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What Happens When You Are No Longer Recognised? | EP 26 | Dear Body
21 Plays21 days ago
In this episode of Dear Body, we explore the CNIC not just as a card, but as a body pass. Imagine an object that mediates your ability to move, transact, and belong in Pakistan.
Through the story of Amin Khan, a resident of Islamabad whose ID was blocked, we trace the effects of administrative suspension on daily life. What happens when recognition is conditional, and existence is validated only through a system?
We look beyond policy and bureaucracy, reflecting on bodies, identity, and the stakes of being “seen” in modern life.
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Transcript
Network and Identity Glitches
00:00:00
Speaker
Imagine using your phone on a regular day and unlocking it to pay for lunch at work when suddenly the signal weakens. You assume it is a temporary network issue so you connect to a colleague's mobile hotspot.
00:00:13
Speaker
You open your banking app expecting the usual routine, but it logs you out. You try signing back in and suddenly your credentials no longer seem to exist.
00:00:26
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At first, it feels like a minor inconvenience, the kind of glitch you dismiss without much thought. But then, the disruptions begin to immaculate in ways that are harder to ignore.
00:00:38
Speaker
You cannot send money, your salary does not arrive, you try booking a ticket, but the system refuses to proceed. Even something as ordinary as checking into a hotel becomes impossible because you can no longer prove who you are in a way that system recognizes. And slowly, almost imperceptibly at first, something begins to shift in your understanding of what is happening.
CNIC and Daily Life Disruptions
00:01:04
Speaker
This is no longer a technical failure. It is not your phone, your bank or the network. It is something more fundamental. The systems that structure everyday life are no longer recognizing you as a valid presence within them. What makes this experience unsettling is that nothing about your physical reality has changed.
00:01:26
Speaker
You are still here, occupying the same space, moving through the same day, inhabiting the same body. But administratively, something has shifted.
00:01:38
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You are no longer legible in the places that matter most for participation in modern life. It is not disappearance in a literal sense, but a form of suspension where existence continues, yet the inability to function within society is quietly placed on hold.
00:01:59
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In Pakistan, this condition is not hypothetical. It is tied to something as ordinary and as easily overlooked as as the computerized national identity card.
00:02:11
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And it is through this object that today's episode begins.
00:02:21
Speaker
Hello, I'm Saroosh and you're listening to Dear Body, a show about body politics, culture, and the ways society teaches us how to exist in our bodies. And and if that is something that intrigues you, then I hope you connect with me on this journey.
00:02:37
Speaker
Let's get into today's episode. Now, at a glance, the CNIC appears to be a simple document, a 13-digit number, a photograph, a set of biometric markers, a record of who you are, where you belong.
00:02:50
Speaker
But in practice, it operates as far more than identification. It acts as a central node that connects your body to a vast network of institutions, banks, telecom companies, transport systems, government services, each of which relies on it to confirm your legitimacy.
00:03:11
Speaker
This is what makes the CNIC so consequential. It does not merely describe your identity, it enables it. It allows your body to move, transact, communicate and access the structures that make everyday life possible. Without it or when it is temporarily rendered inactive, the consequences are not abstract, your mobility becomes restricted, your financial access is interrupted, your communication channels are cut off. What appears to be a bureaucratic action begins to shape the conditions under which you live. There are of course reasons why such systems exist.
00:03:52
Speaker
The state requires mechanisms to organize populations, verify identities, respond to concerns around fraud, security and documentation. These are not inherently unreasonable objectives, but what is often less visible and is how these systems do more than manage identity, they actively produce it. They determine how identity is recognised when it is considered valid and what happens when that recognition is withdrawn even temporarily. Because in a system like this, identity is no longer just something internal or self-defined.
00:04:29
Speaker
It is something that must be continuously confirmed by external infrastructures, our databases, verification processes, institutional
Verification and Access in Society
00:04:38
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networks. The moment that confirmation falters, the effects ripple outward into nearly every aspect of daily life. What begins as an administrative interruption becomes a lived experience of limitation.
00:04:52
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So this episode is not simply about a policy change or a legal amendment or even a national identity card. It is about a deeper question that sits beneath all of these structures. What does it mean to exist in a system where recognition is not constant but conditional? And what happens to a person, their body, their movement, their sense of belonging, when that recognition is suddenly, even temporarily placed on hold? If you stay with that initial feeling, the quiet shock,
00:05:22
Speaker
of not being recognised, you begin to see how much of everyday life is actually built on systems that are constantly confirming who you are. In Pakistan, at the centre of it all sits the CNIC.
00:05:37
Speaker
It's easy to think of the CNIC as just another document, something you carry in your wallet or now increasingly on your phone, a card you show when asked, a number you type into a form or when you are shopping.
00:05:51
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But the more closely you look, the more it becomes clear that this is not just a record of identity. It is the infrastructure through which identity is made usable.
00:06:02
Speaker
For most people, this doesn't register as identity governance in daily life. It appears in smaller moments, when a payment app refuses to open and the first reaction is not political concern but irritation.
00:06:16
Speaker
When a SIM card suddenly stops working and the instinct is to restart the phone rather than question the system. When a form demands verification and you must instinctively reach for a number you rarely think about unless it is requested. Identity in these moments is not an idea, it is a reflex.
00:06:36
Speaker
You do not experience this as exclusion in a dramatic sense. It feels more like waiting, appendding starters a a grey loading screen, a try again later message. You keep moving through the day, but certain actions begin to accumulate friction. You postpone tasks, not because they are impossible, but because access has become unpredictable. Over time, you adjust your behaviour around systems you do not directly see, but constantly anticipate.
00:07:08
Speaker
There is a sociologist named David Leon who has described this as a shift towards what he calls social sorting. The idea is simple, but its implications are far reaching. Identity systems don't just confirm who you are, they also organise people into categories.
00:07:28
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They determine who gets access, who is delayed, who is flagged, who is excluded, not always visibly and not always intentionally, but consistently.
00:07:39
Speaker
So identification becomes more than recognition. It becomes a way of managing populations. And once identity is tied to these systems so deeply, the boundaries between inclusion and exclusion become less about physical presence and more about whether you are legible within the system itself. whether your data aligns, whether your records match, whether your identity can be verified in the way the system expects it to be.
Biometric Systems and Identity Politics
00:08:11
Speaker
Citizenship, we often think as a legal or political status, starts to take on a more operational meaning. It becomes something you have access to, something you can exercise, only when the system recognizes you as valid within it. This logic is embedded in small familiar processes. when a ride hailing app requires repeated verification before a trip, when a banking app flags the transaction because it fails outside of pattern, when travel booking requires additional confirmation that appears arbitrary to the user.
00:08:48
Speaker
None of these moments feel political on their own, but together they produce a consistent condition. Access is no longer assumed, it is continuously negotiated. That's where this conversation begins to move beyond documentation and onto something deeper about how identity, belonging and participation are structured in the world we live in. If you research and read upon Ajana's work on how biometric governance situates identity systems within broader biopolitical frameworks, it will show you how technical infrastructures function as instruments of control, risk management and social sorting. In Kenya's Huduma Namba registration rollout, civil society groups raised concerns that biometric centralization could exclude rural populations lacking formal documentation or stable access to registration centers. Elderly citizens and pastoral communities were particularly affected due to difficulties in providing consistent biometric records or navigating registration infrastructure.
00:09:59
Speaker
These cases illustrate how biometric systems do not simply record identity, but actively reshape who can successfully produce an administratively valid self in the first place. This can also be applied to instances or the strata of society in Pakistan. We will get into that very soon. But before that, let's look at how identity structures are not neutral. They are suffused with politics, suspicion, and calculus of security. Biometric technologies abstract the body into measurable data points.
00:10:39
Speaker
fingerprints, facial features, iris scans, ultimately producing what Ajana terms recombinant identities that are legible to institutions while erasing the narrative, self-attesting aspects of identity. In Pakistan, this abstraction interacts with inherited administrative logics. kinship networks, a place of residence, and social positioning. These remain integral to whether an an individual CNIC can operate as a legitimate pass into society. Pakistan offers a particularly vivid illustration through its National Database and Registration Authority. Established in 2000, Nadra maintains one of the world's largest centralized biometric databases connecting over 96 million citizens to government and private sector services through multipurpose identity card.
00:11:34
Speaker
While biometrics, meaning your fingerprints, facial recognition, iris scans are often emphasized, research shows that identification is grounded in older paper-based systems, kinship networks, and proof of residence. Administrative suspension in this context frequently targets Pashtun migrants in Islamabad, whose cards are blocked by ostensibly automated processes. This suspension not only delays their access to services, but materially shapes their capacity to inhabit urban space, pursue employment, and claim legal recognition. To elaborate more on how this context applies here, I'd like to take this moment to share a case Amin Khan, Pashun resident of Islamabad's I-11 informal settlement.
00:12:24
Speaker
Now, when he petitioned Nadhra to issue a CNIC listing his Kachchi Abadi address, his request was denied, and the court's intervention ultimately led to the state targeting the settlement itself for demolition. The refusal of Nadhra to recognize his residential claim exemplifies the anxieties of bureaucratic institutions regarding the visibility of marginalized groups.
00:12:49
Speaker
Here, administrative suspension becomes a subtle mechanism of control rather than using direct force. The state regulates mobility and belonging by withholding documentation that mediates access to urban life.
00:13:05
Speaker
What makes these cases difficult to locate emotionally is that there is no single moment of rupture, there is no clear before and after. Instead, there is not gradual narrowing.
00:13:16
Speaker
One service becomes unavailable, then another requires extra steps, then access shifts from direct to conditional. By the time it is recognised as exclusion, it has already been normalised as delay. not The reality of suspended citizens highlights the stakes of such exclusions. The card structures what bodies can do, where they can go, what services they can access. Its absence or dysfunction produces zones of suspension in which citizenship is particularly enacted but never fully realised, even
00:13:50
Speaker
Routine interactions begin to rely on this background system, buying a SIM card, receiving money from family, applying for a job, or even registering a child's school admission all depend on invisible validation layers. Most people do not think about the CNIC as something active in these moments. It is assumed to be stable. It only becomes visible when it stops working. It is not only a document but a mediator of rights, an instrument of governance and a lens through which citizenship is experienced in corporeal, spatial and administrative terms. Recognizing the CNIC as a body pass allows us to see how governmental systems translate social anxieties into technological forms and how citizens navigate, negotiate, and contest these forms in their pursuit of inclusion, recognition, and the right to move freely through public life.
00:14:48
Speaker
Biopolitics begins with a shift in how life itself is understood as something that can be administered In Michel Foucault's framing, it refers to the set of practices through which states and institutions manage populations, deciding who is counted, who becomes visible, who gains access to resources, and who remains structurally peripheral. Within this logic, identity stops being only personal attribute.
00:15:15
Speaker
It becomes a point of governance, Now, systems of recognition, whether identity cards, biometric databases, or adjusted frameworks, they do not simply confirm who someone is.
00:15:27
Speaker
They organize social life through classification, sorting, and regulation. This raises a quiet but persistent tension. What does it mean to exist in a system where recognition is not guaranteed but can be delayed, suspended or withdrawn? Biometric systems are often introduced as solutions to this uncertainty. Fingerprints, iris scans, facial recognition techniques, all of these are typically framed as neutral tools, precise, efficient, objective.
00:16:00
Speaker
Yet, as Ajana argues, I'm bringing Ajana back again into the conversation, according to Ajana, these systems are deeply embedded in political logics, particularly those shaped by security concerns, distrust and risk calculation.
00:16:19
Speaker
They do not only verify identity, they actively reconfigure it. At borders, for instance, biometric screening does not operate equally across all bodies. It produces differentiated features.
00:16:32
Speaker
Some individuals move through systems with ease, while others are repeatedly marked for additional scrutiny or delay. Even when the same procedure applied universally, the outcomes remain uneven.
00:16:46
Speaker
Certain identities accumulate what can be described as a kind of institutional trust, while others remain perpetually provisional. At the same time, these systems also transform what identity itself can contain.
00:16:59
Speaker
They privilege what can be measured over what can be narrated. Histories, relationships and self-understanding are compressed into data points that must fit predefined templates. Ajana describes this as a movement towards recombinant identities where institutional systems reconstruct the individual in ways that are legible to databases but incomplete in relation to the lived experience. So you gain something and that is the standard but actually there is also something that is lost in translation.
00:17:36
Speaker
So on an administrative level, you are readable, but you're not being fully represented within that a template that has been predefined for you. Now, this leads to a more fundamental question that runs through all systems of identification.
00:17:51
Speaker
So who actually has the authority to define recognition itself? Identity infrastructures do not operate in neutral space. They encode assumptions about legitimacy, belonging, and trust.
00:18:04
Speaker
In doing so, they determine not only access to services, but also the conditions under which a person is allowed to appear as a valid subject within institutional life.
Shaping Legitimacy and Participation
00:18:16
Speaker
Recognition in this sense is not simply descriptive. It is productive, it produces inclusion and exclusion simultaneously. See, from this angle, the question is no longer about how accurate or their efficient these systems are. It is about what kinds of lives they make possible. Ajahnar's work suggests that the challenge is not merely technical but it's more on an ethical lens. If you look at Ajahnar's work again, it is basically suggesting that the challenge that we have right now is not just technical in nature but ethical.
00:18:49
Speaker
How the built systems can that can recognize without flattening and govern without erasing the complexity of lived identity. Otherwise, the risk is that identity becomes something that is imposed on others rather than expressed freely. Something defined externally but but before it is ever experienced internally. So if we look now at the identification system, the modern identification systems, David Leon has
00:19:20
Speaker
perfectly pointed out how they are built on centralized databases that extend far beyond record keeping. They actively structure your daily life by mediating what can and cannot be done. so when i and i So when an identity is flagged or suspended, the impact is rarely confined to a single domain. A disruption in one system can cascade into others. Thus, if it affects your mobility, financial transaction, healthcare care access, administrative procedures.
00:19:52
Speaker
Now, the duration may be brief or prolonged, but the defining feature is not time, it is the reach. The interruption spreads across ordinary to routines until stability itself begins to feel contingent. As a result, what emerges is not disappearance, but a form of partial visibility.
00:20:12
Speaker
The individual remains physically present. Yes, you're socially active as well. Yet you become unreadable within the institutional systems. For those who are already navigating precarious forms of life like the informal settlements, migrant communities, this condition intensifies existing uncertainties because physical presence and bureaucratic recognition no longer align in stable ways. One continues while the other fluctuates. Across different global contexts, this structure repeats with variations.
00:20:46
Speaker
National identity systems in places such as Japan and Malaysia demonstrate how large-scale registries embed mechanisms of access control within everyday life. suspension or restriction is not an anomaly within these systems, it is a part of how they regulate participation. The key difference across context lies not in whether the logic exists, but in how deeply it is integrated into routine functioning. if This is something that has already intrigued you.
00:21:17
Speaker
on a deeper level and you would like to explore more into how at a global scale different systems operate whether there are any similarities or do they operate on a different or at a level which is 10 steps ahead of how everything operates in Pakistan. Now a blocked identity does not usually correspond to a singular action or mistakes. It reflects a classification process that determines whether a person remains legible within the system and if they don't, when is it that they do not? in many urban settings, even outside formal systems, recognition is still constantly performed through face checks at the security gates, phone-based authentication for payments or QR code verification at entry points, a missed OTP, a locked account, or an expired record can quietly interrupt access to transport, food delivery, or workplace entry. These micro-frictions accumulate into a broader reality.
00:22:19
Speaker
Identity today is not a static position, but a continuously negotiated condition, maintained through repeated validation across systems that rarely announce their authority, but constantly exercise it. Yet, within these challenges, there are openings for reimagining belonging. If vulnerability is an inherent feature of modern governance, then ethical approaches to identification must contend not only with accuracy and efficiency, but also with dignity, autonomy, and narrative voice of the individual.
00:22:54
Speaker
Recognition should not be a form of compliance imposed from above, but a negotiation rooted in empathy, mutual respect, and acknowledgement of the self-authored life.
00:23:05
Speaker
In practical terms, this means designing systems that allow space for contestation, that protect the most vulnerable, and that consider social inclusion as a primary objective, rather than a by-product.
00:23:18
Speaker
Sometimes when I pause to consider what it means to belong, I find that in a it is less about a cert certificate, a card or a digital record and more about being seen and being allowed to see oneself reflected
Belonging Beyond Identification
00:23:32
Speaker
in the world.
00:23:32
Speaker
Recognition in this sense is not simply bureaucratic, it is profoundly embodied. It touches how we navigate streets, how we access care. How our very presence in public space is affirmed or doubted. Biometric systems and identity technologies more broad broadly do not merely register who we are. They configure what it means to be, who is deserving of inclusion, and who remains perpetually marked as suspect. The body becomes a ledger of social expectation, risk, and suspicion rather than a site of lived experience. The promise of citizenship is always intertwined with the risk of exclusion. Immigrants, welfare claimants and other marginalized groups are subjected to intense scrutiny, immigrants welfare claimants and other marginalized groups are subjected to intense scrutiny while the markers of trust and legitimacy are unevenly
00:24:33
Speaker
What emerges is a form of governance that is remote, technical and abstract, yet whose effects are profoundly intimate, felt in everyday experiences of vulnerability, suspicion and conditional belonging. Yet there is something also completely deeply human in the spaces that these systems cannot fully capture. There are moments when community ties and formal networks and mutual understanding become the scaffolding of life.
00:25:03
Speaker
sustaining those whom institutions leave in limbo. Belonging then is not reducible to a card, a database or a security protocol. It is woven through relationships, practices and encounters where recognition is enacted, not merely granted.
00:25:21
Speaker
Perhaps this is the invitation that remains open in the end of such a reflection with you. To inhabit a world where belonging is mediated by surveillance, technology and the law is to confront the fragility of recognitions in itself. But it is also to recognize that life persists in the unquantifiable spaces, in the gestures of care, in the acts of mutual support, in the small but persistent ways people assert that they are seen, heard and accounted for beyond any ledger. Perhaps the most radical act we can take in such a world is to remain attentive, remain attentive to the ways recognition is withheld or granted.
00:26:03
Speaker
to the quiet affirmations of belonging that resist control, and to the possibility that even in systems designed to categorize and constrain, there is room for generosity, connection, and care. I hope you take away something from this episode as we conclude. Because this is one of those topics that you don't just sit down to think about. They are a subject of discussion, but only at a surface level. And it's important to recognize these systems. At the same time, it is also important to recognize the complexity of such systems. As always, be sure to
00:26:39
Speaker
Follow me, connect with me on Instagram. You can also drop a comment if you are listening to this podcast right now. I also have a website. It is saroshibrahim.com and I hope to see you in another episode.
00:26:56
Speaker
Till then, make sure to be kind. I'm your host Saroosh and you will listening to Dear Body.