Extrajudicial Killings May Be Frequent in India’s Most Populous State

An exclusive investigation reveals how the Uttar Pradesh police often exploit loopholes in the law and disregard forensic evidence in shootouts

On Jan. 26, 2018, as India was celebrating its Republic Day (commemorating the adoption of its constitution), Mukesh Rajbhar, a 17-year-old laborer in eastern Uttar Pradesh (U.P.), was killed in a police shootout near his home in Mutkallipur village. The police claimed that he was a wanted criminal evading arrest in an attempted murder case and that he had opened fire along with his associate. Thus, they had shot him in self-defense, and he succumbed to his injuries. They claimed that, in addition to this murder case, Rajbhar had a history of criminal activity: two cases of robbery and theft, and one case under the Gangster Act of 1986, the state’s special law to curb organized crime and antisocial activities. Hence, he was a “dreaded criminal.”

Rajbhar's family alleged, however, that the police had implicated him using cases that are commonly described as being “kept in cold storage” — that is, cases that are originally filed against unknown persons but are later used by the police to “create criminal histories” to use against people they want to portray as “dreaded criminals.” Consequently, the family was not convinced about the police’s version of events and claimed that their son’s death was extrajudicial. “He was only 17,” his father, Nandlal, a tall and sturdy but aged man, told New Lines. Seated on a traditional, woven stool with bundles of documents connected to his son’s death, Nandlal bore the marks of both sorrow and resilience.

The family received news of Rajbhar’s death the day after the incident from local residents and newspaper reports, even though the law mandates that the police must inform the family when a person is killed in a police shootout (called an “encounter” in popular parlance). “Mukesh was in Kanpur until a day before his death [a city almost 250 miles from the site of the incident]. CCTV footage from his house corroborated this. The local police picked him up from the city and brought him here to kill him,” Nandlal claimed.

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“The police say they killed our son. Why then, did they not show us our son’s face? He is alive!” Nandlal whispered. Local human rights activists explained that sometimes, out of deep shock, prolonged trauma and a yearning for closure, families claim that their loved ones are alive. Rajbhar’s mother couldn’t hold back tears as she spoke of her son.

The family wrote letters to Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC), the country’s human rights watchdog, seeking a federal bureau probe into Rajbhar’s death, but their pleas were not heeded. On the contrary, the local investigations absolved the police of any foul play.

However, scientific and forensic evidence analyzed by New Lines earlier this year showed discrepancies between the police version of events and Rajbhar’s postmortem report. There was bleeding from his nostrils and a bandage had been applied to his chest, two possible indicators of physical violence before death. The cause of death noted was “haemorrhagic shock” due to “antemortem firearm injury,” in other words, fatal bleeding due to gunshot wounds sustained before death. The report also said one bullet had pierced through Rajbhar’s upper back and exited out the front, indicating that he was shot from behind.

But the official investigation did not address these findings, and for the past six years Rajbhar’s family members have grappled with the bitter reality of India’s broken justice system. The constitution’s guarantee of the right to life, equality and redress for violations has rung hollow for them as they have struggled to find justice for possible extrajudicial violence at the hands of the state.

Over the years, these encounters with the police have emerged as a common practice in some parts of the country, like U.P. The police engage in what appears at first glance to be spontaneous, defensive gunfire with the alleged criminals — all to maintain the state’s semblance of law and order. The accused either sustain or succumb to their firearm injuries.

Since 1997, when the NHRC began maintaining a database on police killings, at least 3,584 people have died in police shootouts in the country. The state of U.P. tops this list, with 1,114 killings. From January 2017 to April 2023, the U.P. police said, 183 people were killed in 10,900 police shootouts throughout the state. The state also witnessed an exponential rise in “half-encounters,” a practice in which police inflict non-life-threatening injuries on alleged criminals, for example, by shooting them in the leg. Over 5,000 people were injured this way during this period.

Official versions of police shootings often parrot the same script: The injured or the deceased was a “dreaded criminal,” with an apparent record of misdeeds, who resisted arrest by opening fire at the police “with intent to kill,” so the police had to fire back in self-defense.

However, many human rights activists and families of victims have claimed that most of these police actions are “fake encounters,” a term used to describe extrajudicial killings. Contrary to the police’s claims that these incidents were “spontaneous confrontations,” most of them were planned, they allege. Most victims have only been accused of crimes (mostly petty offenses) and are not convicted criminals on the run.

New Lines investigated 10 cases of police shootouts in U.P. — including some that resulted in death — a task that involved examining more than 2,000 pages of documents obtained under India’s Right to Information (RTI) law. This investigation revealed discrepancies between the police accounts and New Lines’ conclusions, which were based on the available forensic and scientific evidence, raising troubling questions about whether the killings were extrajudicial. However, human rights watchdogs have not investigated the discrepancies New Lines found, and no action has been taken regarding them.

The investigation also concluded that the 2014 guidelines issued by India’s supreme court on investigations into police shootouts had proved ineffective. Moreover, the police used loopholes in the laws and guidelines to grant themselves impunity. Rajbhar’s death was one of these cases.

The highest court has mandated an independent investigation into the cases, to be carried out by the state’s special police unit or a police team that was not involved in the incident. This investigation was to be followed by a magisterial inquiry that was to be completed within three months. An intimation, or summary of the incident, was to be turned in to the NHRC within 48 hours of the death for the purpose of analyzing the case files and intervening if necessary.

The supreme court’s 2014 guidelines also extend to shootouts resulting in “grievous injury cases,” but the subsequent wording in the judgment — that the guidelines be followed “as far as possible” in such injury cases — allows the police enough discretion to decide which guideline requirements to follow and which to ignore.

But in every case that New Lines looked into, various agencies had rushed to absolve the police of any wrongdoing and sideline the mounting evidence of their culpability. They did not cross-examine officers’ claims, and the NHRC, empowered by the supreme court to intervene, also failed to take notice of these flaws before giving its stamp of approval.

Moreover, the majority of victims killed by police were from marginalized classes, lived in poverty and hailed from religious minority communities, especially Muslims. When families of victims insisted that their deaths were extrajudicial, they had to deal with a broken legal system that seldom operates in their interests. They also faced tremendous police intimidation and failed to find quality legal aid because so many of them were unaware of their rights, leaving them without meaningful recourse.

In 2019, United Nations experts expressed alarm over the allegations of at least 59 police killings in U.P. — most concerning individuals from Muslim communities living in poverty— and raised concerns that the supreme court’s guidelines had not been followed since March 2017. They said evidence indicated that the killings took place in police custody and during encounters and that the victim was acting in self-defense. “We are extremely concerned about the pattern of events: individuals allegedly being abducted or arrested before their killing, and their bodies bearing injuries indicative of torture,” the U.N. experts said. They sent detailed information to the Indian government on 15 of the cases.

As the most populous state in the country, U.P. retains a central position in India’s politics. Eighty of the 543 members of the lower house of Parliament represent U.P. More than half of India’s prime ministers have been elected from this state. The state’s other claim to fame is its culture of gun violence and gangsters, which has persisted for decades, with various criminal syndicates operating in the region. Consequently, law and order in the state is a highly contentious issue that often turns national, given the state’s significant political influence.

Although police killings occurred during the rule of previous state governments, since the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) rose to power in U.P. in 2017, led by Hindu nationalist strongman Yogi Adityanath, official policy now embraces police shootouts. The policy has emboldened the police, and they realize that they will not be held accountable, regardless of the evidence against them. Adityanath has made several public statements in support of the police, and his government has often honored the officers involved in the shootings. In 2017, he said, “If you commit a crime, you will be knocked off.” In 2020, he reiterated that “criminals would either go to jail or to Yamraj [the Hindu god of death]”, and in March of this year, he said: Criminals’ “right to live will be snatched” if they interfere with others’ right to live.

“Through such statements, the message being sent is that justice is a numbers game for the state and adherence to the rule of law is a waste of time,” said Vrinda Grover, a lawyer and human rights activist who has represented several of these victims and their families in the Indian courts.

“The narrative that is constructed conveys to the people that we do not need a judicial system in this country because scrutiny of evidence and proving guilt in accordance with the law is too time-consuming and cumbersome,” she said, adding, “that [police killings] are an efficient, cost-effective mode of eliminating those marked as criminals by the state. Of course the police pick up these signals with alacrity. After all, it gives them arbitrary power to pull the trigger and spares them the tedious task of evidence collection to convict a person before court.”

Grover and other activists told us that the police are also under pressure from their political superiors to show their efforts to control crime. “Encounters are a public spectacle. Government data does not show any causal relationship between encounter killings and crime reduction,” Grover said. “Also it is undeniable that the rising crime graph triggers social anxiety, and encounter killings tend to convey to many a sense of safety. The state preys on these concerns to spin and sell the spectacle of encounters to distract us to believe that the swift elimination of criminals will lead to crime control.”

Thus, under Adityanath, police encounters have skyrocketed as seen in the data shared publicly by the U.P.’s state police. Claiming to have acted in self-defense, police officers have escaped legal implications and are backed by the state’s top leaders, who claim that they have not been involved in extrajudicial killings. However, most families and victims, who are largely disenfranchised, vehemently deny this claim.

Rajeev Yadav, a human rights activist working in the Azamgarh district of U.P., said that repeated statements from Adityanath giving free rein to his police to “eliminate crime” have emboldened them to take the law into their own hands.

“What we are witnessing today is that the police are acting as paid assassins and contract killers, killing or harming persons for a price,” the activist said. “The actual criminals bribe the police to escape investigation. The police then coerce informers into implicating someone with a history of perhaps minor, petty offenses. They are acting as killers on hire,” he added. Families and victims echoed similar allegations.

In the early years of Adityanath’s rule, a sting operation by India Today revealed that, for a price ranging from $5,000 to $7,000, some police officers were willing to stage encounters to eliminate a person’s opponent. There were reports of a monetary “rate card” floating around in some districts, for police action against one’s adversaries.

Today, although there is the perception that street crime has been reduced under Adityanath, data from India’s crime records bureau tells a different story. In 2022, the state still rated the highest number of crimes against women, with 65,743 cases reported that year, along with 7,955 cases of sexual offenses against children and 15,368 cases of atrocities against marginalized communities. The state is also showing an upward trend in cases of gun violence and gang rivalry since 2017, with the rate of registered cases being at least three times higher than the national average of 5.4 per 100,000 people.

However, most media coverage has been based on the police’s version of these shootouts, without independent scrutiny of their claims. A handful of journalists have looked into the encounter killings in the past decade, but they have not investigated the growing mountain of evidence that exists in the form of forensics, ballistics and other records.

In all the cases New Lines investigated, there were disparities between the police narratives and New Lines’ findings, which were supported by an array of evidence that raised concerns about extrajudicial killings. For instance, the case of a man named Lakshman Yadav reveals how police forces have behaved with impunity by violating the supreme court’s 2014 guidelines and performing superficial police probes. Even the NHRC ignored these disparities and thereby absolved the police of any foul play, according to internal documents accessed by New Lines.

Lakshman, who was a resident of the Azamgarh district of U.P., was killed in a police shooting in 2019 while he was preparing to contest local elections for the position of village head. As per the police version, on Oct. 10, 2019, at around 5 a.m., the officers responded to a tip that Lakshman and his associate were heading to a neighboring village, roughly 15 miles away, to murder its village head when they apprehended him midway around 7.30 a.m. A chase ensued and ended in a shootout in which one police officer and Lakshman were injured. Lakshman died on his way to the hospital.

However, Lakshman’s family alleged that the then village head, Chandrabhan Yadav, had connived with the police to make it look like an encounter so that they could avoid a murder case and the police would have impunity.

The police later presented a list of 43 criminal charges against Lakshman (the first one dating to 2010) as evidence to show the 35-year-old was a hardened criminal. But Lakshman’s uncle, Dubri Yadav, claimed that a large number of the alleged cases against him had been dug out of “cold storage” and were being used to create a criminal record for Lakshman. He said that ever since Lakshman was involved in a village brawl in 2014, he had faced police harassment, with the police repeatedly filing cases against him and confining him to jail.

But the police claimed that Lakshman was a wanted criminal with a bounty on his head. To prove this, they presented a copy of the public proclamation at the inquiry.

Dubri informed us, on the other hand, that no one could say when such a bounty had been announced. “He was in jail and the police knew where he lived. He was going to contest elections and wasn’t escaping arrest. So what bounty are they talking about?” he asked.

Moreover, Lakshman’s name was not mentioned on the state’s official list of most-wanted criminals, a fact that further fueled Dubri’s doubts about the police’s claims. Families and activists say the police typically issue an official order for a bounty following an encounter, in order to bolster their case.

Since every such proclamation of a bounty must be sent to the State Crime Records Bureau (SCRB) and the senior authorities of the state, New Lines filed an RTI request to find out the exact date when the SCRB was informed. However, the SCRB instead directed us to the local police station in the town of Maharajganj, who in its reply indicated that they did not have any such record.

Furthermore, the police claimed that the distance between Lakshman and them when they engaged in gunfire was between 35 and 49 feet. However, Lakshman’s postmortem exam revealed that four of his eight gunshot wounds showed “blackening and tattooing” of the skin. This happens when a bullet is fired from close range, such as point-blank or within 3 to 4 feet.

The police later referred the case to a doctor in the state’s Medicolegal Cell in Lucknow, the capital, which overruled the observations in three of the four gunshot wounds in Lakshman’s body. It was made on the basis of a video recording of Lakshman’s forensic examination and the report did not explain the blackening of one wound on his face.

The police also stated that Lakshman had identified himself before being taken to the hospital. New Lines asked a forensic expert from a top government hospital in Delhi to comment. The expert said that it is extremely unlikely that Lakshman could have done so, given the critical injuries he sustained, such as his head wound. Moreover, the result of a hand-wash test, used to detect the presence of gunpowder chemicals that result from discharging a firearm, was negative for Lakshman, which undermines police claims that he fired a gun.

Moreover, the forensic expert pointed out that one of the wounds on the left side of Lakshman’s skull showed that he may have been lying on his back on the ground. That would indicate that Lakshman was already down when he sustained the shot to the left side of his head.

But the police probe into the incident did not account for all these details, while it blamed Lakshman and his associate for opening fire at police officers, which led to his death. One of the police officers was said to have been injured during the gunfight and was admitted to a hospital. However, his medical-legal report, which was submitted as proof of this injury, noted “alleged H/O [history of] fire Rt. arm injury.” The report did not further clarify the doctor’s diagnosis of the wound.

In this case, the police also failed to follow many of the 2014 guidelines, such as checking for fingerprint evidence on the guns recovered from Lakshman’s body or securing any cell-phone data records, which might have established his exact location at the time of the alleged encounter. The magisterial inquiry absolved the police of any wrongdoing, noting that the recovery of a firearm from Lakshman was enough to indicate that he died because of retaliatory, self-defensive shooting by the police.

The five eyewitness accounts supporting the police version also raised questions in light of Lakshman’s family’s allegations. The primary witness was Chandrabhan, the village head and Lakshman’s political adversary. Other witnesses included a friend of Chandrabhan’s bodyguard, two neighbors and the niece of another political rival.

When the case reached the NHRC for routine analysis, the members of the commission relied on the criminal cases filed against Lakshman for concluding that he was a “proclaimed offender”; they did not request copies of the cases to verify whether he was actually accused in any of them or if the complaints were against unknown people. If the commissioners had done this, the copies would have been present in their records. The commission carried a perfunctory analysis and absolved police of any foul play in Lakshman’s case either, because none of these things is mentioned anywhere in their reports.

While police killings have drawn some public scrutiny, instances in which police officers grievously injure someone, usually by shooting a person in the leg — sometimes maiming them for life — have not come under the media’s spotlight. The courts and the NHRC have not raised this issue either. Higher courts have been reluctant to entertain petitions for investigations into these types of injuries, and the NHRC has also failed to note this pattern of police abuse.

Dubbed “half-encounters” by locals, this phenomenon exposes a troubling trend of excessive force and impunity within law enforcement during Adityanath’s tenure. In private, the state police refer to it as “Operation Langda” (“Operation Lame”), and the ​​BJP’s social media accounts have glorified this practice with captions such as “Criminals are begging for their lives in U.P.” Again, the police justify these shootings in the name of self-defense. The lower courts usually send for the police’s claims to examine them but then take their findings at face value.

In 2018, Ajay Yadav, from the Azamgarh district, was permanently maimed by the U.P. police. He was apprehended by the local police and taken to a station nearby, the family alleges, where he was blindfolded and his hands and legs were tied with rope, alleged his family. Several police officers from a special unit took him to a secluded area nearby and shot him in the knee, according to the family.

“The police alleged that he tried to steal one of their pistols to shoot them, and as a result, they had to shoot him. But his life turned upside down after that. Not only was he maimed, but he also could not get a job and lead a normal life,” said Karma Yadav, Ajay’s mother. He spent about six months in jail and did not recover from his injuries, and the family had to pay $240 in bribes to secure his release, his sister Shakuntala said.

His sister also said that the police had begun harassing Ajay and his family after he brawled with some well-connected men in 2016.

“The fight got bigger and they paid the police to harass my brother,” she said. After that, the police would randomly show up at their home at odd hours, summoning Ajay to the station for no particular reason and even threatening to kill family members. In 2018, he was taken into custody, where he was maimed.

Even after that, Shakuntala said, the police would randomly pick him up at any time of the day to question him in cases he had nothing to do with. In 2021, when Ajay could no longer bear it, he ran away. His current whereabouts remain unknown.

Ajay feared both that the police would eventually kill him if he returned, the family said, and that the state’s illegal actions might push him into the world of crime. “What do you think a maim person with no job, no money will do to survive? The police have perhaps created a new criminal in the name of preventing crime,” Shakuntala said. Family members also said that the police threatened them with “bulldozer action,” a unique form of instant, illegal punishment invented by Adityanath’s government whereby the property of accused criminals is demolished, bypassing all legal procedures.

While Ajay has run away, Maqbool Khan (whose name has been changed to protect his identity), a Muslim man who was shot in his left leg in 2022, continues to live in fear of the police.

Working as a daily-wage laborer in a poor and impoverished neighborhood in western U.P., Khan faces seven counts of cow slaughter. Most states in northern India have laws either fully or partially banning the slaughter of cows, a sacred animal worshiped by Hindus. Because the majority in the butcher trade are Muslim, they have been unfairly subjected to harsh provisions of the anti-slaughter laws, especially in U.P., where the maximum punishment is a 10-year imprisonment. In 2020, the Allahabad High Court raised concerns over the frequent misuse of the law to implicate innocent people who have then spent weeks in jail without any specific allegation against them.

Khan would often find the police at his doorstep when a crime had occurred in the vicinity, whether petty or serious. However, in 2022, he recounts being brutally assaulted and threatened by a group of police officers who deliberated whether to kill him and stage it as a shootout or simply injure him. “They shot at my left leg, and I spent six months in jail. They warned me against opening my mouth before the court.”

He contested the police report, which has been seen by New Lines, that claimed he was injured while fleeing. He did not want to speak against the police in public or in court, however, because he feared that this would jeopardize his safety. Instead, he hopes the court will judge the main allegations fairly. But he is also aware that the judicial system is clogged with over 50 million pending cases.

“Maybe I will die by the time they are judged. I will then finally get to be at peace,” he said.

While victims like Khan fear reprisal from the police, some who seek help are stuck in the judicial system because of a backlog of cases, a shortage of judges and corruption.

For instance, Dilshad, a resident of the Muzaffarnagar district in western U.P., was living a modest life with his family and was known by local villagers for his gentle demeanor. This tranquility was shattered on a chilly night in 2020. The police landed at his door and forcefully took him to a nearby police station after locking his wife in a room. At the police station he was shot in the leg, he said.

Dilshad’s relative, Juber Malik, said that he had committed petty offenses in the past, such as cattle theft, and was trying to get back on the right path at the time of the shootout.

“Just because the police wanted to show how strict they were with law and order, they did this,” Malik told New Lines.

With help from local activists, Dilshad’s wife filed a complaint with the NHRC the next morning, but the watchdog group didn’t act on it until 12 days later. The members of the commission ordered the state police to send a report. They didn’t follow up with the police until a year later, and about nine months after that, they closed the case while noting that Hussain had a criminal history and had been arrested by the police.

During this period, because the family received continual threats from the police, it approached the Allahabad High Court and pleaded that it order an independent investigation into the case. But the judge instead asked the family to approach the local court for relief.

“We were devastated,” Malik said. “We were sure the lower court wouldn’t have been able to get us justice. The police would have killed him in an encounter later. At least he breathes now.”

Unlike in encounter deaths, the 2014 supreme court guidelines do not mandate that the police notify the NHRC of an encounter injury. Experts said that this leaves it up to the trial court authorities to ensure that the guidelines are followed in injury cases.

“Most often, this does not happen,” said Rajeev Yadav, the human rights activist from Azamgarh.

Grover, the lawyer and activist, said that unlike dead victims, those wrongly injured at the hands of police have other legal avenues open. “They can go to the district’s criminal court and seek a probe,” she said. But activists and victims told New Lines that they fear greater repercussions from the police if they try to take action against them.

“At least I am alive now. If I seek action against the police, they will definitely kill me,” said Khan, highlighting the pervasive fear that most victims of half-encounters live with.

These cases of police shootings and killings have put the supreme court guidelines in the spotlight, which mandate that a First Information Report (FIR) be filed immediately after an encounter. But because the guidelines are vague and do not specify who could file the complaint and be named as the accused, the police often file the complaints. In them, they designate the deceased as the accused and the complainant as one of the police officers involved in the encounter. Since the accused is dead, the police cannot file charges against anyone, so they proceed to recommend closure of the case in the judicial magistrate’s court, exploiting the loopholes in the guidelines. The officers involved are cleared of accusations and maintain a clean record.

India’s law requires the magistrate to notify complainants if the police recommend closure of their case after investigating it.

“Now this is where the mischief comes in,” Grover pointed out.

Under Indian law, it is the complainants who have the right to file a protest if they find the police’s probe to be unsatisfactory. And the complainants may argue before the court that a case needs further investigation and even bring new material to persuade the magistrate.

“But because in encounter cases, the FIR is lodged by the police itself against the deceased, the police acquire the status of the complainant, and consequently the closure of the case is not protested against,” she said. “We then have a crime, which has never been investigated, and the impunity spawns even further.”

Even if the complainant doesn’t file a protest petition, the law empowers the judicial magistrate to reject the police’s closure report and order further investigation, but that is extremely rare, which again helps the police escape judicial scrutiny.

The 2014 guidelines also require encounter cases to proceed to trial on a fast track, but almost none reaches that stage for the above reason — the trial is scuttled at the inquiry stage.

The guidelines additionally give families the option of complaining to a senior criminal court judge if they feel a probe is being sidelined. But multiple difficulties, including poverty, illiteracy, lack of legal aid, fear of police retaliation and police intimidation, deter them from availing themselves of this legal remedy.

“This is where institutions, such as the NHRC, play a critical role. They are empowered to take up cases, recommend action and even move courts to seek justice for the victims of police atrocities,” Grover said. The guidelines require the NHRC to intervene when there is “serious doubt about independent and impartial investigation.”

Human rights experts have noted the long spell of silence from the NHRC, despite human rights abuses being frequently reported in the media. For instance, suo motu (a Latin legal term meaning “on its own motion”) cases, which the watchdog can bring on its own without the need for a formal complaint, have seen a sharp decline in recent years. In 2018 and 2019, it registered 84 cases of this sort. But in 2021 and 2022, the number fell to 16.

“Unfortunately, instead of an effective institutional response in cases of human rights violations, what we observe is a checkered record of NHRC, where the response of the NHRC fluctuates with the change of guard at the helm of the NHRC,” Grover said.

Others have noted that the recently retired chairperson of the NHRC, Justice Arun Mishra, was known for his controversial judgments in favor of the ruling BJP when he was a judge on the Indian supreme court.

New Lines met a host of senior officers in the NHRC, including its secretary-general and CEO, Bharat Lal, who said it was “beneath” him and his position to “discuss such cases” when the NHRC’s failure to examine encounter cases was pointed out to him. Other officers also had no answers.

“There is an oversight mechanism in place. None of our senior officers, via whom every file passes through, found any problems. If you have found something, that’s your perception,” one of the officers told New Lines. Some other officers privately acknowledged lapses in the NHRC’s working. “You may be right. What else can I say?” one said.

There are structural and procedural flaws in the watchdog body that led the supreme court to call it a “toothless tiger” in 2017. For instance, all records obtained in cases of police killings are sent to the NHRC’s Investigation Division for analysis, which then makes a recommendation to the commission’s members that they can accept or reject. But this division mainly consists of police officers who don’t act against their own and tend to “stick like a band of brothers,” observed the supreme court.

Although the NHRC meticulously archives written records and scientific evidence in every case of encounter killings, it returns the postmortem video footage to state authorities after they close a case, which makes it extremely difficult for anyone, including the family, to obtain the footage. This in turn severely limits public scrutiny of the authorities’ actions.

In rare instances where the NHRC declares an encounter to be an extrajudicial killing and recommends corrective action, it does not follow up with the police. For instance, in the case of Furkan Akhtar (name has been changed), it recommended departmental action against an investigating officer guilty of committing serious lapses in an encounter probe. However, New Lines found that the state merely issued a warning to the officer.

In another instance, in 2017, the NHRC concluded that the death of 20-year-old Sumit Gurjar was extrajudicial and recommended that the U.P. government conducted an independent investigation into the 19 officers involved in the murder. However, the state, in its reply to an RTI query filed by New Lines, said that it did not find any officer guilty of any offense in its investigation.

Even the courts have been slow in ensuring such cases are thoroughly investigated. Petitions seeking independent investigations or actions against police officers are pending in most of the higher courts in the country. In India’s supreme court, a petition seeking a probe into all 183 encounter killings in U.P. under Adityanath is pending adjudication.

In October 2023, the state swore before the supreme court that it had duly followed its 2014 guidelines, stating that “no evidence has so far been found to blame the U.P. Police,” a claim that directly contradicts what our investigation has found. The state refuted allegations of “fake” and “state-sponsored” encounters. No substantial hearing has been held since then.

In contrast, the Global Alliance of National Human Rights Institutions (GANHRI), an organization linked to the United Nations and representing more than a hundred national human rights institutions, deferred the NHRC’s reaccreditation for the second year in a row. It cited objections such as political interference in appointments to the commission, involvement of the police in probes into human rights violations, and poor cooperation with civil society.

However, Lal, the secretary-general of the NHRC, told New Lines, “As far as NHRC working is concerned, there is absolutely no problem. … Who are the Europeans to question our police and India’s standard of human rights? We are a 5,000-year-old civilization. If it were up to me, I wouldn’t pay any attention to the GANHRI,” he said. His statement reflects the hardline nationalist fervor that has gripped India in the past decade since the BJP came into power.

To address the gaps in the supreme court’s 2014 guidelines, Madan Lokur, a former justice on the court, said that the court can “revisit its guidelines.”

“The guidelines are not written in stone,” he told New Lines. “If they require modification on the basis of experience gained, necessary changes should be made. There is nothing wrong in doing so.”

In addition to lodging complaints against the police, fast-tracking cases and suspending police officers, experts said that the supreme court must ensure that its guidelines leave no ambiguity about investigating cases, and ask for a higher level of judicial scrutiny into these killings.

Lawyers like Grover feel that the NHRC and other state human rights institutions should come to the aid of the victims and their families and that it is incumbent on lower courts to make sure that the supreme court’s 2014 guidelines are scrupulously followed when it comes to so-called half-encounters.

“There has to be a disincentive and accountability,” she said. “If there are absolutely no consequences for committing cold-blooded murders, projected as encounters, how will this impunity end?”

Most families and victims that New Lines met cling steadfastly onto hope for justice. Their plea is simple: They need an impartial investigation and unwavering support from the judiciary.

Imran Ali (name has been changed), whose brother was killed in a police encounter in October 2021, echoes the collective sentiment of families and other victims, asking, “There must be some person of integrity who will understand our pain, listen to us and provide justice, right?”

This investigation was supported with a grant from the Pulitzer Center. With additional reporting on half-encounters by Akram Akhtar Choudhary, a human rights lawyer and researcher from Uttar Pradesh.