‘Who has police on their side they’ll win’: police-religion nexus in lay explanations for police’s actions in Delhi riots 2020.

Abstract

Much psychological research has examined the role of authority and police in conflicts and riots where the police is directly a target for the rioters. Further, much of this research has examined issues in WEIRD and settings of the Global North. In this paper, I examine the role of police in riots between two social groups in India: the 2020 Hindu-Muslim Delhi riots. I offer a discursive psychological examination of lay accounts of users' comments to news coverage of these riots. The analysis shows that users first oriented to and mobilized a readily known understanding that policing is biased and affiliated to Hindus over Muslims. Second, users developed and negotiated the possible affiliation of police to Hindu groups by pointing to contingent and routinized practices of both police and Muslims. Last, users offered routinized descriptions of Muslims as violent in justifying police actions. Findings show that users could interchangeably treat the police and Hindu groups in dealing with Muslims. Overall, policing was evaluated in terms of a religious groundswell of meanings and perceptions of relations between social groups and the State