Eighteenth International Conference on Interdisciplinary Social Sciences

Abstract

This paper focuses on the uncertainties and ambiguities of the young Muslims of Jamia Nagar, a neighborhood in New Delhi, on their everyday interaction with the police force strolling in their neighborhood. Jamia Nagar is a highly Muslim-populated and segregated neighborhood in New Delhi neighboring the Jamia Millia Islamia University has had a history of police violence in 2008, known as the Batla House encounter, and in 2019 during the anti-CAA protests. Currently, the neighborhood is permeated by the presence of police personnel, buses, and police booths that keep the residents of Jamia Nagar in a state of anxiety, uncertainty, and ambiguity about their lived spaces and lives. Through an ethnographic inquiry, these questions will be expanded by listening to the perspectives of the Muslim youth about the constant presence of the police, unsettling rumors, and false alarms that keep them in anticipation of police violence or communal riots. By describing these questions of ambiguity, the paper attempts to expand what Arjun Appadurai has called ‘the ethics of probability’ in doing an anthropology of the future. Overall, the paper offers an understanding of the transformation of a space experienced in terms of safety and belongingness to a space that boasts insecurity and fear instilled by the state towards the Muslim community, especially during the aftermath of the CAA.