How I Investigated Potential Extrajudicial Police Action in India’s Most Populous State

Police shootouts are common occurrences in India, more frequent in some states than in others. A shootout, called an “encounter” in popular parlance, are apparently “spontaneous” encounters between police and alleged criminals. The encounters often result in the death or life-long injury sustained by the latter. The police, who are under the control of individual state governments, justify such actions in the name of self-defense. Almost all police versions parrot the same script—that the “criminal” was evading arrest and shot at officers with the intent to kill, and the police officers were compelled to shoot back in self-defense. If the encounter leads to the alleged criminal’s death, the version claims that they succumbed to their injuries.

But for far too long, human rights activists and lawyers who have represented the families of deceased “criminals” have cried foul play on the part of the police. They say that almost all such incidents are pre-planned conspiracies, and that the deaths are extrajudicial killings.

Last year, a conversation about one such encounter got me thinking. A man with no criminal background had been killed by the police in Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state. The state is a political hot potato for various reasons, and its police are notorious for being trigger-happy. The question on my mind: How could police officials orchestrating such killings escape legal implications in almost all cases? This is where I started my investigation.

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During preliminary research, I realized that a bigger problem in Uttar Pradesh today was kneecapping. While 183 people were killed during encounters between 2017 and 2023 in the state, over 5,000 were injured, usually in their left knee, during the same time period. The state’s ruling party’s social media handles also glorified such police action. I decided to pursue 10 cases of encounters—six that led to the individual’s death and four cases of kneecapping. The revelations were startling.

While such encounters have a long history in Uttar Pradesh, the current happenings under the state’s chief minister, Yogi Adityanath, are unprecedented for several reasons.

First, the number of encounters has skyrocketed under Adityanath compared to the previous government.

Second, more than encounters resulting in deaths, a much larger number of encounters have resulted in grievous gunshot injuries to a victim’s legs, usually the left kneecap. These have become an everyday affair in the state.

Third, unlike previous governments, encounters are blatantly endorsed as an official state policy, rewarded by ruling party leaders, to keep a check on law and order, regardless of Indian court rulings frowning upon the practice.

Fourth, victims and families said that the state’s use of encounters, purportedly to curb crime, is paradoxically resulting in the creation of more criminals.

And fifth, the abject failure of India’s criminal justice system and India’s Supreme Court in clamping down on apparent extrajudicial killings, despite mounting evidence, is perpetuating a cycle of violence and injustice and causing greater alienation from the judicial process among affected communities.

Although Indian courts have criticized encounters as being “a criminal philosophy” and an action that “affects the credibility of the rule of law and the administration of the criminal justice system,” they have, at the same time, recognized that the police often deal with hardened criminals and, therefore, have the right to self-defense by injuring or killing, but only when it is imminently necessary. In doing so, Indian courts acknowledge the fine line between self-defense with reasonable force—a valid legal ground to escape charges—and the use of excessive retaliatory force, which is a punishable offense.

How I Got Started

The main aim was to find answers to these two questions:

1. Did material proof in the form of scientific evidence exist to show discrepancies in the police’s version of an encounter and expose their crime?
2. If so, how did the criminal justice system fail to ensure justice for the families of the dead and victims of kneecapping?

While reviewing past media reports on police encounters, I realized that none had analyzed scientific reports and police records to determine if the police were lying. Gathering data on the ten cases I shortlisted is where I began.

I achieved this through desk research, interviews with legal experts, public records requests (known as the Right to Information (RTI) in India), and field reporting. I filed over 40 RTI requests with several public authorities, including the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC), India’s human rights watchdog, which is required to intervene in suspicious cases of encounter killings.

The NHRC turned out to be a goldmine for data. Records pertaining to every case of encounter killing in the country are analyzed by the NHRC. In turn, the NHRC meticulously archives records of every encounter killing. My RTI requests to them eventually succeeded, and they released the records. These records included postmortem reports, forensic science reports, ballistic reports, police and family members’ testimonies, file notings, and witness statements.

The next step was to analyze each of these documents. Documents pertaining to the six cases of killings turned out to be over 2000 pages. Every line in the document was important. I decided to use AI to get a preliminary understanding of these complex scientific records. Over the months, I did that. “Can blackening of the skin occur when a bullet is fired from 46 feet away?” was one of the many questions I asked ChatGPT. Of course, none of this was left unchecked by forensic and legal experts I reached out to later.

Simultaneously, I filed RTI requests with other public authorities like the state police to gather other data. “Furnish the action taken by the state government on NHRC’s recommendation to probe XYZ police officer’s role in XYZ extrajudicial killing,” one RTI request demanded. The answers revealed how the state was complicit in saving its police officers despite the human rights watchdog finding them guilty of orchestrating extrajudicial killings.

After conclusions were drawn, I reached out to lawyers, researchers, and former judges who have worked on encounter cases. This was done to include their comments on the record for the story and to also improve my understanding of the issue.

Gathering data on encounter killings was doable since there are elaborate guidelines on how to probe and document records of such cases. But when it comes to encounters only leading to injuries, no such guidelines exist. The police are neither required to notify the NHRC of such an incident nor specifically required to follow a different probe procedure. As a result, the elaborate documentation of scientific evidence that exists in cases of killings is absent in injury cases. It was particularly challenging to find any material proof in the four cases of encounter injuries I investigated.

I reached out to activists from the state to track down families and victims. While the families of the dead were more than willing to speak to a reporter, it was particularly difficult to build trust with surviving victims of encounters. They feared that if the police found out that they spoke to the media, they would kill them in an encounter. “Though maimed for life, I can at least breathe now,” one of the many survivors who refused to speak told me.

I visited eight families and victims. Akram Akhtar Choudhary, a lawyer-activist who helped me with reporting on encounter injury cases, visited two victims. Their versions helped give shape to the story. Once the story was in place, I sent a detailed questionnaire to the Director General of Police, the state’s top law enforcement official. As expected, I did not receive a response.

The story finally revealed a state of pervasive injustice in India’s most populous state, Uttar Pradesh, where trigger-happy police, emboldened by its political masters to believe that they will not face accountability, regardless of the amount of evidence against them, go scot-free in a legal system that seldom comes to the aid of the victims or their families. I also found that India’s criminal justice system systematically keeps the families of the dead victims out of the legal loop. When cases of this nature are brought before India’s Supreme Court, it either works lethargically or tends to look the other way, perpetuating a cycle of widespread impunity.

Lessons From the Project

1. Because much of the legal work at the lower stage happens in the state’s local language in India, it was particularly challenging to understand the plethora of documents, which were in Hindi. AI helped save time in translating them and provided a fairly accurate report in English.
2. Authorities are hesitant to part with information of such sensitive nature. Sometimes, one may have to put up a fight. My initial public access request was denied by the NHRC. It would have then become extremely difficult to extract records from the State Government. So, I decided to personally visit the information officers at the NHRC and persuade them to release the records, taking support of court judgments in favor of transparency. In the end, they did.
3. RTI requests had to be framed cleverly. If the question was too direct, they might reject the request. Some information requests required me to frame questions that did not seem adverse to them. Some conversations with Information Officers, especially at the State Police office, required me to praise their efforts in crime control. Most times, it worked.
4. One should be aware of confirmation bias when dealing with such a subject. Speaking with neutral experts, like a forensic expert, helped me to understand the realm of possibilities one could come across in a case such as this.

Final tips for reporters who want to tackle this topic

Engaging forensic experts, legal scholars, and human rights activists from the outset can significantly improve the depth of the investigation. It saves a lot of time later. Their expertise can help navigate complex evidence, like ballistic reports or autopsy findings, and ensure that your conclusions are well-founded. I believe this kind of early collaboration also helps shape questions and possible hypotheses better, so you are better equipped to talk (and sometimes play the devil's advocate) to the victims and other sources.