National Alliance of People’s Movements has written a letter to the Telangana Chief Minister A. Revanth Reddy demanding a review of police surveillance infrastructure built over the last 10 years.
| Photo Credit: By Arrangement
The National Alliance of People’s Movements, a collective of civic rights activists, has written a letter to the Telangana Chief Minister A. Revanth Reddy demanding a review of police surveillance infrastructure built over the last 10 years. The letter calls for an “Urgent need for comprehensive policing reforms, to stop violation of constitutional and human rights, privacy, freedom of expression of citizens in Telangana.”
The 25 signatories of the letter include well known rights activists like Rama Melkote, Meera Sanghamitra, Jeevan Kumar, Khaleeda Parveen, Shaikh Salauddin, Natasha Ramarathnam, K. Sajaya, S.Q. Masood among others. The letter logs the detail that the present Chief Minister was a target of police surveillance: “In fact, even you have been a victim of this ‘surveillance setup’ and related police harassment, during your time as an opposition leader. In a recent case, senior police officials were booked for targeting senior politicians, members of the judiciarysocial activists and media by phone tapping and accessing other internet and telephonic communications, illegally.”
The letter pinpoints the change in policing over the past decade where “large-scale surveillance and preventive arrests of anyone planning a peaceful protest has reduced the space for people to organise, thus violating basic constitutional rights.”
The letter has 18 demands including end to excessive policing of gig and platform workers, end to ‘mission chabutra’, end to cordon-and-search operationsinstallation of CCTV cameras in police stations among others.
The long pending demand for publication of Telangana Police Manual to guide the work of police officials which will help citizens demand accountability from men in uniform, finds its way into the charter made by the concerned citizens across India.
