by Nicholas West | ACTIVISTPOST.COM | April 5, 2015
The evolution of “non-lethal” weapons has been disturbing enough (and actually lethal in many cases), but speculation that this developing arsenal would be attached to drones has generally been met with accusations of fear-mongering.
However, the recent announcement that India (a constitutional republic) has now green-lighted drones for controlling “unruly crowds” in its northern capital Lucknow should get any skeptic’s attention. Incidentally, even among highly populated India, the Uttar Pradesh region is a populous area of 204 million people, putting it into the range of most of the United States.
The transfer of weapons of war such as drones from foreign to domestic use should be seen as the ultimate canary in the coal mine for any supposedly democratic country.
It should be noted that India is by no means the first to consider drones for crowd dispersal or suppression. In 2014, drone maker Desert Wolf sent the drone pictured below to Turkey as well as to South Africa to potentially be used to quell dissent, which in South Africa included platinum miners who were on strike:
India already has embarked on a troubling range of oppressive measures throughout their society, including another “first” – a biometric national ID program for all of its 1.2 billion residents, of course in response to the standard concerns of fraud and cybercrime, but now covering nearly all human activity.