UP cop who tried 'citizenship scan' with mobile gets warning after viral video

In Uttar Pradesh’s ongoing experiment with improvised governance, a new device has apparently been unveiled: the citizenship-detecting smartphone.

A video from Ghaziabad that went viral this week shows a police officer appearing to 'scan' people by pressing a mobile phone against their backs, solemnly suggesting that the device could identify where they 'belonged'. The scene, filmed in the Bhowapur slum area of Kaushambi on 23 December 2025, would have been funny if it were not a police operation involving real people with real rights.

The exercise, carried out by Ghaziabad police along with Central Reserve Police Force personnel, was ostensibly aimed at identifying 'illegal immigrants'. Residents were stopped, questioned, and made to produce Aadhaar cards, voter IDs and passports — because nothing reassures a democracy quite like document checks in a slum.

Things took a turn from grim to grotesque when the officer decided to demonstrate his apparent faith in magical technology, holding a phone against a man’s back and implying it could determine his origin. Social media, predictably, responded faster than the rule of law.

“Is this a new technology?” one user asked. Another noted, dryly, that police “questioning citizenship on a whim undermines rights — it’s not their call to make.” A third dispensed with irony altogether: “What absolute nonsense. Harassing poor people.”

The police, however, were not amused by the mockery — not necessarily because of the humiliation of residents, one suspects, but because the tactic failed.

In an official clarification, Abhishek Srivastava, assistant commissioner of police, Indirapuram, said the video showed routine area patrols and interaction with residents of temporary settlements. The station house officer of Kaushambi, he said, has been issued a “strict warning” to ensure such behaviour does not recur.

A warning for treating citizenship like a parlour trick, or letting the video leak out? To be fair, the ACP hinted at further steps after the mandatory inquiry.

Meanwhile, media channel Times Now tracked down Roshni Khatoon, the woman seen in the viral clip. In a statement that says more about power imbalance than police conduct, she clarified that the “officer was nice” — even as she admitted the online circulation of the video had left her and others embarrassed.

“I want to appeal to Yogi ji (Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath) to do something about us who have been staying in these shanties,” she said, addressing Adityanath not to complain about being treated like suspects, but simply to ask not to be forgotten.

That, perhaps, is the most damning detail. In a state where slum residents can be scanned like barcodes, mocked online, and then persuaded that the police meant no harm, the outrage is not that someone pretended a phone could detect nationality. The outrage is that this passed, briefly, as a serious exercise of state power — until the internet laughed.