january 30, 2021
The Anxious State
Strategies of surveillance of women reveal the state’s warped notion of public safety.
Nikita Sonavane, Ameya Bokil, Srujana Bej write:
M
adhya Pradesh’s (MP) chief minister, as reported in
the media, recently suggested that working women
would be required to register themselves at the local
police stations for “safety” tracking. The Uttar Pradesh police
followed suit by announcing that Lucknow’s cameras will be
equipped with artificial intelligence to capture photos of “wom-
en in distress” on the basis of their facial expressions to initiate
police response. Police reliance on surveillance technology to
address women’s safety has substantially increased in the after-
math of the 2012 Delhi gang rape. The Nirbhaya fund and Safe
City projects have been initiated to reduce sexual offences. In
Bengaluru, wrist “Raksha bands” contain motion sensors and a
panic button to alert police when women are in danger; while in
Mumbai, `18 crore has been allotted for GIS-mapping of crimi-
nal “hotspots.” The surveillance of women by the state machin-
ery has been rather common, whether it was the case of Gujarat
in 2008 or weak judicial responses in other instances.
To understand the effectiveness of technology-based policing to
address violence against women, it is necessary to first trace the
genesis of policing. India’s police force was established by the East
India Company to control colonised populations for economic ex-
ploitation, in the name of maintaining “public order” by utilising
vast surveillance powers. The British adopted targeted policing
practices to channel limited resources against groups around
whom a consensus of criminality could be built. This consensus of
the communities which are the proper objects of policing derived
its rationale from the caste system. It has since helped construct
the “criminality” of men and women from Adivasi, Dalit, Denoti-
fied Tribal communities and the hijra—transgender communities.
The Criminal Tribes Act, 1871 characterised several nomadic
and semi-nomadic tribes as “hereditary criminals.” It empowered
the police to record their fingerprints and required their attend-
ance before village headmen and at police stations. Despite its
repeal, its legacy is kept alive through provisions in our criminal
procedural codes and state laws that empower police to surveil
“habitual offenders.” Consequently, some communities are
constantly monitored by the police because criminality is in-
scribed on their bodies—they are criminals either likely to
commit a crime, attempting to commit a crime or fleeing after
committing a crime.
One can be designated as a habitual offender upon mere police
suspicion even without a conviction, according to the state’s po-
lice regulations. The consequence is that surveillance becomes a
Economic & Political Weekly EPW january 30, 2021 vol lVI no 5
normalised, routine interference in one’s life through fingerprint
recording, police domiciliary visits, home picketing and inter-
rogative harassment. Despite the limited scope of these police
powers, further circumscribed by the Supreme Court in Govind v
State of Madhya Pradesh, the surveillance activities of MP Police
are disproportionate. The police have created a permanent data-
base of private information (including biometric details) of ha-
bitual offenders and their families, as well as minors. This is sup-
plemented by targeted CCTV surveillance. In effect, a 360-degree
profile is being created of every person “coming in contact” with
the police and these constructions are then used to legitimise
biased predictive policing practices. None of these seem to have
a clear legal basis, with the police using ambiguous provisions
from its police regulations that make no mention of digital data-
bases or CCTVs, at a time when India has no data protection laws.
Surveillance-based policing is also an extension of the state’s
anxiety over its own failures in proactively creating public spac-
es that are safe for women. But practising surveillance in the
name of providing safety for women, in effect, does little to re-
duce violence against women. On the other hand, the state’s in-
terference leads to constraints on the minimum degree of free-
dom that is necessary for decent living. The state seeks to en-
sure women’s safety within a structural ecosystem that is
marked by the absence of reasonable limits on police discretion,
whereby scant judicial and public scrutiny has meant that a
local police station’s power to decide what offences to register,
whom to arrest and what tools to utilise is hidden to the public
and is virtually limitless. Therefore, we must situate police sur-
veillance for women’s safety within such a setting of legal am-
biguity, police secrecy, unchecked, disproportionate police dis-
cretion, and state failure.
Policing is an age-old practice, sustained by Brahminical
ideology which seeks to maintain strict control over women’s
sexuality. The police have been among the foremost violators
of women’s safety in public spaces. The Brahminical patriar-
chal nature of policing controls the bodies of dominant caste
women and inflicts violence against Dalit, Bahujan and Adivasi
women. The control of women is being pursued by creating
typologies of certain caste and classes of women who need to
be protected from “immoral,” “savage” men through the tool of
technological power. In a patriarchal society that already
places strict restrictions on women’s mobility, it is also likely
that policing technologies will be used to further hinder
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women’s access to public spaces. Given this background, it
would be naïve to assume that strengthening of the police’s
surveillance architecture, purportedly to ensure women’s safety,
would serve any purpose except to further entrench a carceral
control over the bodies and agency of women, and bolster the
narrative of criminality associated with men from marginal-
ised communities.
Nikita Sonavane, Ameya Bokil and Srujana Bej (cpaprojectindia@gmail.com)
are associated with the Bhopal-based Criminal Justice and Police
Accountability Project.

8 january 30, 2021 vol lVI no 5 EPW Economic & Political Weekly