Close circuit cameras and graded privacy in Delhi
In this post, Shivangi Narayan reflects on her piece ‘CCTVs and the Criminal City’, which appeared in the 21(4) issue of Surveillance & Society.
Close circuit television (CCTV) cameras have become a household item in India. Just like one would install a gas connection or buy a water purifier, they also get a camera fitted in their house. With the whole equipment including set up costing just about 1200 Rs or 15 dollars and a livestream available through an app on the mobile phone, this added security measure is a no brainer, as I argue in my recent article ‘CCTV and the Criminal City’ in Surveillance & Society. Governments are also quick to install CCTVs as a solution to every problem. Women’s safety? CCTV. Child security? CCTV. Law and order? CCTV. Every problem is translated to a safety problem and if the camera retailers are to be believed, there is a CCTV for every safety issue.
Privacy circles in India view this tech as a brazen invasion of privacy, and rightly so. I am also one of them. I attributed people’s enthusiasm for video surveillance to their ignorance about the harms it can entail. However, that changed when I visited the North East District of Delhi, a marginalised area, both geographically, socially and economically, which was battered not just by a ‘riot’ in Feb 2020 (even though some publications argue that it was not a riot but a pogrom), but also by the lockdowns of the Covid 19 pandemic, which set a number of families back a “100 years”, as claimed by a resident. What also happened in North East Delhi was the incarceration of hundreds of Muslim youth, accused of instigating the riots, identified primarily on the basis of CCTV footage/mobile phone footage and facial recognition software that the Delhi Police acquired from a private developer based in the city. People in the area knew quite well that CCTVs were used to identify the youth who were otherwise innocent but merely in the vicinity of the camera, or were acting in self defence. The residents also told me how the cameras that actually captured the majority community’s attacks on the Muslim community were nowhere to be found and the footage mysteriously unavailable.
Thus, I was sure that the community would resist the fresh installation of CCTV cameras, part of the newly launched ‘Safe City scheme’ of the central government, with such knowledge at its disposal. As my initial hypothesis went, people were now not ignorant about what the CCTV could do, so of course they would resist it. This is when I found that residents were not only not against CCTV but they considered its foray into their community a matter of pride and an act of ‘caring’ by the government. The very essence of governance as elucidated by Foucault, that of husbandry, lay in the coverage of the streets of North East Delhi with cameras. As a surveillance researcher, this breaks a lot of patterns and notions about privacy, and what it means for different people.
The need for being visible to one’s government, a government that in their opinion, has left them to rot in a corner, is more than the eventuality that that visibility might be misused. The desire for government CCTV surveillance, complicates the traditional limits of privacy and surveillance. I argue that the desire emanates from the lack of choice — of any other way of accessing their government — and so the customary safeguards are forgotten.
We trade our privacy for governance but how far and how much is defined by one’s social position.
