The Constitutional Paradox of Why the State Can Surveil but the Citizen Cannot Record

**Kanishk Goyal and Ayushi Kumari 

“Publicity is justly commended as a remedy for social and industrial diseases. Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman.”

– Louis D. Brandeis

Brandeis’s observation matters most when State power itself becomes the subject of public scrutiny. In September 2025, the Supreme Court took suo motu notice of a report stating eleven people’s death in police custody in Rajasthan within eight months. Families seeking CCTV footage from the police stations concerned were told it was unavailable or did not exist, with police citing technical faults, lack of storage, ongoing investigation or legal restrictions. The Court registered the matter as In Re: Lack of Functional CCTVs in Police Stations, and has since pulled up the Union government and several states for treating its own directions with indifference.

The Supreme Court’s decision in Paramvir Singh Saini v. Baljit Singh recognised CCTV surveillance as a constitutional safeguard against custodial violence and abuse of power. That safeguard, however, is meaningful only when cameras are installed, functional and their footage is preserved. In practice, these conditions are not always met. The State cannot rely on gaps in its own accountability framework to justify preventing citizens from creating an independent record of police action. Nor can such a restriction rest solely on executive instructions, particularly in the absence of any statutory prohibition on recording police activity. 

Recording public officials in the discharge of their duties is closely connected to the freedom of speech and expression under Article 19(1)(a), as it enables the collection and dissemination of information on matters of public importance. Any restriction on this activity must therefore be supported by law and justified under one of the reasonable restrictions in Article 19(2). 

A blanket prohibition, based only on administrative preference or assertions of institutional control, sits uneasily with this constitutional framework. More fundamentally, it is difficult to reconcile the State’s reliance on CCTV cameras as instruments of transparency with its refusal to permit citizens to document the very exercise of public power that those cameras are intended to oversee.

In this article, Part I argues that there is no general legal prohibition on recording police activity and that such recording is protected under Article 19(1)(a). Part II examines the relationship between State surveillance and citizen recording in light of Paramvir Singh Saini. Part III considers the scope of restrictions under Article 19(2). Part IV sets out the resulting legal position.

Part I: The Constitutional Case for Recording the Police

Before proceeding, it is worth being precise about what this article means by recording: audio and video recording, whether continuous or as photographs, made openly on a personal device by a person lawfully present at a police station during an interaction with the police. This covers a bystander recording police conduct towards someone else, and sousveillance, recording of one’s own interaction, such as one’s own questioning. It does not extend to covert surveillance, hacking, interception or recording of unconnected material such as confidential case files or a protected witness’s identity, addressed in Part III.

Recording inside police stations is often treated as prohibited by law. Police officers frequently object to it, and members of the public generally comply, creating an impression that such recording is legally impermissible. Whether that impression is supported by law is a separate question. In a constitutional democracy governed by the rule of law, restrictions on individual liberty must have a legal basis and cannot arise merely from administrative practice or convention. The issue, therefore, is whether Indian law authorises the police to prohibit recording inside a police station.

The Supreme Court has consistently interpreted Article 19(1)(a) to protect not only the freedom to speak, but the ancillary freedoms that make meaningful speech possible, including the rights to seek, receive, collect and disseminate information. In Secretary, Ministry of Information & Broadcasting v. Cricket Association of Bengal, the Court affirmed that free speech includes the right to acquire and disseminate information, and in the State of U.P. v. Raj Narain, it recognised the citizen’s right to know as indispensable to democratic governance. Recording police activity is a natural extension of these guarantees: it lets citizens document official conduct and preserve an objective account of it. Without that ability, these freedoms would often be ineffective, and recording is safeguarded under Article 19(1)(a).

There is no central law in India that expressly prohibits recording inside a police station, and unlike certain government establishments protected by statute, police stations face no general prohibition on photography, videography or audio recording. In fact, the only express legislative provision dealing with the issue points in the opposite direction. Section 33(2) of the Kerala Police Act, 2011 provides that no police officer shall prevent a member of the public from lawfully recording police action or activity in a public or private place. Although this provision applies only within Kerala, it shows that recording police activity is not regarded as inherently unlawful.

The Official Secrets Act is the most frequently argued legislation in cases involving recording inside a police station. The assumption is that a police station is a “prohibited place” and that recording within it is an offence under the Act. The Bombay High Court has rejected this, holding that a police station is not a “prohibited place” under Section 2(8), an exhaustive definition, and that recording inside a police station neither amounts to spying nor attracts liability under Section 3. The Act, therefore, provides no legal basis for a general prohibition on recording inside police stations.

On the contrary, Courts in the United States have generally recognised a right to record police officers performing duties in public, since an officer exercising public power holds a lesser expectation of privacy than in a private capacity. In fact, blanket restrictions on recording have been treated as a form of prior restraint on speech. Indian doctrine does not import these tests directly, but the reasoning mirrors Part II’s argument that treating State recording as legitimate while treating the same act by a citizen as suspect is hard to sustain.

Part II: The Constitutional Contradiction Between State Surveillance and Citizen Recording of Police Stations

Even assuming the right to record inside police stations is a matter of policy rather than a constitutional entitlement, the State’s opposition to such recording gives rise to two constitutional contradictions. Firstly, if CCTV cameras in police stations exist to promote transparency and deter custodial abuse, why should the legality of recording depend on whether the camera is operated by the State or a citizen? Secondly, if privately generated visual evidence is routinely relied upon by investigating agencies, on what basis can the State object to citizens documenting the exercise of public power itself?

The first contradiction stems from the Supreme Court’s decision in Paramvir Singh Saini v. Baljit Singh, which directed every police station to be equipped with night-vision CCTV cameras capable of recording audio and video, with footage preserved for at least one year. These directions were constitutional safeguards flowing from Article 21, meant to protect individuals against custodial violence and torture, and to promote transparency as a check against abuse.

Yet the constitutional promise envisioned in Paramvir Singh remains far from realised, as the suo motu proceedings referred to at the outset make plain. By November 2025, only eleven States had filed compliance affidavits, and the amicus curiae told the Court that most States had not put in place the standard operating procedures needed to install, maintain and preserve CCTV data. Madhya Pradesh was held up as a model state, with every station linked to a central control room, while others, including Uttar Pradesh, were still setting up a basic dashboard. Rajasthan, where the case originated, was directed to explain how many cameras it had installed and how footage was stored. RTI data from across the country tells much the same story of cameras missing, broken, or switched off when it matters. If transparency is indispensable to preventing police excesses, why should citizens be prevented from documenting the same spaces, particularly when the institutional safeguards remain inadequately implemented?

The second contradiction is equally strong. Police authorities routinely rely on footage from privately installed CCTV cameras, dashboard cameras and other personal devices while investigating, treating such recordings as credible evidence for establishing facts and identifying suspects. If privately generated recordings are reliable enough to aid prosecution, it is difficult to justify a categorical objection to citizens recording public officials discharging public functions. The issue is not evidentiary value but constitutional consistency.

This is not to suggest every act of recording inside a police station must be permissible. Legitimate concerns relating to ongoing investigations, witness protection, privacy or operational security may warrant narrowly tailored restrictions. However, these concerns cannot alone justify a blanket assumption that citizens are prohibited from documenting the exercise of police power. The question is not whether surveillance is necessary, rather why its legitimacy should depend solely on who is holding the camera.

Part III: When Can Restrictions on Recording Police Activity Be Constitutionally Justified?

As established above, recording inside a police station is not unlawful, though it is not immune from regulation. The liberty to record has largely been recognised as incidental to free speech in the context of police activity in public spaces. A police station is different: it is not a place with unrestricted access, and the State may legitimately assert interests relating to security, investigative integrity and the orderly functioning of police premises. The question, therefore, is not whether restrictions may be imposed, but under what circumstances they are justified.

The functioning of a police station may justify restrictions on recording. Police stations are the site of ongoing investigations, witness examinations, seizure proceedings, and the collection and preservation of evidence. Recording may disclose confidential investigative material, reveal the identity of protected witnesses, or affect the fairness of an investigation, and police stations also receive victims of crime, children and other vulnerable persons whose identities or privacy are protected by law. The same applies where recording interferes with official duties. Recording is distinct from conduct that obstructs police officers performing their statutory functions, and does not, by itself, amount to obstruction. But where a person records in a manner that disrupts an investigation or interferes with the lawful exercise of police powers, liability may arise under provisions such as Section 221 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023.

These situations differ from a blanket prohibition as in each instance, the restriction is imposed because the recording threatens a specific legal interest, such as investigative integrity, individual privacy or the effective discharge of official duties. A blanket prohibition, by contrast, assumes every instance of recording is objectionable irrespective of circumstance, an approach difficult to sustain under Article 19(2), which permits restrictions only where authorised by law, founded on a recognised ground, and reasonable.

Part IV: Towards a Constitutional Presumption of Transparency in the Exercise of Police Power

Whether recording police officers is a right or a matter of policy may continue to be debated. What is far less convincing is the claim that such recording is inherently illegal. As this piece has shown, there is no general law in India prohibiting recording inside a police station, nor can such a restriction rest on long-standing practice or the discretion of individual officers. This does not mean every act of recording must be permitted: restrictions will be justified, for instance, to protect an investigation, safeguard the identity of victims or witnesses, preserve operational security, or prevent obstruction of police duties. But these restrictions must be based on law and applied only where genuinely necessary, not used to support a blanket assumption that citizens are barred from recording the exercise of police power.

There are also policy reasons for this position. Because police work is carried out in institutions the public is ordinarily entitled to enter, the concern that recording would deter officers from doing their jobs carries less weight than it might elsewhere. Any genuine risk to an operation or an officer’s safety can be addressed through the restrictions discussed in Part III, not a blanket ban. Recording may, if anything, increase public trust by giving citizens an independent account rather than one filtered through official records. And where citizen recording could itself be misleading, the answer is to fix the State’s own CCTV recording, shown earlier to be inconsistently implemented, not to prohibit citizens from recording at all.

Protecting individual liberty matters even more where concerns about custodial violence and other human rights violations persist. It was to address these concerns that the Supreme Court, in Paramvir Singh Saini, directed the installation of CCTV cameras in police stations. If recording is recognised as an important safeguard when carried out by the State, it is difficult to justify treating citizen-led recording as inherently suspicious. Transparency should not depend on who is holding the camera. While the State may regulate recording in exceptional cases to protect legitimate interests, the exercise of public power should ordinarily remain open to public scrutiny. In a constitutional democracy, accountability is strengthened not by limiting transparency but by ensuring that restrictions on it remain the exception, not the rule.

**Kanishk Goyal and Ayushi Kumari are B.A. LL.B. (Hons.) students at National Law Institute University, Bhopal.

**Disclaimer: The views expressed in this blog do not necessarily align with the views of the Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy.