Editorial: The encounter justice fallacy

CHENNAI: Earlier this week, the West Bengal police shot dead a man suspected of the rape and murder of a 12-year-old girl in Uttar Dinajpur district. Police said they were pursuing the suspect when he pulled a gun on them. So, they had to shoot him in self-defence. The incident took place at 3 am.

This was the fourth extra-judicial killing of crime suspects in West Bengal since the BJP came to power in May this year. Right after taking office, the government of Suvendu Adhikari made it clear that the police would be given a ‘free hand’ to crack down on crime.

‘Free hand’ is code for a bypass of judicial process, and the police took him up on it when they drove a rape-and-murder suspect to the crime scene, at the witching hour of 3 am, to ‘reconstruct’ the incident at Baruipur and shot him dead. A pro forma account of the incident was supplied to the press: The man tried to snatch a gun from a police officer and was shot dead in self-defence.

As if to confirm that extra-judicial killings are policy in West Bengal now, two such ‘encounters’ were enacted at two different places on October 27, one to put down a rape suspect, and another to kill a man suspected of assassinating a local BJP leader. Chief Minister Adhikari has publicly defended all four incidents, arguing that the police are entitled to retaliate when attacked.

Adhikari is following in the footsteps of his UP counterpart, Yogi Adityanath. Extra-judicial killings have been a feature of policing in that state since 2017. In the nine and a half years since Adityanath took office in Lucknow, there have been 17,043 encounter operations in the state in which 314 suspects were killed.

Extra-judicial killings are not new in India. They were an instrumentality freely wielded by security forces, while the state looked the other way, against insurgents in Hyderabad in 1948, Kashmir since the 1990s, Punjab in the 1980s and 1990s, and against Naxalites since 1968. In the past two decades, especially since the BJP came to power in several states, that instrumentality has been extended to crime as well. In some states like UP, extra-judicial methods have been incorporated into police procedures, almost giving them the status of policy. Chief ministers like Adityanath, and now Adhikari, are sold on the notion that lethal force rather than the criminal justice system better showcases their tough attitude to crime.

But does this really deter crime? There is little convincing evidence that encounters, even when practised at scale as in Uttar Pradesh, deter crime in any durable sense. Despite nine years of aggressive policing and thousands of encounter operations, crimes against women have only risen in UP. In 2024, there were 66,400 such crimes, including 3,209 rape cases. Although encounters have not demonstrably deterred these offences, government leaders and police officers continue to sell them to the public as effective policy.

Worldwide, it has been shown that crime responds more to the certainty and swiftness of lawful punishment than to the severity of extra-judicial justice. At a systemic level, what deters crime is the certainty of detection, effective investigation, prosecution and conviction. By adopting encounters as policy and neglecting due process, chief ministers like Adhikari and Adityanath are making the grave mistake of rejecting what works and adopting what does not.