Cameras can be creepy: What Arvind Kejriwal can learn from Smriti Irani's episode

By evening on Friday (April 3), as the news played out, Union HRD minister Smriti Irani spotting a hidden camera at a store in Goa was top news on Google News. Above that even of the BJP's top-level National Executive meeting in Bangalore. And justifiably so.

This, as Goa's chief minister Laxmikant Parsekar reportedly told television channels, is more than outrageous and extremely shocking. Local MLA from Calangute constituency Michael Lobo, who arrived at the store after a call from Irani with the police and got an FIR lodged against Fabindia, the errant store, for outraging the modesty of a woman. Both Parsekar and Lobo said the incident will be probed thoroughly.

While it's extremely shocking, as the CM put it, it's not a new menace. It's news because a minister is a victim this time around. Ask anyone visiting clothing stores in any metropolitan store or mall in India, and many women would say they avoid the trial room. Many would say they would prefer to try at home and then return if it needs to be changed. Those who do are forever on their toes, apprehensive of some pervert scum having put up a spy cam somewhere.

Lobo said they had seen recordings and "everything in the [trial] room was captured". So, quite justifiably, all staffers of the store are being questioned by the police. Equally true is the fact that some of the employees, if not a majority, would be innocent. It's one or a few pervert who are at fault, and should be tried for the crime.

The problem with technology, though, is that it is a double-edged sword. Take a CCTV or hidden camera, for instance. Store owners will tell you they are installed to keep an eye on shop-lifters, if not bigger crimes. And then some depraved minds use them for perverted acts. The degree of perversion would differ, but CCTV cameras, the new-age safety and security gizmo for the 21st-century urban Indian, is no different. You can kiss privacy goodbye for sure. Surf the internet, and you might even stumble across your own image captured by some CCTV camera sometime somewhere.

And this is where the Arvind Kejriwal-led Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) government in Delhi needs to pick up a lesson or two. Before the Assembly elections this February, Kejriwal was on record saying if elected, his government would install 10 lakh to 15 lakh CCTV cameras across the national capital to ensure security for women. "If 15,000 CCTV cameras can be installed for Barack Obama [during his visit to Delhi to be chief guest at the Republic day parade this January], why can’t the same be done for our mothers and sisters? We will install ten-15 lakh CCTV cameras..." Kejriwal had said.

Purely on the basis of idea and intention, nothing wrong with it, though many had, and still are, questioning where he would find the resources to pepper the city with these cameras. But that is a debate best left for another day. Can Kejriwal assure the people that footage from these cameras would not be misused, like the Calangute Fabindia's has presumably been done?

Kejrwal had earlier declared that these cameras would be installed in public places, and spaces. In an interview to Ravish Kumar for NDTV just before the Assembly polls, Kejriwal had even asked what does he, Kumar, do at a public space that should make him apprehensive of the cameras. Kumar, of course, avoided an answer and repeated the question about invasion of privacy, as a journalist should. And Kejriwal repeated his stock answer — that CCTV cameras can stop criminals and bring down the crime graph, both proactive and retrospectively — as a politician should.

Most people I know would say, “I don't know what either of you would do. But I would not want to be photographed with a chance that the picture would land in the grisly worldwide web. Besides, cameras at clothes, fashion and retail stores are also meant to curb would-be criminals and nab the criminals. Look what many of them do in the hands of voyeurs."

The name of the game is regulating/monitoring those cameras and their footage. But for a city unable to do that to the existing few thousand cameras installed, it would be dreaming in dreamland to imagine even in dreams that ten lakh-odd additional eyes would be under strict hand-eye coordination.