Accused Is Not Convicted: The Ethics of Stopping 2,873 Flagged Protesters Before Jantar Mantar 2.0

The List on Your Desk

Imagine you are the officer in charge of a police station near the Haryana border at Dwarka. A list arrives from headquarters. It holds names from your area, each matched by a facial recognition camera to a face in the July crowd at Jantar Mantar.

Your instruction is to make sure none of them reach the protest on October 10. The easy answer would be to follow the list. Some of these names carry serious charges and 101 of the 2,873 flagged people are named in murder cases.

If one of them causes harm on Saturday, the failure is yours. But the same list also says something else. At least 25 of those flagged were reportedly in jail when the cameras claim to have seen them. Either the match is wrong or the custody record is wrong.

Both are failures and you are being asked to act on them.

Two Duties That Cannot Both Be Fully Met -

The preventive duty: Police must anticipate violence, not merely respond to it. Article 19(3) allows reasonable restrictions on assembly in the interest of public order.

• The duty of restraint: Every person on that list is accused, not convicted. An accused person keeps the presumption of innocence and the right under Article 19(1)(b) to assemble peaceably. Stopping someone's travel because of who they are, not what they are doing, punishes a status. Neither duty is weakness or obstruction. A good officer could lean either way. That is what makes this a real dilemma.

Applying Proportionality to This Plan The

Puttaswamy judgment (2017) requires state surveillance to be lawful, necessary and proportionate. Test the October 10 plan against each part.

1. Lawful? No published statute governs police use of facial recognition on protest crowds. The tracking plan is described only by unnamed officers, with no written order cited.
2. Necessary? The genuine risk sits in a small subset, such as people with outstanding warrants or bail conditions. It does not sit in all 2,873 names.
3. Proportionate? Barricades and checks at the border hold back everyone. Warnings delivered through PG owners reach students who were never flagged at all. The cost spreads far wider than the threat.

The Resolution **Act on

specific legal grounds, never on the face match alone.** In practice, that means four things.

• Have a human officer review every match and discard any match that custody records contradict.
• Act only against people with a live legal ground, such as an outstanding warrant, a bail condition or specific credible intelligence. Each action should be in writing under a named power, so a court can review it.
• Communicate the Section 163 order officially, with its terms and duration, rather than through landlords.
• Police the protest site by conduct, not the border by identity.

What this costs: someone with a troubling history but no current legal bar may reach Jantar Mantar. The officer who narrowed the list must own that risk. The answer is heavier, visible policing at the venue, not a quiet blanket ban that no one can challenge.