Police encounter

Police encounter is the term used by the Indian Police Service or Indian military/paramilitary forces when explaining the death of an individual at their hands who was deemed by them to be a militant or "subject of interest". It refers to extra judicial killings or executions not authorized by a court or by the law. Such encounters also go by the name of "staged encounters", where weapons are added to the dead body to show cause for the killing of individual. Common reasons given for the discrepancy between records showing that the individual was in custody at the time of his encounter, is that he/she had escaped. Many encounters involve innocent people, or militants who were already in custody and were brutally tortured at the time of their alleged encounters.

The Police in Indian metro cities have a very high rate when it comes to encounter killings. Many of them have been quite controversial in nature. So far how ever no human rights group lawyer has been successfully able to prove that the encounters were staged. The fact that the dead person had a criminal background was proven beyond doubt, and the court never gave a verdict that the dead person was in illegal custody. Though highly controversial from an official point of view, there hasn't been much action taken against such activities by the Police. This is attributed to the common understanding that "staged encounters" are primarily carried out by Police to kill high profile and extremely dangerous criminals which the Indian Police Service have been unable to prosecute legally (due to lack of evidence or powerful political connections). The most notorious case has been the encounter killing of Sada Pawle and Vijay Tandel, and the court acquitted the police officer Sub Inspector VR Dhobale. See also Daya Nayak.

In recent times a number of Hindi films have been based on the theme of police encounters. The most noted of them include Ab Tak Chappan, Encounter: The Killing,Kaagar, Risk, Shootout at Lokhandwala. Vikram Chandra's new novel Sacred Games is also based on the police force in Mumbai and provides a rivetting account of police encounters.