Policing Belonging: Police, Protest and Indian Citizenship Amendment Act, 2019

• Applicant: Dr. Deep Chand
• Subject Area: Criminology
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 568847880

The police in South Asia have largely functioned as an oppressive instrument of state power rather than protectors of citizens’ rights (Subramanian, 2009). But how has this long history affected questions of citizenship and belonging? The proposed project will answer this question and advance our understanding of policing belonging and the role of policing in South Asia, using India’s Citizenship Amendment Act 2019 (CAA) as a case study. This Act grants citizenship to ‘illegal migrants’ of six non-Muslim (Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis and Christians) communities from Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh who arrived in India before the end of December 2014 based on ‘religious persecution’ but does not grant such eligibility to Muslims from these countries. There followed massive social protests across India at different times and spaces because the Act singled out Muslim migrants for exclusion from citizenship eligibility criteria and ruptured the sense of belonging among Indian Muslims. The violent methods of policing these protests may have further eroded the belonging of protesters by repressing their ‘dissent voice’. The study seeks to understand how policing of protest escalates/de-escalates the conflict between police/state and protesters over political and legal rights and erodes feelings of belonging among anti-CAA protesters facing police brutality during the protest. This project will explore policing as a vital mediator of belonging and citizenship for the anti-CAA protesters, who employed a ‘repertoire of resistance’ (Tilly & Tarrow, 2015) to express their opposition to the state/police. The project will also consult the police officers involved to explore how policing protests have altered their understanding of their role in society and what effect this has had on their understanding of belonging. Equipped with this situated grounding of the policing of protest, the project will explore, theoretically and practically, the question of what policing that contributes to belonging might look like. The broader aims of the project are to develop a conceptual, empirical, and practical understanding of how police and policing can strengthen a sense of belonging and social integration in society by recognising citizens’ human rights and producing democratic governance for citizens, and conversely, how it can also weaken the sense of belonging and social integration by rejecting citizens’ democratic rights and civil participation in protest.

• DFG Programme: WBP Fellowship
• International Connection: United Kingdom
• Host: Professor Ian Loader, Ph.D.