Guards of Jamia: Between Duty and Discretion—A Student’s Account of Power and Compliance
Kanishka Chaturvedi | 11 June 2025 | The Mooknayak
This ethnographic essay explores the paradoxical position of the security guards at Jamia Millia Islamia, examining how they are simultaneously enforcers of institutional authority and subjects of systemic precarity and marginalisation. Drawing from informal conversations and everyday observations, the piece reveals how these contractual workers are deployed as political instruments within an increasingly authoritarian and surveillance-heavy campus environment, particularly during moments of student dissent.
Through a reflexive and critical lens, the essay interrogates the guards’ role in upholding institutional control, their precarious labor conditions, and the ways in which their social identity—particularly as Muslims—shapes their engagement with power, resistance, and moral policing. By highlighting instances of both complicity and quiet solidarity, this work complicates simplistic binaries of oppressor and oppressed, offering insight into how power, labour, identity, and dissent intersect in contemporary university spaces…