Facial Recognition: Next time, a Selfie with the Cops?
- 2 days ago
- 9 min read
Crack down on peaceful dissent. Attack this book, or that. Facial Recognition and Surveillance. Vicious trolls and propaganda. Toxic language from the Red Fort. India's democracy stands ravaged. Three recent events tell a familiar story. But this time, the tide is turning. No doubt about it.
Independent Ink News Desk
It is now clear worldwide that facial recognition cameras are unreliable in identifying known offenders in a crowd. Their accuracy diminishes even further when lights are flashing and crowds are moving unpredictably, as happens during protests where police may resort to pellet guns, lathi charge (with nails and electric current, as on July 25, 2026 in Delhi) and tear gas at protesters. (AK 47 was used in the Patna protest against students, accompanied by midnight arrests.)
Given the unreliability factor, it came as a surprise when the Delhi Police informed the Supreme Court on September 1 that its facial recognition software identified 2,873 individuals at the Jantar Mantar protests, between July 20 and July 26, as having a police record. This submission came on the very day that the apex court quashed all the cases against protesting students, all over the country.
The police’s plea was that the court grant it permission to file FIRs against those ‘criminals’ identified by the facial recognition software.
One would have thought the Delhi Police would have verified the identities of the 2,873 people caught on camera. It had not.
Matters would have rested there, but an investigation by The Indian Express has now revealed that 25 of those on the police list were actually lodged in Tihar Jail during the Jantar Mantar protests. Surely, they couldn’t have jumped jail to present themselves at Jantar Mantar -- unless they were part of a devious scheme hatched by George Soros to discredit the Delhi Police!
Hence, if they were imprisoned in high security Tihar Jail, how come they were out there at Jantar Mantar also?
When cornered by the newspaper, the Delhi Police was quick to defend itself by blaming the instances of mistaken identity on the facial recognition software. It further said that all the 2,873 cases will be verified before FIRs are filed.
We must grant that the police have been schooled in the standard operating procedure that must be followed when using facial recognition software. It is simply this: any formal action must be preceded by physical verification of the software's inputs. This is because all that the software does is match images captured with a police database of known criminals.
Indeed, the facial recognition software has an unenviable record of failing
The irony can’t get any more darker.
Why, then, did the Delhi Police submit the list of 2,873 people to the highest court in the land without any verification?
Was it done to later justify the unprecedented and brutal force unleashed, including on school students and girls? (And this includes sexual attacks by certain Delhi cops on women, recorded as evidence on videos, testified by at least one woman publicly. One woman was slapped by a senior officer for no rhyme or reason.)
That leads us to an important question. How many criminals were actually present at Jantar Mantar?
And why only Jantar Mantar? Tens of thousands were protesting in Mumbai, Pune, Kolkata, Patna, among other cities and towns in India? Were they also infiltrated by hardened criminals?
One sinister enactment of bitter realism follows another. Even while the police theory was being discussed, a criminal, with blood on his hands, proudly emerged on a podcast: Swatantra Bhardwaj. He claimed that he smashed the head of the father of a 15-year-old Dalit girl who was in the protest at Jantar Mantar. He celebrated the fact that the father had 60 stiches, that he has been left untouched after what is a ‘half-murder’, that the girl was saying she will take poison if justice is not given, and that he was roaming free all night (with other goons, perhaps), and the Delhi Police did not bother.
Besides, among other boasts, he said that he hit a protester (neela kabutar) with his improvised ‘hand-weapon’, that left the victim covered with blood all over the body. Besides, the impression he gave is that he does it openly, and will do it again, and no one can dare touch him. Also, that he was wearing Delhi Police boots, and holding a Delhi Police baton.
He claimed with absolute confidence, that a minister in the Delhi BJP government, Kapil Mishra (earlier, accused of allegedly inciting violence during the Delhi riots in 2020), is his ‘bhai’, and Chirag Paswan is his ‘bhai’, and you name it – even Narendra Modi is his bhai.
There are photographs on display in the Social Media of his apparently cordial relations with Kapil Mishra, Chirag Paswan, BJP leader Manoj Tewari, and the current Bihar Chief Minister Samrat Choudhury (BJP). Other videos have emerged of him and his gang of goons aggressively flaunting themselves, perhaps during the 25 July march.
(Besides, there is video evidence of plainclothes men with lathis, and cops without nameplates, on the same day.)
So, who were they and was the Delhi Police top brass aware of them? Are they present or missing in the facial recognition process?
So why was Swatantra Bhardwaj roaming scot free, flaunting his blood-stained record openly, while the Delhi Cops looked the other way?
So, who was protecting him, as he claims, and, if so, why?
The daughter of the victim had spoken about the incident from the CJP stage in Jantar Mantar, accompanied by Abhijit Dipke and others. The video is still running. It was an open and shut case.
"When Nishu’s father was attacked by the sanghi goons, she cried and begged DCP Sachin Sharma and Delhi police to arrest the culprits. Even after two months the goons are roaming free. DCP Sachin Sharma must be prosecuted for enabling this crime," Abhijit Dipke said in a Tweet.
So why did the Delhi Police officers refuse to take immediate action against him, and allow him to roam free for weeks? Was the Union Home Minister, Amit Shah, aware of such elements, including the other plainclothes men, during the peaceful march of the students?
The third case is that of the assault on two independent women journalists, inside the Saket Police Station in South Delhi. They were reportedly dragged to the thana and beaten up for a long time because they asked a question to the Delhi Chief Minister. Significantly, the journalists said that they were beaten up with increased hostility because they had Muslim surnames. One of them said that when she asked for water saying she was thirsty, one particular woman cop continued the brutal assault. Communal abuses were hurled at them, it was alleged.
In a Social Media post, the CPI stated: “The reported assault on women journalists Shaheen Khan and Nafisa Khan at Delhi’s Saket Police Station is a grave assault on press freedom and constitutional rights. Further disturbing are Shaheen Khan’s allegations that the assault became more brutal after her Muslim identity was revealed. The targeting of women journalists on the basis of their religious identity, coupled with physical assault and humiliation inside a police station, exposes the deeply communal and lawless conduct of the Delhi Police. These are not minor allegations; they demand an immediate, independent and time-bound inquiry.”
The party further said: “Under Amit Shah, the Delhi Police has increasingly become a rogue force, acting far beyond the limits of law, police procedure and constitutional accountability. The assault on students during the July 20 students’ movement, the use of pellet guns, and the refusal to register FIRs against right-wing affiliates even when goons such as Swatantra Bhardwaj openly flaunt their crimes before cameras, reveal a shameful pattern: repression against students, journalists and dissenters, while political goons are protected. This cannot be allowed to continue. The conduct of the Delhi Police must be thoroughly investigated and those responsible for these violations must be held accountable.”
The attack on women journalists led to widespread outrage, with journalists, civil society activists, student leader like Neha Bora, Congress leaders, lawyers, among others collecting outside the police station demanding that an FIR be lodged. The Press Club of India and other journalist groups condemned the incident. Rahul Gandhi tweeted in support of the journalists.
Besides, the entire country, especially the young, have taken another case of Bajrang Dal goons going berserk extremely seriously. These fanatic cadre are the unofficial vigilante group of the Sangh Parivar, annually let loose, especially on Valentine’s Day, on young couples or friends, just about any young man and woman together – whatever be their relationship! They entered a school in Ahmedabad and protested against two books in its library. The school, again in a dark irony, was fined Rs 10,000 by the authorities and the books were reportedly removed from the library.
Also, the same gang violently disrupted a quiet ‘reading session’ in a park in the same city, where various books were being read. They identified the same two books and manhandled the readers – including young men and women.
The two books are famous best-sellers, one read across the world since the defeat of fascism by the Soviet Red Army, and Adolf Hitler’s suicide in a bunker in Berlin, and printed umpteen times. It is the diary of Anne Frank, a teenager who was hiding in an attic in Amsterdam and writing her diary, even while Jews were being picked up all over the place by the Gestapo, Hitler’s notorious spy agency. Soon, she was found out, reported by an informer, and murdered in a concentration camp.
So why did the Bajrangis find the book offensive?
Is it because the RSS and its founding fathers supported the Holocaust and the ethnic cleansing of Jews in the Nazi concentration camps, even while they refused to participate in the non-violent freedom struggle against the British in India?
More than 6 million Jews were murdered, many gassed to death, in the labour/death camps and concentration camps in Europe, run by the fascists.
The irony gets darker because our prime minister has ardently supported Benjamin Netanyahu, widely perceived to be an orthodox, Zionist Jew, while most of the world has declared him a ‘war criminal’, including the International Criminal Court, for the on-going genocide in Gaza, with 80,000 plus civilians murdered, including 23,000 children.
(The UN-backed International Criminal Court (ICC)… issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defence minister Yoav Gallant, together with a former Hamas commander, citing allegations of war crimes and crimes against humanity. -- UN News, November 21, 2026)
The other book is I Am Malala: The Girl who Stood Up for Education and was Shot by the Taliban by Malala Yousafzai.
Malala was a school girl when she started writing a blog for BBC Urdu in 2009 about her life and times in Swat Valley in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province in Pakistan, on the Afghan border, perhaps one of the most beautiful places in the world. Taliban had gained control of the region, and they had banned girls from attending school (as is the norm in Afghanistan now under the Taliban regime). Soon, Malala was invited to express her views on Pakistani and international media. She fervently appealed for the right to education, especially that of girls.
In a case widely reported, gunmen entered her school bus one day and shot her in the face. A bullet went through her head. She survived, and became an icon for school children and adults across the world. She was given the Noble Prize for Peace for her dogged fight in support of the right to education for girls.
Even while the CJP’s Shiksha Thik Karo campaign is on, and while scores of videos have emerged exposing one horror story after another, showing the horrible conditions in which our school children study in many rural schools, the Bajrang Dal goons have yet again shown why Hindutva fanatics are so relentlessly proud to be so uneducated and violent.
For all you know, tomorrow, another group of Hindutva fanatics, might actually stop you reading two more books, while schools might be fined for keeping these books in their libraries: Revolutionary Bhagat Singh’s Why I am an Atheist, his famous essay written in Lahore Central Jail, awaiting his death sentence. Bhagat Singh was 23 when he was hanged.
The other is, The Story of My Experiments with Truth by Mahatma Gandhi, his autobiography.
Indeed, while criminals like Swatantra Bhardwaj can go scot free for such long period of time despite his apparent crime and the teenage daughter's appeals, those reading these books might be branded and condemned as ‘Dimagi Naxal’, with or without "Homeopathy medicine".
However, the tide is turning, and turning so rapidly, that the establishment, drunk with arrogance, and power without accountability, has been taken by surprise. More surprises are in store. All the signs are out there.
That is why, if you listen hard, you can hear.
You can hear the Akashvani, loud and clear:
Enough is Enough!
This is Antkaal -- of the fake Amritkaal!