When Justice Becomes an Encounter Why Society Applauds Extrajudicial Killings
- BerryBeat Team
- 6 days ago
- 11 min read
On 6 December 2019, four men accused of rape and murder in Hyderabad were shot dead by police. The official story was familiar. The accused had allegedly tried to escape during a reconstruction of the crime scene. They had allegedly attacked the police. The police had allegedly fired in self-defence.
Large parts of the country did not wait for a trial, a forensic record, or a judicial finding. They celebrated.
Sweets were distributed outside the police station. Crowds showered flowers on the police. Members of Parliament applauded in the well of both Houses. The killing was praised as swift justice, as if justice had finally found the courage that courts lacked.
In 2024, a Supreme Court-appointed commission led by Justice V.S. Sirpurkar concluded that the encounter was staged. The four men, the commission found, had been woken up and shot in cold blood. Six Hyderabad police officers have been charged with murder.
The meaning of that finding is larger than one case. It asks a painful question of Indian democracy: when a society cheers an encounter, what exactly is it cheering?
The Hyderabad encounter showed how quickly rage can become permission
The Hyderabad case was not the first encounter to be celebrated in India. It became a national mirror because the public response was so open, so confident, and so emotionally untroubled.
The accused were not convicted. The evidence had not been tested. Their guilt had not been proved in court. Yet the public treated their deaths as a moral event, not a legal one. The ordinary safeguards of criminal justice were seen as obstacles. The police bullet was seen as resolution.
That reaction did not emerge from nowhere. Sexual violence cases in India often move slowly. Survivors and families face humiliation, delay, intimidation, and public scrutiny. Convictions can take years. Appeals can take longer. The courtroom can feel colder than the crime scene.
So when the Hyderabad police announced that the accused were dead, many people felt relief. They saw the encounter as punishment without waiting. They saw it as closure without paperwork. They saw it as certainty in a system where certainty is rare.
But grief and anger cannot be allowed to become public warrants.
A democracy does not ask people to feel less. It asks the state to act with more restraint than the crowd. That restraint is not softness. It is the line between justice and revenge.
The Sirpurkar Commission’s findings pierced the emotional certainty that had formed in 2019. If the encounter was staged, then the country had not celebrated justice. It had celebrated a killing carried out under state protection. The accused were denied trial. The victim’s family was denied truth. The public was given theatre.
And theatre is powerful because it looks finished.
A dead body produces a conclusion. A trial produces questions. A charge sheet can be challenged. A witness can turn hostile. A confession can be coerced. Forensics can expose gaps. A judge can acquit. The encounter avoids all of this by ending the story before the story can be tested.
That is why it is so dangerous.
Encounter killings turn failure into spectacle
India recorded 813 encounter killing cases between April 2016 and March 2022, roughly one every three days. In that six-year period, no police officer was convicted. The National Human Rights Commission reported 85 deaths during police encounters in 2024.
Those figures should unsettle any society that calls itself constitutional.
A legal system that records hundreds of encounter deaths and no convictions against officers is not showing efficiency. It is showing impunity.
The appeal of the encounter rests on a simple emotional bargain. The public agrees to look away from process because the result feels right. The state gains applause for bypassing the hard work it failed to do.
That bargain rewards institutional failure.
If investigation is weak, fix investigation. If trials take too long, expand judicial capacity. If witnesses are threatened, protect witnesses. If forensic systems are underfunded, fund them. If police are overworked, reform staffing and training.
The encounter does none of this. It converts the failure of the criminal justice system into a public relations event.
Claim made for encounters | What the claim hides |
They deliver quick justice | They skip proof, trial, and accountability |
They deter crime | They may normalise illegal state violence |
They punish the guilty | They can kill people who were never proved guilty |
They restore public faith | They deepen distrust in courts and policing |
They protect victims | They can deny victims the truth of what happened |
A trial is slow because it must carry burdens that an encounter refuses. It must establish identity, motive, evidence, procedure, and guilt. It must allow defence because the state is powerful. It must accept that the police can be wrong. It must accept that public anger is not proof.
An encounter performs confidence. A trial tests it.
This distinction matters because the state does not become noble simply because the accused is hated. The power to arrest is already immense. The power to investigate is immense. The power to use force is immense. When the state also claims the power to punish without trial, the citizen is left with mercy, not rights.
And mercy depends on who the police believe you are.
The keyword trail tells its own story: India encounter killings 2024 2025 data NHRC, Hyderabad Disha encounter fake Supreme Court Sirpurkar, UP Operation Langda encounter killings Noida, encounter killings zero convictions 6 years India, extra-judicial killings Muslims India 2025, fake encounter India public applause due process. These are not isolated searches. They are signs of a public trying to name a pattern that official language often softens.
The word “encounter” itself does heavy work. It sounds accidental, mutual, sudden. It suggests two armed sides meeting in danger. It does not sound like custody. It does not sound like control. It does not sound like execution.
Language protects power when law does not.
Uttar Pradesh shows how encounters can become governance
Uttar Pradesh offers one of the starkest examples of encounters as a public policy signal. Under the Yogi Adityanath government’s tenure, police conducted 8,472 encounters. More than 3,300 people were shot in the legs in what came to be unofficially called “Operation Langda.”
The phrase itself is chilling. It turns injury into branding. It turns disability into proof of state resolve. It invites the public to see a bullet wound as both punishment and message.
In Gautam Buddh Nagar district, which includes Noida, police averaged one encounter every three days over two years. National Herald India documented cases involving chain-snatchers, car stereo thieves, and members of the so-called “thak-thak gang.”
This matters because encounter logic rarely stays limited to the most horrific crimes. It expands.
At first, the public may accept it for rape and murder. Then for gang violence. Then for robbery. Then for petty theft. Then for people who “look suspicious.” A method justified as exceptional becomes a routine administrative tool.
Once that happens, the original moral excuse fades. What remains is a policing culture where force becomes a performance metric.
A government can then point to encounter numbers as evidence of toughness. Police stations can treat arrests, injuries, and killings as signs of productivity. Television panels can turn violence into spectacle. Citizens can mistake fear for order.
But fear is not the same as safety.
Real safety is when a woman can report violence without being shamed. It is when a Muslim teenager, a Dalit labourer, a migrant worker, or a poor street vendor can face police questioning without fearing disappearance or death. It is when a complainant can trust that the person arrested is the person who committed the crime. It is when the accused can stand trial because the law is strong enough to prove guilt.
Encounter policing weakens all of this.
It also corrupts ordinary policing. If officers learn that the public rewards shortcuts, the discipline of evidence suffers. Why build a careful case if a staged chase is more admired? Why protect witnesses if a bullet produces applause? Why respect custody protocols if violations are unlikely to be punished?
This is how institutions decay. Not always through one dramatic collapse, but through repeated exceptions that become habits.
The zero-conviction record from 2016 to 2022 sharpens the concern. No system is perfect. Police do face dangerous situations. There are real armed confrontations. Officers can be wounded or killed. The law recognises self-defence. It permits proportionate force.
But when hundreds die and no officer is convicted, accountability begins to look fictional.
A credible system would distinguish lawful self-defence from staged killing. It would investigate each death independently. It would preserve forensic evidence. It would examine call records, custody logs, ballistic reports, post-mortems, and chain of command. It would punish lies.
Without that, the encounter becomes not an exception, but a parallel criminal justice system.
The burden falls hardest on those with the least power
Extrajudicial violence does not fall evenly across society. It follows existing lines of power.
The South Asia Justice Campaign documented 23 Muslims killed in extrajudicial incidents in 2025, marking the third consecutive annual increase. That figure sits within a wider concern about how suspicion attaches itself to identity. In many parts of India, the language of crime, terrorism, cow protection, illegal migration, and “anti-national” conduct has often blurred into the language of community.
When due process is weakened, majorities may not feel the danger at once. They may imagine the encounter is meant for “criminals,” a category they assume will never include them. But the law’s protection matters most when someone is unpopular, poor, despised, or politically convenient to punish.
The Constitution is not tested when it protects the beloved. It is tested when it protects the accused.
That protection does not insult victims. It honours them. A lawful trial says the crime was serious enough to deserve proof, not rumour. It says punishment must rest on truth, not spectacle. It says the victim’s dignity cannot be built on another illegality.
There is a painful misunderstanding at the heart of public support for encounters. Many people believe that defending due process means defending the accused person’s conduct. It does not. Due process defends the public from state error and state abuse. It protects the innocent. It strengthens convictions that are deserved. It makes punishment legitimate.
A conviction after a fair trial carries moral weight. A killing in custody carries doubt, even when the public wants certainty.
That doubt harms everyone. It means the real perpetrator may remain unidentified. It means evidence may never be tested. It means police officers who follow the law are undermined by those who do not. It means communities begin to treat every official claim with suspicion.
For marginalised communities, this suspicion is not abstract. It can shape whether families report crimes, cooperate with investigations, or seek help from the state. If the police are seen as judge and executioner, the station stops being a place of remedy. It becomes a place of risk.
Why people applaud what they should fear
The public applause for encounter killings is not always born from cruelty. Often, it is born from exhaustion.
People see rape trials delayed. They see corruption cases drag on for decades. They see undertrials spend years in jail. They see wealthy accused persons hire better lawyers. They see witnesses threatened. They see victims’ families age in court corridors. They see acquittals that feel like abandonment.
So when the police kill an accused person, the act feels like an answer to a system that rarely answers.
That feeling must be taken seriously. A defence of due process that ignores public pain will fail. People do not cheer encounters because they have read case law and rejected it. They cheer because the justice system has often made lawful justice feel remote.
But the answer to a broken court cannot be an illegal bullet.
The encounter offers three things that the formal system often withholds.
It offers speed.
There is no investigation to follow, no witness to protect, no cross-examination to sit through, no judgement to wait for.
It offers certainty.
The dead cannot contradict the official version. They cannot reveal torture. They cannot identify planted evidence. They cannot say they were innocent.
It offers emotional closure.
A photograph of the dead body becomes proof that something happened. It lets the public move on.
What it does not offer is justice.
Justice requires the possibility that the state may be wrong. It requires someone to account for error. It requires a judge to say whether the evidence proves guilt. It requires the police to show their work. It requires society to accept that anger, even righteous anger, cannot replace proof.
An encounter ensures nobody has to admit any of this.
If the accused was guilty, the state avoids the burden of proving it. If the accused was innocent, the state buries the error with the body. If the investigation was weak, the weakness never reaches court. If officers lied, applause drowns out the lie.
This is why encounter culture is so tempting to power. It converts accountability into emotion. It asks the public to participate in the suspension of law and then calls that participation justice.
A mature democracy must refuse that invitation.
The way forward is not softness, it is seriousness
Rejecting encounter killings does not mean accepting impunity for crime. It means demanding a justice system serious enough to punish lawfully.
India does not need a gentler response to violence. It needs a more credible one.
That credibility begins with basic commitments.
Independent investigation into every police encounter death, not by the same chain of command that benefits from the official story.
Mandatory preservation of forensic evidence, including weapons, bullets, post-mortem records, location data, and custody documents.
Time-bound judicial scrutiny of custodial deaths and encounter killings.
Protection for witnesses, complainants, and families who challenge police versions.
Public reporting of encounter data by state, district, caste, religion where lawfully and ethically recorded, offence alleged, and case outcome.
Real consequences for officers who stage killings, plant evidence, torture suspects, or falsify records.
Investment in courts, prosecutors, forensic labs, legal aid, victim support, and police training.
These are not abstract reforms. They are the practical infrastructure of justice.
India also needs a cultural change in how public figures speak about crime. Ministers, legislators, and television anchors should not celebrate deaths before facts are known. Police officers should not be turned into heroes for killings that have not been independently examined. Crowds should not be encouraged to confuse vengeance with courage.
The courage India needs is harder.
It is the courage to stand with a victim’s family and still demand a trial. It is the courage to condemn rape and murder without granting the state a licence to kill. It is the courage to say that even the most hated accused person must be produced before law, because if the law can be denied to one person, it can be denied to many.
That principle is not sentimental. It is protective.
Due process is often described as a shield for the accused. It is also a shield for the public. It forces the state to prove what it claims. It creates a record. It allows journalists, courts, families, and citizens to question power. It separates punishment from mood.
A society that gives this up may feel safer for a moment. It becomes less free in the process.
Justice must be slower than anger and stronger than fear
The Hyderabad encounter forced India to confront an uncomfortable truth. The public did not merely trust the police version. Many people wanted it to be true because it felt morally satisfying.
That is the danger.
When justice becomes an encounter, society stops asking whether the state has proved guilt. It asks whether the killing feels deserved. Once that becomes the standard, rights shrink into reputation. The popular are protected. The hated are disposable. The poor are vulnerable. Minorities are exposed. Police power grows in the exact space where law should stand.
The answer is not to shame public anger. Anger has its place. It has pushed laws to change, institutions to respond, and crimes to be taken seriously. But anger must not be allowed to write the final order.
Justice is not a photograph of the dead. It is a public process that can survive scrutiny. It is evidence tested in open court. It is punishment that follows proof. It is accountability for both crime and state violence.
A republic proves itself not when the crowd is calm, but when the crowd is furious and the law still holds.
That is the standard worth defending. Not because the accused deserve our sympathy, but because the Constitution deserves our loyalty. Not because courts are perfect, but because a bullet fired outside the law cannot repair them.
The encounter promises finality. Justice demands truth. India must choose the harder promise.
