Racism or racialization has rarely, if ever, been used as a framework to understand contemporary policing practices in India. While discourses around racism are still overwhelmingly conditioned by the “white/non-white” binary, literature on “new racism studies” has proposed a focus on “racialization” as being capable of explaining processes of subjugation of people ascribed with racialized meanings (Baber 2022; Rai 2022). Drawing from these trends in “new racism studies” I note that new racism or critical racism scholarship may be able to offer theoretical frameworks that address structural inequalities and discrimination in contemporary India, which manifest in various ways in contemporary policing practices