Book Section #16919

India’s Constitution, now living through roughly three-quarters of a century of
democratic practice, has repeatedly demonstrated that “successful adoption” is
not measured only by the survival of a text, but by the capacity of constitutional
values to discipline new forms of power. In the twenty-first century, artificial
intelligence (AI) has emerged as precisely such a form: a governing
infrastructure capable of classifying persons, predicting behaviour, distributing
welfare, detecting fraud, moderating speech, and shaping public attention at a
scale unknown to earlier administrative eras. The constitutional problem is not
that machines “decide,” but that decision-making is increasingly routed through
socio-technical systems that are opaque, probabilistic, and often insulated from
ordinary mechanisms of reason-giving and accountability (Citron, 2008;
Pasquale, 2015).
If the Indian constitutional project was historically animated by the ambition to
convert a society of graded status into a polity of equal citizenship, then AI must
be evaluated against the same normative horizon: liberty, equality, dignity,
fraternity, and the rule of law. The move from “visible” administrative discretion
to “model-mediated” governance threatens to displace the classical
constitutional safeguards of notice, hearing, reasons, and review, not always by
open repudiation, but by quiet technological substitution (Citron, 2008).
This chapter therefore treats AI and data protection as a continuing chapter in
India’s constitutional journey. The central argument is that India’s constitutional
resilience at 75 years will increasingly be judged by whether constitutional
supremacy can discipline digital power in two directions at once: first, the state’s
power to surveil, classify, and automate public decisions; and second, private
power exercised through platforms, data brokers, and AI systems that profile,
predict, and curate social life. The chapter proceeds from constitutional baseline
to statutory implementation and then to governance design: privacy and dignity as foundational; equality and non-discrimination as anti-hierarchy constraints;
due process and reasoned justification as minimum rule-of-law conditions; and
institutional accountability as the bridge between constitutional promise and
algorithmic governance.