic errors and shared with the police a fundamental disinterest in the liberty of ordinary people. This article tells the politically marginal but highly revealing story of how a series of errors during the arrest and subsequent detention of an elderly man called Peter Budge—an innocent bystander in a situation of heightened communal tensions—led to a momentary scandal in the United Provinces administration in the year 1947–48. Peter's case disappeared between the cracks of bad record-keeping, leading to his lengthy and unlawful detention. It raises important questions about the complementary relation between law and violence, and the fictitious nature of public-order laws. In contrast to the scholarship that has discussed the spectacular violence of the state, this article looks at the ‘other’ acts of violence of the state and argues that the everyday reality of public-order enforcement is key to understanding the nature and operations of the late colonial and post-colonial state.

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Access has become a keyword of the twenty-first century. However, even in the 1960s, government data collection and growing computational power facilitated new forms of statistical analysis that people thought could become new ‘intelligence’ systems. The legislative response to these threats were new data protection and information privacy regimes that included ‘data subject rights’ – mechanisms by which individuals could obtain access to information about them held by others, and rectify any inaccuracy. This type of transparency gave individuals a way to participate in the profiling regime, by attempting to ensure that the data used by profilers was accurate and relevant. Informed by the German constitutional concept of informational self-determination, limitations to profiling in data protection are premised on the idea that a person’s self-image ought to be the primary determinant of their identity. However, it is argued here that this approach loses traction as the profiling environment becomes more sophisticated.

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Official discretion, errors, and oversights: legal bureaucracy and the question of justice in twentieth-century India

5 - Data Subject Rights and the Importance of Access

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Official discretion, errors, and oversights: legal bureaucracy and the question of justice in twentieth-century India

5 - Data Subject Rights and the Importance of Access

Summary