India, Oct. 23 -- On October 22, a Twitter user asked a simple question that most people, including most journalists, could not answer. "Can someone tell us how did eMudhra become the foundation of the global internet in the first place?"

The replies were quick and dismissive. "It didn't," wrote one user. "eMudhra is not the foundation of the internet. And never was," wrote another.

Both replies were closer to correct than the original tweet. But the underlying story, which a third user, Sandeep Srinivasa, laid out in a widely shared thread with screenshots, is real, documented, and did not get much attention in India this week. eMudhra, the Bengaluru-based digital identity company, has spent eight years as one of roughly a hundred orga...