Table of Contents
What is ‘Encounter’?
- ‘’Encounter killing” is a term used to describe extrajudicial killings by the police or the armed forces, allegedly in self-defence, when they encounter suspected gangsters or terrorists.
- Extrajudicial killings are not new to India.
- They have been used in the past by the police and security forces in varying contexts – to quell insurgencies such as in the states of Bengal in the 1960s, and in Punjab in the 1980s. against suspected terrorists in Gujarat during 2002-2007
- Such killings are also a regular feature in “ordinary” circumstances, for example in those states that do not have active conflicts (such as Uttar Pradesh) and in the course of regular law enforcement operations.
POLICE CUSTODY:
- When following to the receipt of an information/complaint/report by police about a crime, an officer of police arrests the suspect involved in the crime reported, to prevent him from committing the offensive acts further, such officer brings that suspect to police station, it’s called Police Custody.
- 17 people, including six minors, were killed in Sarkeguda, in Bijapur district of Chhattisgarh, in June 2012, has noted the following findings: there was no firing by the villagers; there is no evidence to suggest they were Maoists; the villagers were assaulted and killed from close quarters; security forces may have fired “in panic”
The Manipur case
- A high-profile case filed in 2012 before the Supreme Court of India related to allegations of 1,528 extrajudicial killings in the state of Manipur, which is conflict-affected.
- The Supreme Court issued a landmark decision in 2016, in which it stated in unequivocal terms the illegality of such actions and the lack of “absolute immunity” in such cases
Consequences of normalizing Encounter
- Next time police will arrest random people to save their own image.
- Kill them to satisfy conscience of society.
- Politicians will take benefit of it.
- Real criminals will be free.
- Ultimately, to curb this rampant criminal practice there needs to be a concerted effort on multiple fronts – the legal, institutional as well as societal.
Latest Burning Issues | Free PDF