In the late 60’s and 70’s, long before Internet and social media or five-year courses in mass communications, cub reporters were thrown into the deep to learn to swim. This included a night or a week in the emergency ward of a hospital, or the morgue of the city civil surgeon. The blood and gore and stink was supposed to harden your mind and strengthen your heart.
Your soul was seared by a few nights spent in the red light district, in Delhi’s notorious as Gastian Bastian Road after some British general, or GB Road for short, as used by tonga drivers and rickshaw pullers who took you to the place.
If you enjoyed reading this article, you can help support our journalism by adding OHeraldo as a preferred source.
But your real introduction to the realities of life was in the days and nights spent in a typical police station. Darya Ganj or Kamla Market or Kotwali, all in the walled city. It was on one such night that a rookie journalist saw first-hand what a third degree interrogation meant. This was some chap caught for theft or robbers – certainly not murder. He was trussed with his hands and feet tied, strung on a pole balanced on two chairs. Occasionally he was slapped on his bottom, or the soles of his feet, care taken not to leave marks. This was left hanging for what seemed an eternity. It is presumed he confessed to a crime he may or may not have committed, and later in court was given a brief term in prison. One crime solved.
The police hadn’t heard of modern forensic sciences even if their senior officers had perhaps read Sherlock Holmes in the college library. Equipment in police stations was near non-existent, and still very basic. The Crime branch perhaps had some equipment and a man or two trained to use it. But DNA testing in murder and rape was unheard of in an era where perhaps the only room sized computer was in the Faculty of Science in the University of Delhi.
India had, of course, not heard of electronic tethers or radio frequency shackles that the United States was even then trying out to ensure that criminals on parole or held for defying some other law did not leave town, or cross boundaries they were obliged to respect. There was talk in science fiction literature, and dystopian films, that radio frequency miniature tags could be inserted under the skin and could be detected at barriers. That is how modern pet owners keep track of their dogs and cats, or the prized bull or ram on a farm.
This came to mind half a century later in this spring as Parliament cleared without much ado, and almost with no public exposure, the Criminal Procedure (Identification) Bill which allows collection of biometric data of persons arrested for a crime, or wanted by the police to help them in some investigation.
The Bill substantially widens the ambit and scope not just of the data but the people who it would cover. The data would include biometrics such as fingerprints, palm prints, foot prints, iris and retina scan, and undefined body fluids and physical and biological samples such as blood, semen and saliva.
This does not raise a red flag in most people, even among activists. We have become inured. The Aadhaar card application has got us trained to give our finger and thumb prints, to stand still while the retina is being scanned, and to meekly surrender every other data sought by the person from a private company which has been outsourced the collection of the data.
Passports require fingerprints. And any visit to the United States or Israel would not only require you to submit a full set of fingerprints but also accept the fact that you could be subject to strip check. I speak from experience.
The bills should have raised several red flags.
Why prisoners? That term can include everybody who is or has been inside a prison while not on official duty as a police officer, jailor, staffer, doctor or magistrate. This term includes people arrested for “crimes” that could include protesting a price rise, demanding due wages as an employee, or a university student taking part in a political agitation. It can mean under trials awaiting a court hearing or sentencing.
It also means people who have not been even charged with a crime, but are just held on suspicion as hundreds of young and old people arrested under UAPA or by the National Investigations Agency. India has nothing to be proud of the number of people who spend long years in jail and then have a judge find them innocent of the crime for which they had been jailed, perhaps under political pressure or because the police were acting under influence or were corrupt.
The second is the issue of biometrics itself. As mentioned earlier, Indians give their biometric data to the government in the belief that Aadhaar cards are mandatory. The government had said they were not mandatory. The Supreme Court also said that. But slowly, step by step, the government sabotaged the Supreme Court ruling by making the Aadhaar card and its data mandatorily linked to PAN cards, bank accounts, income tax, GST and so on. Now often, schools demand this for processing scholarships. Aadhaar data has become universally mandatory without legal or parliament sanction.
There have been deep concerns about how data is shared, sold or computerised by the corporate sector or used for surveillance by government agencies. The right to privacy of a citizen upheld by the Supreme Court as a fundamental right has been short circuited.
(John Dayal is an author, editor, occasional documentary film maker and activist. He lives in New Delhi.)
