Does the criminal no longer care about the camera?
Just like a cricket match, we have these days the “deferred live” versions of brutality acting out at all levels. Whether it’s armed goons ransacking a grocery store and attacking the shop owner, or forcing open ATM machines after severely wounding the security guard, or slapping a woman in full public view at a civic body meeting, or hacking a 22-year-old Dalit youth to death – barbarism’s belated broadcast is a fixture in our news television.
It’s called the “caught-on-cam” story, and it shows the raw, grainy footage of violence-as-it-happened. A genre by itself now, it presents a stark picture of our riotous times, a people sitting on the proverbial nuclear bomb of rage, prone to instant and easy eruptions, duly “captured live” and telecast later.
Living with close-circuit monitoring has impacted every aspect of our lives. The “culture of surveillance” has gone from being actively resisted to now being grudgingly accepted and even lauded among many, though certainly not all. In the face of perceived and peddled threats, paranoia gets the better of most and a CCTV camera, otherwise a ruthlessly alienating and invading entity, begins to look like a friend (thereby ensuring the surveillance industry makes a hefty profit monetising our fear of each other).
Yet this begs a question. Actually not a question but a conundrum. Has constant CCTV surveillance deterred or egged on this rash of brawls and murderous attacks across the length and breadth of the country? Do perpetrators of crimes (caught) on camera, often ordinary men and women, feel constrained or emboldened by the presence of a recording device? Do repeat offenders become even more hardened, daring themselves the peccadilloes, so often bearing lethal consequences for the victims of the gross assaults, not despite but because of the camera?
The philosophical question here would be: Does surveillance beget violence? However, when the nation is a tinderbox of rage and dangerous majoritarian prejudice, and when belligerence is political capital in the stock market of the state, a camera does not remain an objective eye. (It never was, anyway.) It becomes an instrument of passion as active control.
From jewellery heists to mass cheating, to a daughter-in-law strangulating her mother-in-law or a “Naxal attack”, to rapes and sexual assaults in bars, well-lit streets, bustling markets and high-end restaurants – the CCTV cameras are “catching” crime as it happens everywhere. In glitzy shopping malls and their cramped, creaking parking lots, in corner stores and school classrooms, in office corridors and busy boulevards, angry men (and sometimes women) are resorting to sudden (or calculated) and flagrant displays of violence.
And once those bouts of rage are live captured, and later circulated as news stories or “viral” videos and gifs on social media, they acquire a fresh lease of life. They are endlessly and repeatedly watched, sometimes in horror, but also, and more often, in tacit agreement with the perpetrator.
Thrashing, beating up, arson, looting, rioting, molesting and raping do not happen in a socio-political vacuum. They are obviously directed at the vulnerable groups, including women, or religious and sexual minorities. As angry neo-nationalists threaten to rape, maim and kill on camera, in live interviews or reported “bytes”, as some television journalists double up as extortionists and ring leaders of a lynch mob, actively manufacturing nationalist frenzy, then why do we find these “caught-on-camera” stories appealing at all?
And if we do find them appealing, and we certainly do, either to shudder in horror or to smugly approve of, or even to just mindlessly consume, we must ask ourselves what has been the relation between violence out there and violence as a footage and as a meme, in our bedrooms, on our television screens and mobile phones, on a loop, ad nauseam.
Despite the criticism of the shock-and-awe policy of the US-led NATO’s Iraq War, a policy in which the world was numbed into submission with graphic images of bombings and blasts and systemic near-obliteration of a country delivered directly to your TV screens, when war reportage became a matter of playing endlessly videos and images of death and destruction of the Iraqis (from the fighter jet cams), the appetite for and the fantasy of violence delivered to our doorstep has only increased.
At one extreme is the dressed up, made for camera and heinously lethal bravura of say a group like ISIS, whose beheading videos are stuff of contemporary legend of/on terror.
At the other end, however, are these CCTV-generated images and videos of brawls, altercations, sexual assaults, robberies and even (not that infrequently either) murder, with which (erroneously, of course) we do not associate any overt political motive, but which nevertheless point to a disturbing diagnosis of the national temperature.
And it is alarmingly high.
Belligerence is the national mood. Belligerence as nationalist righteousness is the national discourse. There is an overt nod, from the top and from a staggering number of people, to lumpenism as an expression of (a certain brand of) “patriotism”.
Hence, when the Dalit boy is hacked to death for daring to marry an upper caste girl in Tamil Nadu’s Tirrupur, the “caught-on-camera” aspect of the crime is not just an adjunct to the story. It is the story, or at least the news point in this terminally titillation-hungry context.
What is new and therefore is news is the fact that not only did the presence of CCTV cameras not stop the daylight murder from happening, it actually became a condition of the crime. Hacking a Dalit boy to death somewhere in the invisible backyard of this vast wasteland of a nation isn’t going to do the job any more. The job being keeping Dalits in their place.
Similarly, when a man slaps a woman for voting for a person from a rival political outfit at a civic body election, the presence of a camera is simply to ratify that patriarchy at large is in agreement with this "lone wolf", who, despite being driven away by guards, is nevertheless condoned for his actions, and that condoning hardly happens in secret.
This is no solitary rage of the individual caught in the heat of the moment. This is camera as an ally, as an accomplice in the act, the act itself is in larger interest.
Certainly, CCTVs, and the footage therefrom, are helping “nab” the criminals sooner, and more effectively. Policing crime is easier now, if you know how to define and approach and understand the said crime.
However, just like the lawyers who were caught on camera beating up Kanhaiya Kumar in front of the Patiala House court in the heart of the national capital, the brazenness with which violence is unleashed at different scales before a recording device is unprecedented.
The caught-on-camera version is the latest in the series of violence deeply aware of its eventual use as voyeurism and incitement. The CCTV footages give it all an aura of authenticity and accuracy, something both suspect and dismissed in this age of perpetual photoshop.
The medium is once again the message.