The ethnography in this dissertation expands on the role of urban policing in city-making, and in crafting the lived citizenship of the citizens who inhabit Delhi-NCR and urban India. The four substantive chapters collectively address a constellation of policing practices by delving into the diverse encounters that take place between the urban citizens on one hand, and the policing entities in their multiple human and non-human incarnations, on the other. The dissertation draws on over 18 months of fieldwork between 2022 and 2024, primarily conducted in India’s national capital region (NCR). The dissertation asks and responds to the questions: How do urban citizens negotiate a city that is subjected to varying forms and intensities of policing and surveillance? What are the ways in which citizens encounter, confront, demand, accept, or at times even disregard the policing infrastructures and policing actions that they are exposed to in the everyday? And, finally, how do diverse forms of policing limit and curtail the lived citizenship of a city’s policed inhabitants? Chapters 1 & 2, through their attention on police barricades and on the use of cameras and visualization of policework, examine the somewhat overlooked and yet crucial elements of street-level policing which shape everyday life in Delhi-NCR as an urban center. In contrast, chapters 3 & 4 are concerned with those aspects of policing that instead respond to Delhi-NCR as the political center of the country. These latter chapters on policing of protests and civic engagement, and on the politicized wielding of incarceration, reckon with how political action is policed in India.
