‘An association with discipline’: duty, politics and police associations in Kerala, India

Police work is caught within a fraught relationship between ‘discipline’ as a structuring principle and ‘politics’ as a mode of relational practice. Drawing from an ethnographic study of police associations in Kerala, India, we argue that an inexorable tension between discipline and politics fundamentally shapes police unionism specifically, and what we may call ‘police worker politics’ more broadly. Contextualised in the broader ambit of the history of police unionist movements in India, and scholarly studies of police unionism globally–especially in the Amero-Anglosphere–we outline how police associations in Kerala conceive a ‘non-political’ identity, which ironically may itself be considered as a political act. In so doing, we consider what kinds of possibilities for ‘the political’ may exist among police who organise collectively in different contexts and on multiple scales.