The Department of Interdisciplinary Humanities welcomes Dr Nisha Kapoor to deliver its annual lecture 2025-26 on her paper 'Governing by Data: Surveillance, Tech Capital and Majoritarian Power in Hyderabad'.

This paper contributes to ongoing discussions of authoritarianism in contemporary India by examining its urban manifestation through a synthesis of neoliberal capitalist and nationalist forces, analysed here through the emergence of the “Data State” in the metropolitan city of Hyderabad.

Building on scholarship that identifies datafication as enabling citizen disenfranchisement, mass surveillance, technocratic governance, and new forms of capitalist extraction, the paper argues that Hyderabad represents a particularly concentrated site where these dynamics converge. The city’s rapid development has been driven by a strategic economic commitment to information software capital and, more recently, platform and AI capitalism, alongside a culturally inflected, messianic faith in information technology as the vehicle for realising the promise of “Digital India” and India’s imagined status as a global technological power. Positioned as a Silicon Valley outpost and a forerunner of India’s data economy, this model of development is spatially concentrated in the western technopolis of ‘Cyberabad’, while reshaping governance practices across the wider urban region.

Focusing on the expansion of digital policing and surveillance infrastructures, the paper examines how data-driven urban security has become central to Hyderabad’s mode of governance. These systems, developed through public–private partnerships with global technology firms and local IT capital, reconfigure populations as data subjects and render urban space legible through risk, suspicion, and control. The paper situates these processes within Hyderabad’s historically layered urban geography, marked by its identity as a Muslim city rich in cultural and architectural heritage, and argues that contemporary surveillance practices intersect with broader projects of Hinduisation.

About the speaker

Dr Nisha Kapoor is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Warwick. She is the author of Deport Deprive Extradite: 21st Century State Extremism (Verso, 2018) and editor of The State of Race (Palgrave, 2013). In 2020 she won the Philip Leverhulme Prize and is currently working on a monograph provisionally titled The Data State and the Hindutva Nation which explores growing authoritarianism, algorithmic regulation and the emergence of data subjects under Hindu majoritarianism.