NEW DELHI: Digital India has swept the imagination of the "modern" Indian along with the "development" paradigm of invest (read ‘make’) in India under the present Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government.

Surprisingly enough this package of government or as our esteemed Prime Minister would term “governance” of development, in terms of infrastructure, digital empowerment and supposed economic prosperity is gaining mass popularity without any critical questioning from the majority of the Indians both living in and outside of India.

A lot has indeed gone into the making of this imagination which also includes the role of the media vociferously advocating a "globalized and digitalized” India, empowered enough to give strong competition to the most advanced countries in the world.

But while all this sounds fantastic, whose India are we talking about?

What does empowerment mean to most Indians, or let’s be specific the underbellies of the Indian boom- the Dalits, the adivasis, women, the physically and mentally challenged? Who benefits out of this? And who are the main players of this politics of development? And how ready are we as a nation to embrace s digital India at this point in history?

It all dates back to when the East India company first came to "invest" in India, with a sole business motive that would be mutually(at least we can give them a benefit claim) advantageous for India and the East India company. Sounds surprisingly similar to the present context of the politics of FDI in India, right? What began with a language of cooperation and mutual sustenance finally ended in India becoming a colony of the British in no time.

A similar danger lurks in the digital India initiative with the loud slogan of "invest in India". It seems like today’s India is almost blinded to the omnipresent cues of a politics of a similar nature because the deal is now being sold under the banner of development with a dream being painted of the possibility of India becoming a global superpower. While this takes India away from its reality to an imaginary farce simultaneously neo colonialism seeps in to take into firmly in its grips to make it again its ‘beloved colony’, this time in the name of democracy and in very nexus with the state.

Having said that, now let’s try to understand who gains from this politics and why would the government do it anyway, after all the Modi government like all other governments came to power with promises to provide basic amenities like access to primary health care, education and sanitation to the poorest of the poor.

(Un)fortunately the story here is not very different from why during the colonial era, the zamindars or landlords supported the British. The difference is one of terminology, today we have the capitalist replacing the zamindar and the government is trying to establish itself as the zamindar of the zamindars, or rather the capitalist of the capitalists.

Rapid industrialisation requires land. At least 60 million people have been displaced from their homes and customary lands without any compensation or resettlement and rehabilitation. And 60% of the displaced are tribals and dalits of India- the most marginalized and alienated sections of our society.

We are not even trying to get into the technicalities of available spectrum space and competitive pricing of data plans, we are raising the most basic question as to how and why digital India completely ignores the real problems of the farmer that drives him to take away his own life, the mother that dies at childbirth due to unavailability of healthcare services, the girl child who never sees the light of the day for she is murdered before she is born.

Which India are we trying to digitalize here? The India which cannot provide electricity to more than 40% of its population, the India where till date more than 40% adults are illiterate, the India where thousands of villages do not have roads and the nearest hospital or school is at least ten miles on foot, where thousands of women each day are forced to defecate in the open and a basic minimum wage is a far cry.

Moving a step forward arises the question of internet monopoly. Again the story is similar and is about how big malls came to our doorsteps asserting they will sell us cheaper goods than the corner store or the grocery store down the road. We eventually stopped buying things from our retail shops and started investing in the goods sold by these malls until most small scale shops and retail stores were forced to shut down with our shifting preference for a giant,"friendly" mall selling huge businesses off the corporations. And sooner than we thought the market forces started controlling our likes, dislikes and even what we could buy or not thereby conveniently limiting our choices and controlling our needs.

We did not dissent, because we did not understand the politics of this market monopoly that happened under the carpet. Let’s take a look at the crowd that has the purchasing power to splurge at these malls? Do they represent the ‘real’ people of India? It is an affirmative No! We feel the story of digital India is similar. It too shall begin with lucrative offers and eventually Reliance and Facebook will decide what we see over the internet, how much we have to pay to buy which product (read website) on the internet, with those offers.

Soon the internet will cease to remain a mode of communication and networking but will turn into a product for communication controlled and monopolized by big corporates to foster their economic interest, and what corporations have done to India and other developing countries is well known.

People are fascinated about the offers of internet.org that it will give free access to some websites via Facebook. Does it not sound similar to something like “give me your nature and I will give you an artificial garden, which will be a token representation of the nature that you will sell me.”

The government has already started to exercise its authority over day to day life of its citizens by deciding what we eat, how we dress, who we worship, what religion we follow and if or not we can have access to the internet (while our PM was in Silicon valley the state of Jammu and Kashmir was cut off from the internet for 77 hours straight in the anticipation of misuse by anti-social elements to create communal tension especially during the important festival of Eid. We wonder if this anticipation goes for a walk when mass graves are discovered in Kashmir. Or when fake encounters by the army continue unabated?

Well Mister Prime Minister you have clearly failed to sell us ‘your’ dream of digital India and make in India. When we say us , we would like to include the voice of the voiceless which includes the adivasi woman in a rural village of Assam who had lost her home and her family to ethnic riots and lived in constant fear of attack either by the militants or the armed forces, we would also like to include the farmer who lost his crops to GM seeds and pesticides and committed suicide, to the Dalit girl who could not continue her education because she was married off by the time she was 12 years old and now has a family to look after....and many many others who comprise a majority of India and are too disillusioned to buy the dreams of digital India.

You failed to sell us your digital un-freedom!

(Anwesha Dutta is a Doctoral Research Fellow at the Department of Conflict and Development Studies, Ghent University. Bitopi Dutta is a Phd Research Scholar at the School of Law and Government, Dublin City University. )

(Bitopi Dutta is a Phd Research Scholar at the School of Law and Government, Dublin City University. She can be contacted on bitopidutta@gmail.com)

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