A member of India’s upper house has asked the Supreme Court to declare indiscriminate biometric surveillance of peaceful assemblies unconstitutional and halt it until Parliament passes a law authorising it.
AA Rahim, a Rajya Sabha MP for the Communist Party of India (Marxist) from Kerala, filed under Article 32, which allows direct approach on fundamental rights. The case is listed as AA Rahim M.P. v Union of India, diary number 45049 of 2026. It concerns the July Jantar Mantar protests called by the online collective Cockroach Janta Party, which demanded the resignation of then Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan over repeated question paper leaks. Pradhan resigned on July 25 and the protests ended.
The petition lists specific equipment: CCTV cameras, drones, a mobile command and control vehicle, AI-powered facial recognition, smart spectacles, and the National Crime Records Bureau’s Abhigyan fingerprint application. Biometric data of thousands of protesters was captured and matched against undisclosed databases without those surveilled being told, it alleges, and interlinked with permanent national criminal databases.
Delhi Police’s own reply to a right-to-information request, the petition says, confirms it has never conducted a privacy impact assessment, and that facial recognition is internally confined to tracing missing persons and identifying the dead. “The data so collected is retained, shared and processed without any disclosed safeguard, purpose limitation or retention schedule,” it states.
Rahim contends the surveillance had no statutory backing, that neither Delhi Police standing orders nor the Criminal Procedure (Identification) Act, 2022 authorises biometric collection at a civilian assembly, and that it fails the legality, legitimate aim and proportionality test from the court’s 2017 privacy judgment in KS Puttaswamy v Union of India. The practice, the petition argues, “reflects a standing and expanding practice of biometric surveillance of peaceful protest by the Delhi Police, conducted in a legal vacuum.”
Two private vendors are respondents alongside the Union government, Delhi Police and the NCRB: Aditya Infotech, which supplies the command vehicle under its CP PLUS brand, and Dimension NXG, whose AjnaLens smart spectacles were used. No data-handling agreement covering their access to footage and facial templates has been made public, the petition says, and it seeks orders barring them from retaining protesters’ biometric data.
Indian forces have expanded this capability for years, from an AI system used to arrest 70 suspects in Delhi to smart glasses planned for Republic Day. British forces have used it at demonstrations too, with the Met’s first use of live facial recognition in protest policing. A parallel petition is pending in the Delhi High Court, which has asked the Centre whether any standard operating procedure governs the practice.
Sources: LiveLaw, Bar and Bench
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By the ID Tech Editorial Team
