Aishe Ghosh, former president of Jawaharlal Nehru University’s students’ union, has asked the Delhi High Court to declare the mass surveillance of student protesters unconstitutional and to order police to permanently destroy the personal data collected on them. Her petition, filed on July 15, 2026, calls the watch over Jantar Mantar “continuous, indiscriminate and intrusive,” and argues it violates the rights to privacy, dignity, free speech, and peaceful assembly.
The demonstrators are the Cockroach Janta Party, led by student activist Abhijeet Dipke, who held a hunger strike at Jantar Mantar from June 20 over repeated exam paper leaks. According to the petition, they were under round-the-clock watch from a permanent surveillance tower, filmed while eating, resting, and seeking medical help.
At the July 27 hearing the government tried to shut the case down. Additional Solicitor General Chetan Sharma told the Bench that with the protest over, the surveillance had stopped and there was nothing left for the court to rule on. Senior Advocate Nandita Rao, for Ghosh, said the case was still alive because it seeks a declaration that the surveillance already carried out was illegal.
She asked that the data be destroyed, especially since the government has assured that no action will be taken against the protesters. The Bench of Chief Justice DK Upadhyaya and Justice Tejas Karia told her to “let things cool down further” and file a more general petition, then said it would hear the matter on Tuesday.
What the students want deleted comes from two police vehicles parked outside Kerala House. Officers inside a van called Ikshana watch live CCTV feeds run through facial recognition software, which draws green boxes around faces and checks them against a police database. The van carries eight fixed cameras for 360-degree coverage and was inducted before the 2023 G20 Summit. A senior Delhi Police officer confirmed to the press that the force runs facial recognition on protest footage against its criminal database to find any wanted people present, according to The Indian Express.
The Internet Freedom Foundation, which has fought for transparency on this system since 2020, pulled the numbers out through the Right to Information Act. Delhi Police told the group in writing that no rule governs its use of facial recognition, that no assessment of its effect on privacy was ever done, and that a similarity score of 80% counts as a positive match.
When the American Civil Liberties Union ran Amazon’s Rekognition at its default setting in 2018, it falsely matched 28 members of the US Congress to criminal mugshots, a disproportionate number of them legislators of color. Rao warned the court that an 80% match could wrongly implicate someone in a criminal case.
Students at the site said they cover their faces while holding placards, afraid that landing in a police database could cost them future government jobs. Ghosh’s petition singles out girl students aged 16 to 20. A second officer told the press there are no fixed retention rules for the footage, since a probe into unrest at the site could open months later, so recordings could stay in police systems indefinitely.
Solicitor General Tushar Mehta, for the government, defended the recording at the earlier hearing on July 20. He said every protest is videographed as a routine law-and-order measure and called a claim of privacy in a public place “ironical”. He also told the court that protesters themselves film and post everything, and that the CJP had asked them to “videograph everything”. At that hearing he put it flatly, “There is no snooping. There is no surveillance.”
The green boxes inside the Ikshana van say otherwise. The databases the software matches against were maintained under Sections 3 and 4 of the Identification of Prisoners Act, 1920, a law Parliament repealed in 2022. Seven years after the IFF began asking, what legal basis they rest on now, and whose faces they hold, is still unknown outside the police.
