Paper Kinship: Constructing Individual Identity in Cold War Pakistan

Drawing on archival material and oral histories, this chapter examines Pakistan's national identity database’s most immediate historical predecessor: Pakistan’s first paper-based population register. The first identification regime was set up in the wake of the creation of Bangladesh in 1973. I examine why national identity took on renewed significance in the form of documentary technology at this time, approximately two decades after Pakistan’s formation. To this end, this chapter first situates the unprecedented scheme within the landscape of existing identity documentation in the aftermath of the Indian Subcontinent’s Partition, and the creation of the independent nation-states of India and Pakistan, in 1947. It then traces a political history of postcolonial documentary technology. It situates transformations in bureaucratic information systems in relation to the territorial reconfiguration after Bangladesh’s independence and the escalating Cold War on the western frontier. It examines how the identification regime sought to apprehend unsettled populations in the wake of an ongoing process of decolonization. During this period, the Pakistani state’s practices of securitization crystallized in techniques for managing the population not only through passports or permits but internally through identity registration. With mass movement across frontiers—especially the Afghanistan-Pakistan border—familial information became crucial for establishing and verifying both individual and national identity. Such an approach is significant for how we understand digital identification protocols at present, specifically through their reliance on kinship. In conclusion, this chapter reflects on how Pakistan’s first national identity registration regime helps us conceptualize the shift between the past and present in ways that trouble the category of the “postcolonial” itself.