This paper introduces and systematizes a new critical concept , the Panparaptomaticon to diagnose an emergent regime of governance in India and beyond. Derived from Greek pan (all), paraptoma (misdeed, offense, lapse) and icon (instrument, image, device), the term denotes an apparatus that watches all and automatically produces offenses from the fabric of ordinary life. The paper traces a genealogy from Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon as read by Michel Foucault, through Didier Bigo’s Banopticon, to the Panparaptomaticon as a third stage enabled by Artificial Intelligence, facial recognition, and permanent data aggregation. The core argument is that India has entered a post-crime scenario where traditional criminal jurisprudence based on actus reus and mens rea is rendered irrelevant. What matters instead is algorithmic bias, risk scoring, and permanent digital inscription.
Empirically, the paper focuses on the handling of student protests by the Delhi Police at Jantar Mantar in July 2026. Drawing on court petitions, press reports, and eyewitness testimonies, it shows how the deployment of AI-aided vans named ‘Ikshana’ and the Mobile Command and Control Vehicle, drone surveillance, and biometric capture via the National Crime Records Bureau’s Abhigyan app constitutes a lived Panparaptomaticon. Finally, the paper develops a theological and ethical response by placing this Indian biopolitical conjuncture in dialogue with Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical Magnifica humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence (15 May signed, 25 May 2026 published). The encyclical’s critique of technocratic paradigm, defense of truth, work and freedom, and call for a civilization of love over a culture of power provides normative resources to resist the crime machine and reclaim democratic space.
Keywords:
Panparaptomaticon, Panopticon, Banopticon, Biopolitics, Surveillance, Facial Recognition Technology, Delhi Police, Jantar Mantar Protests, Post-Crime, Algorithmic Bias, Post-Truth, Catholic Social Teaching, Magnifica humanitas, Pope Leo XIV
1. Introduction: The Crime Machine
In the modern landscape of governance and control a new form of surveillance has emerged that reshapes how power operates over populations. This system can be understood through the concept of the Panparaptomaticon, a term that captures the fusion of total observation with the automated creation of offenses. It builds upon earlier ideas of disciplinary power while adapting them to the age of artificial intelligence and mass data collection. In India this apparatus has become a prominent tool of biopolitics, serving as a means for the state to manage and suppress dissent especially among students and ordinary citizens engaged in political expression.
The urgency of naming this formation comes from a disjunction between law and technology. Indian law still formally speaks the language of crime, intention, evidence, and trial. Policing practice, however, increasingly speaks the language of data, matches, risk scores, and databases. Between these two languages lies a vacuum where a new instrument operates. This paper attempts to theorize that vacuum.
The argument proceeds in four steps. First, I provide a conceptual genealogy. Second, I define the Panparaptomaticon with precision. Third, I ground it in the recent Indian experience of student protest surveillance. Fourth, I propose a theological-ethical response drawing on the Christian tradition of human dignity as articulated most recently by Pope Leo XIV.
2. Genealogy of Total Observation: From Panopticon to Banopticon
To grasp the Panparaptomaticon one must first recall the classic Panopticon. Conceived by Jeremy Bentham in 1791 as an architectural design for a prison, and later analyzed by Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish (1975), the Panopticon was a circular structure with cells arrayed around a central watchtower. Guards in the tower could observe every inmate, but inmates could never be certain whether they were being watched at any given moment.¹ The result was profound. Individuals began to regulate their own behavior out of the constant possibility of being watched. Discipline arose not solely from external force but from the internalization of surveillance. The goal was efficient control through uncertainty rather than continuous visible coercion. Foucault saw this model as emblematic of modern societies where institutions such as schools, factories, hospitals and barracks extended similar techniques of observation and normalization.
The Panopticon produced docile bodies through possible visibility. Its power was psychological and economical.
A later development came with the Banopticon introduced by French sociologist Didier Bigo in response to shifts in security practices after 9/11 and during the early twenty-first century.² Unlike the Panopticon which aimed at watching everyone within a closed institution, the Banopticon focused on selective targeting in open spaces. Certain groups labeled as risky like the migrants, Muslims, protesters, or members of minorities faced intensified scrutiny while the majority of the population remained largely unobserved and even comforted by being watched over. The effect was the creation of categories of suspicion in advance of any actual wrongdoing. Profiles determined who warranted attention and exclusion. This approach sorted populations into those deemed safe and those marked for monitoring or restriction. It represented a move from universal discipline toward differentiated management of perceived threats. If Panopticon was about disciplining to normalize, Banopticon was about banning to secure.
Bigo’s insight is crucial for India because it helps explain earlier phases of policing such as communal profiling, NRC-CAA related watchlists, and campus profiling of JNU, Jamia, AMU students. However, both models are now insufficient.
The Panopticon requires the illusion of a central eye. The Banopticon requires a pre-defined list of risky others. What happens when the eye becomes distributed across 50,000 CCTV cameras, drones, body cams, and social media scraping tools, and when the list of risky others expands to include everyone who shows up? We need a third concept.
3. Defining the Panparaptomaticon: An All-Offense Machine
The Panparaptomaticon advances beyond both frameworks by incorporating artificial intelligence, facial recognition systems and continuous data aggregation. Its name derives from the Greek roots pan meaning all, paraptoma meaning misdeed or offense and icon meaning instrument, image or device.³ Literally, it describes an all-offense machine or an instrument that detects every possible misdeed in everyone.
In practice it scans entire populations without pause. Every student in a campus, every gathering in a public square, every digital post and every feed from closed-circuit cameras becomes raw material for analysis. Algorithms process this information and convert ordinary acts into recorded offenses. A peaceful assembly may be flagged as potential unrest. A placard or slogan can be interpreted as anti-national sentiment. Risk scores are assigned for actions that have not yet occurred. Once an individual enters the database the entry persists and can influence future opportunities such as employment, education or travel documents.
What distinguishes the Panparaptomaticon is its combination of three logics:
3.1 Totality – Pan. The pan element ensures that surveillance is universal rather than limited to predefined suspects or enclosed institutions. Unlike Banopticon’s selective focus, it watches all. The Indian Smart Cities Mission, with its Integrated Command and Control Centres, and the National Automated Facial Recognition System (AFRS) proposed by NCRB, aim at precisely this pan-visibility. At Jantar Mantar, two vans alone provided 360-degree coverage of an entire protest site, plus border entry points.⁴
3.2 Automated Production of Offense – Paraptoma. The paraptoma element transforms everyday political life into grounds for suspicion. This is its most original feature. The Panopticon observed pre-existing offenses; the Panparaptomaticon produces them. A student holding a poster for exam justice is not committing a crime, but the system converts her face into a biometric template, matches it against a criminal database at an 80% threshold, and creates a permanent entry of “person of interest present at potentially disruptive assembly.” The act is ordinary; the inscription is criminalizing.
3.3 The Removal of Judgment – Icon. The icon element removes human judgment, context and intent from the process. Machines decide. In theological language, it is an icon without a soul, an instrument without conscience. The system operates in reverse of traditional justice. Instead of investigating a specific crime after it has taken place, the apparatus generates a presumption of guilt from the mere act of participation in dissent. Surveillance footage leads to algorithmic matching which produces a database entry that designates a person of interest. The protest itself becomes the evidence.
Together they constitute not a single device but an interlocking set of practices such as cameras, algorithms, databases and administrative uses of the resulting information. It is a crime machine that produces offenses from the fabric of everyday political existence.
4. The Indian Panparaptomaticon in Action: Delhi Police and the Student Body
In the Indian context, this mechanism appears to have surfaced as a biopolitical strategy of suppression. Biopolitics, in Foucault’s sense, refers to the ways in which power manages populations through the regulation of life, bodies and behaviors, not merely through law.⁵ The government deploys these technologies not merely to prevent crime but to shape the political field itself. Student movements that once relied on open assembly and public debate now confront an environment where every action risks permanent digital inscription.
4.1 The Case: Jantar Mantar, July 2026
In July 2026, a large, largely student-led protest gathered at Jantar Mantar, New Delhi, under the banner of various student groups including those colloquially referred to in media as CJP protests, demanding the resignation of the Education Minister over alleged NEET paper leaks. The state response provides a textbook illustration.
Parked outside Kerala House near Jantar Mantar were two highly-equipped surveillance vans deployed by Delhi Police. In the bigger van, called the ‘Mobile Command and Control Vehicle’, personnel examined live CCTV footage. Opposite it was a smaller van, called ‘Ikshana’ , Sanskrit for sight , where two officers stood watch as footage was run through AI-aided facial recognition software which showed green boxes around each face as it tried to match it with a police database.⁶ The Ikshana vehicle had been inducted as a “live CCTV surveillance vehicle” with eight state-of-the-art fixed cameras ahead of the G20 Summit in 2023.⁷
A senior Delhi Police officer confirmed live facial recognition was being used, saying: “We have a large database of criminals, with their pictures. So, we run facial recognition on the footage that is received from the various CCTVs in the area, to see if it flags any face the software matches with someone on our criminal database.”⁸ Delhi Police later claimed that 2,873 persons were identified from the site, with 989 linked to serious criminal cases.⁹
4.2 The Legal Challenge
This total surveillance was challenged. Former JNUSU President Aishe Ghosh filed a PIL in Delhi High Court alleging “continuous, indiscriminate and intrusive surveillance” including a permanent surveillance tower and blanket videography, violating rights to privacy, dignity, free speech and peaceful assembly.¹⁰
More significantly, CPI(M) MP A.A. Rahim moved the Supreme Court against the “indiscriminate deployment by Delhi police of facial recognition technology and allied biometric-surveillance measures against persons participating in a peaceful public assembly at Jantar Mantar.” The petition alleged that throughout demonstrations, Delhi Police subjected protesters, journalists and bystanders to continuous surveillance through CCTV cameras, drones, a Mobile Command and Control Vehicle, AI-powered facial recognition and the NCRB’s Abhigyan mobile fingerprint identification application. Facial images and fingerprints of thousands were matched against undisclosed databases without informing those being surveilled, and linked with permanent national criminal databases despite no legal authority.¹¹
4.3 The Chilling Effect
The High Court was told videography was for “law and order, not for surveillance or snooping.”¹² Yet the lived experience was different. Students reported covering their faces not to evade law but to evade profiling.
One UPSC aspirant from Rajasthan said: “We are all preparing for competitive exams for government jobs, and don’t want to risk getting profiled in police databases.”¹³ Another woman student feared: “What if the footage of me sloganeering… somehow finds its way to my parents? They don’t know I am here because they don’t understand why I need to be here.”¹⁴
Crucially, police admitted there were no data retention guidelines: “If and when something unruly happens… it could merit an investigation either today or three months from now… So it is hard to conclusively say how long the videos could be in our systems.”¹⁵
This is the heart of the Panparaptomaticon: normal expressions of disagreement are reframed as data points that can later justify administrative measures. The absence of clear legal thresholds creates a vacuum in which technology precedes law. Offenses can be constructed first and formalized afterward.¹⁶
5. The Post-Crime Scenario: When Bias Takes Centre Stage
This development marks a significant departure from earlier modes of control and a fundamental shift in jurisprudence. We have reached what I call a post-crime scenario.
Classical criminal law rests on two pillars: actus reus (a wrongful act prohibited by law) and mens rea (a guilty mind, intention, knowledge, or recklessness). Both must be proven beyond reasonable doubt with attention to context, motive, and proportionality. Post-crime inverts this.
5.1 Intention is Irrelevant: The algorithm cannot read intention. A poster saying “We want justice” is semantically processed as containing the word “justice” at a protest site flagged as high-risk. Whether the intention is democratic participation or subversion is not computed. The system collapses mens rea into metadata.
5.2 The Act is Manufactured: Peaceful assembly is not a crime. Yet the Panparaptomaticon converts presence into potential liability. The Delhi Police practice of noting Instagram handles of protesters arriving at the site “to ensure no-one with a criminal background entered” as told to Reuters,¹⁷ shows how presence itself becomes suspect.
5.3 Bias is Systemic, Not Accidental: Facial Recognition Systems work by converting facial features into a digital template and comparing it against stored images, flagging a match if similarity crosses a threshold. Delhi Police’s threshold for a positive match has been 80%.¹⁸ At 80%, in a crowd of 5,000, statistical false positives are mathematically inevitable, and global audits show significantly higher error rates for young faces, women, and darker skin.¹⁹ When guilt is determined by threshold and not by trial, bias takes centre stage. The machine does not need to prove malicious intent. It simply generates records that accumulate and can be activated at later moments.
The implications for democratic practice are substantial. Political participation requires a space of relative freedom where citizens can experiment with ideas and form collective voices. When that space is saturated with continuous scanning and algorithmic judgment, the conditions for genuine deliberation erode.²⁰ Jobs, admissions and official clearances become contingent on clean data profiles. In this way the system extends control beyond the immediate moment of protest into the long-term trajectories of individual lives.
The comparison among the three models clarifies the trajectory. From the Panopticon of possible observation to the Banopticon of targeted exclusion and finally to the Panparaptomaticon of universal automated offense production, the evolution reflects changing technologies and shifting strategies of power. Each stage intensifies the capacity to manage populations yet the latest form achieves a new intensity by collapsing the distinction between observation and the creation of guilt.
6. A Theological Response to Biopower and Post-Truth
A legal response alone demanding DPDP Act reform, judicial oversight, a ban on live FRT in protests is necessary but insufficient. The Panparaptomaticon also represents a crisis of truth and of the human person. It thrives in post-truth where images are stripped from context and truth is reduced to what is computationally verifiable. It also thrives as biopower, managing life itself through risk.
We need a theological anthropology that can answer. Here, Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical Magnifica humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence provides a timely framework.²¹
6.1 The Document
Published on 25 May 2026 and signed on 15 May , the 135th anniversary of Leo XIII’s foundational social encyclical Rerum novarum Magnifica humanitas (Magnificent Humanity) is concerned with “safeguarding the human person in the age of artificial intelligence.”²² Leo XIV chose to present it personally at the Vatican, with experts including Anthropic co-founder Christopher Olah, Professor Anna Rowlands, and Cardinals Fernández and Czerny.²³ The encyclical is organized around a discernment of where we are going and what construction sites we are building.
6.2 Three Theological Correctives
First, Against the Tower of Babel: Reclaiming Finitude and Relationality. Leo XIV uses two biblical images: the Tower of Babel (Gen 11:1-9) where collective effort dominates and dehumanizes, and Nehemiah rebuilding Jerusalem’s ruins piece by piece as shared responsibility (Neh 2-6). He asks: “What are we building?”²⁴ The Panparaptomaticon is a Babel project. It promises total security through total sight, but it is a future that “excludes God” and excludes relationality.²⁵ It forgets what Leo XIV insists: human intelligence is not data processing. “These systems merely imitate certain functions… They do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain… do not have a moral conscience, since they do not judge good and evil.”²⁶ To judge a protester without understanding love for justice, or anger against injustice or youthful idealism is a profound anthropological error. A theological response insists on finitude and embodiment: the human person cannot be reduced to a faceprint.
Second, Safeguarding Truth, Work, and Freedom. Leo XIV identifies truth, work, and freedom as the three spheres where humanity is formed and at risk.²⁷
Truth: In an environment of automatic content production, deepfakes, and disinformation, only the shared pursuit of veracity as common good can sustain democracy. The Panparaptomaticon creates a post-truth justice where an 80% match becomes “truth” and context is lost. The encyclical calls for “an ecology of communication” and an educational alliance for media literacy.²⁸ Applied to policing, this means demanding explainability, adversarial testing, and the right to contest algorithmic evidence.
Work: The encyclical restates the dignity of labor as inherent to purpose. When students fear that protest footage will cost them a government job, work becomes a disciplinary tool. Biopower uses future livelihood to control present speech.
Freedom: Leo XIV warns of AI’s concentration of power, weakening democracy, and dehumanization.²⁹ He calls for “shared standards of social justice” and robust regulation.³⁰ The Delhi High Court’s question about privacy and free speech is thus not a technicality but a defense of human freedom itself.
Third, From Culture of Power to Civilization of Love. The encyclical’s heart is its diagnosis of a “culture of power” fueled by digital revolution and its proposal of a “civilization of love founded on justice, dialogue, and shared responsibility.”³¹ It reaffirms common good, solidarity, and subsidiarity as interpretive tools.³²
The Panparaptomaticon is culture of power par excellence: power that sorts, scores, and stores without dialogue. A civilization of love would insist on subsidiarity that decisions about a student’s future cannot be outsourced to an Ikshana van in a parking lot; on solidarity that the student protesting paper leaks is not a risk to be managed but a citizen to be heard; and on common good that technology must serve truth and the common good, not the other way around.³³
Theologically, this means recovering the doctrine of imago Dei. Human dignity is not conditional on a clean database. It is magnificent precisely because it is capable of dissent, error, repentance, and hope. Mary, whom Leo XIV evokes via the Magnificat in the title, is presented as an icon of humble faith and “weavers of hope” in dark moments.³⁴ The protesting student, often female, often afraid, holding a handmade poster while covering her face, is closer to that icon than the green boxes tracking her.
6.3 Ethical Imperatives
From this dialogue, four imperatives emerge for India:
Legislative Disarmament: As Leo XIV urges to “disarm” AI from warfare and domination,³⁵ India must disarm live FRT from protest policing. The Supreme Court must recognize that indiscriminate biometric surveillance in peaceful assembly has a chilling effect and violates Puttaswamy privacy.
Intentionality Audits: Any AI system used in policing must be required to preserve and assess mens rea, not erase it. No administrative adverse action should follow from protest attendance alone.
Right to Opacity and Oblivion: Following the encyclical’s anthropology of finitude, citizens must have a right to not be facially recognized in democratic spaces and a right to deletion of protest footage after a defined period.
Rehumanizing the Image: We must move from icon as surveillance instrument to icon as sacred image. To see a face is not to capture a template but to encounter a person.
. Conclusion
Understanding this apparatus requires recognition of its cumulative logic. It is not a single device but an interlocking set of practices such as cameras, algorithms, databases and administrative uses of the resulting information. Together they constitute a crime machine that produces offenses from the fabric of everyday political existence. In India the surface of biopolitics has been altered by this machine. Suppression no longer depends solely on visible force or selective targeting. It operates through the quiet accumulation of data that turns collective action into individual risk scores.
The comparison among the three models clarifies the trajectory. From the Panopticon of possible observation to the Banopticon of targeted exclusion and finally to the Panparaptomaticon of universal automated offense production, the evolution reflects changing technologies and shifting strategies of power. Ordinary citizens and especially students engaged in public expression confront a system that watches everyone and converts normal acts into potential liabilities.
The Panparaptomaticon thus stands as a defining feature of contemporary biopolitical control in the Indian setting where the machinery of crime generation serves as an instrument of governance and a barrier to open political life. Naming it is the first act of resistance. The second is insisting, with Pope Leo XIV, that in the age of AI, what is most magnificent is not the machine that sees all, but the humanity that still dares to show up, poster in hand, even when being watched.
Panparaptomaticon is the author’s newly coined term. Its appropriateness is open to scholarly debate. The author invites critical engagement and wider popularization.
Endnotes
¹ Jeremy Bentham, Panopticon; or, the Inspection-House (1791); Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (Vintage, 1977), 195-228.
² Didier Bigo, “Security, Exception, Ban and Surveillance,” in Theorizing Surveillance, ed. David Lyon (Willan, 2006).
³ Author’s etymology: pan (all), paraptoma (Greek for offense, slip, false step — cf. Rom 5:15), icon (instrument/device).
⁴ Delhi Police deployed two highly-equipped vans ‘Ikshana’ and ‘Mobile Command and Control Vehicle’ outside Kerala House near Jantar Mantar, Outlook India and Indian Express, July 2026.
⁵ With 360-degree cameras, AI facial recognition, police monitor Jantar Mantar protest, The Indian Express, 24 July 2026.
⁶ Ibid., description of live facial recognition showing green boxes around each face.
⁷ Delhi Police inducted Ikshana van ahead of G20 Summit 2023 as live CCTV surveillance vehicle with eight fixed cameras.
⁸ Senior officer quote on running facial recognition against large criminal database, Indian Express.
⁹ Delhi Police claim 2,873 identified, 989 with serious criminal histories, Dynamite News, 28 July 2026.
¹⁰ Aishe Ghosh PIL in Delhi High Court alleging continuous, indiscriminate intrusive surveillance, Indian Express.
¹¹ CPI(M) MP AA Rahim moves Supreme Court against facial recognition at Jantar Mantar; plea alleges automated extraction of biometric identifiers and linking with permanent NCRB databases without informing those surveilled, Bar and Bench, Free Press Journal, Siasat.com.
¹² Delhi Police submission via SG Tushar Mehta that videography is for law and order not snooping, Indian Express.
¹³ Student testimony on covering faces for fear of being profiled for government jobs.
¹⁴ Second student testimony on fear of footage reaching parents.
¹⁵ Officer admission on lack of data retention guidelines: footage could be needed months later.
¹⁶ Digital Personal Data Protection Act 2023 grants wide exemptions to security agencies, Indian Express analysis.
¹⁷ Police noting Instagram handles of protesters arriving, Inspector Sunil Kumar quote, Telegraph India / Reuters report on AI surveillance vans.
¹⁸ Delhi Police considered match positive at 80% accuracy, RTI 2022.
¹⁹ Joy Buolamwini and Timnit Gebru, “Gender Shades: Intersectional Accuracy Disparities in Commercial Gender Classification,” Proceedings of Machine Learning Research 81 (2018).
²⁰ Foucault, biopolitics as management of populations through regulation of life.
²¹ Pope Leo XIV, Magnifica humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence, Encyclical Letter, 15 May 2026 (published 25 May 2026).
²² Wikipedia entry: Magnifica humanitas is first encyclical of Pope Leo XIV, concerned with safeguarding human person in age of AI.
²³ Leo chose to present encyclical personally, attended by AI experts including Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah.
²⁴ Encyclical uses Tower of Babel vs Nehemiah rebuilding ruins as images for construction sites of our era, Chapter Three.
²⁵ Pope Leo’s AI encyclical warns of temptation to build future excluding God – Catholic Review, OSV News, 25 May 2026.
²⁶ Magnifica humanitas, Chap. 3, para 99: AI does not undergo experiences, possess body, feel joy or pain, lack moral conscience.
²⁷ Encyclical considers digital transformation in light of truth, work, freedom.
²⁸ Encyclical calls for ecology of communication and educational alliance to address deepfakes and disinformation.
²⁹ Pope Leo XIV warns AI risks widening inequality, weakening democracy – RNS, 25 May 2026; warns against concentration of power and dehumanization, ETBrandEquity.
³⁰ Pope calls on society to implement shared standards of social justice for AI to respect dignity, National Catholic Register.
³¹ Encyclical proposes civilization of love founded on justice, dialogue, shared responsibility vs culture of power.
³² Encyclical affirms principles of social doctrine – common good, solidarity, subsidiarity.
³³ Vatican News: Pope Leo XIV: Technology must serve truth and common good.
³⁴ Title Magnifica humanitas recalls Magnificat, Mary as icon of humble faith and weavers of hope.
³⁵ Pope urges world to disarm AI amid increased reliance, USCCB summary; encyclical opposes AI arms race and use in warfare.
