Nestled deep into the shadowy casts of the rustic monuments of Agra, in March 2026, a child aged seven years went missing. According to reports, the child was last seen playing in her neighborhood, and because she did not return, there ensued a frantic search. Within hours, the focus of the investigation shifted to one particular man. He was known to the family, being one of their tenants in the same locality.
The following morning, the body of the child was recovered inside a flour container in the tenant’s room. The details were gory; the throat of the child had been slit, and there were tell-tale marks of sexual assault. Evidently, the brutality of the crime, combined with the fact that the perpetrator was known to the family, fueled the public’s anger.
“Agra Mein Haivaan Karne Wala Kaand – 8 Saal Ki Bacchi Ki Hatya.” Navora.
The investigation into the crime also seemed to be moving at a rapid pace. The perpetrator had fled the scene, which in itself said a lot about his guilt. It is believed that the perpetrator had attempted to flee the scene to escape being caught; the case seemed complete to the public. It is important to pause here and say:
Crimes of this nature are the most heinous ones. They are transgressions against a person’s soul and denigrates a human being’s existence. They cannot be explained away, they are not mitigatable, and they are, quite definitely, not something that can be softened through context or theory; they are among the gravest violations conceivable.
And, it is precisely because of all of these things that what happened next is so difficult to reconcile.
(“Agra Murder Accused, Who Killed 8-Year-Old Girl and Hid Body in Drum, Shot Dead in Police Encounter; Officer Injured, Probe into Motive Continues,” News Arena India)
Within three days of having committed the crime, the accused was located by the police. According to official reports, he was intercepted by the police as he attempted to flee the scene of the crime. While they were intercepting the accused, he allegedly opened fire on the police officers, injuring a sub-inspector. The police retaliated by firing back at the accused and eventually managed to kill him at a hospital to which he had been taken.
This narrative is familiar- there is a culprit, there is a crime, and most importantly, there is a consequence. Persuasive, to say the least.
And it must be admitted that while surveying cases such as these, wherein the crime in question is so horrific, so viscerally intolerable, that the mind seeks resolution. The spin of events appears coherent, and the outcome feels proportionate. Coming back to our established notion that crimes of such terrifying violence are unjustifiable- to insist on due process is not to weaken that stance. Rather, it is to take it seriously.
Legal theory has long ordered the adage- certainty is not equivalent to proof. The presumption of innocence goes far beyond functioning as procedural gizmo; the notion that a suspect is innocent until proven guilty by the court is a structural device that has been put into place in order to keep the effect of belief out of the legal process.
The man who was believed by all and sundry to have committed one of the most heinous crimes possible in a legal context was never actually declared guilty in a legal context. If the court is the only institution that wields the power to convict and castigate, then I maintain that it is a mandate of enduring necessity that a suspect be taken to court and interrogated, cross-examined, and arraigned as such. All this begs the question- if this legal process has been bypassed, then what is the nature of the result? Is it a consequence brought about by fact or, is it a consequence of affective certainty that has come about due to the alignment of cause, effect, narration, and plausibility? And if it is the latter, then is such confidence sufficient to justify death?
To understand how this operates, it is helpful to look to Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish argues in which he illustrates that modern legal systems emerged as a way of displacing the immediacy of sovereign violence. The spectacle of punishment is thereby substituted with an interdependent network of procedures and processes which scatter power appropriately. Punishment in this framework is no longer an act of direct domination but the result of a suitably enduring process.
Encounter killings disrupt this transformation.
Foucault, in the aforementioned work states, “The judges of normality are present everywhere. We are in the society of the teacher-judge, the doctor-judge, the educator-judge, the ‘social worker’-judge; it is on them that the universal reign of the normative is based; and each individual, wherever he may find himself, subjects to it his body, his gestures, his behaviour, his aptitudes, his achievements.” Therefore, we as “judges of normality”, desert the courtroom and it in turn, forgoes judgement because it has already been delivered everywhere else by everyone else.
The condensing of time characteristic of encounter killings can perhaps be described as juridical simultaneity: the time of suspicion coincides with the time of execution. And yet, by its very nature, the law does not allow for such simultaneity. The law requires delay, and an absolute belief that first and sense impressions and experiences may not be credible. And yet, in this phenomenon of “encounter killings”, all room for such delay ceases to exist.
Another facet of this event that perhaps deserves closer scrutiny: the factor of public perception. Why does this event seem so believable? Why does the story of the encounter seem not only credible but also so profoundly satisfying? Perhaps the most plausible answer to these questions is to be found in the so-called economy of outrage. The crime of sexual violence, particularly involving minors, evokes such powerful feelings that these feelings seem to need some sort of resolution. Public perception here is not clarity: it is convenience. The encounter feels believable not because it is proven, but because it spares us the discomfort of doubt. Outrage does not lead us to truth; it pushes us past it. What feels like justice is often just sweet, addictive and unassuming relief.
In the context of encounter killings in India, the Stanford analysis provides the concept of the posthumous trial by media; it delves into an analysis of “fake encounters”, and notes that this method became a “preferred quick-fix” for dealing with a wide range of individuals—from gangsters to alleged terrorists—often collapsing vastly different categories of people into a single class of “encounterable” subjects.
Death is final - the individual is no longer alive to contest the narratives. Only one version is possible. It is possible to propose the idea of epistemic closure, which is a situation wherein the individual is no longer perceived as having the possibility of being different- no narrative allows room for an alternative. But history is replete with examples wherein individuals who were perceived to be guilty were subsequently proved to be innocent. Or wherein the circumstances surrounding the crime were far more complex than initially perceived. The Ishrat Jahan Encounter Case involved a 19-year-old woman who was killed by police and labelled a terrorist; later investigations by the Central Bureau of Investigation found that the encounter was staged and that the victims had likely been killed in custody. In the 2009 Dehradun Encounter Case, a young man named Ranbir Singh was shot dead by police who claimed he was a criminal; subsequent court proceedings revealed the encounter to be fake, and several police officers were convicted for murder. The Badaun Case was reported as a gang rape and murder of two girls. However, the investigation by the Central Bureau of Investigation later concluded that there was no evidence of rape and suggested the deaths were suicides, though the case remains debated. These instances are not the exception; they are the rule.
At this point, a common and yet compelling counterargument must be made: the legal system is a slow process. Trials take years to conclude. The victims and their families have to wait for an inordinately long period of time before justice is delivered. In cases of heinous crimes, this is not only an inefficient process but also an unjust one. From this point of view, the encounter is a corrective measure; it is a means of restoring equilibrium to a system that is not only inefficient but also unjust. But this argument is based on an important assumption: speed and justice are equivalent concepts. They are not, and to conflate the two would be to risk placing the value of a decision into instancy and not accuracy. Therefore, the need of the hour is not an abandonment of the system but its reform- better forensic equipment and procedures, stringent witness protection, and more precise investigations.
The Agra case, therefore, is not merely a case of whether the accused is guilty. If justice matters, then so does the process- without it, all we have is our two cents. For the moment conviction stems from conviction, we stop proving guilt and start assuming it.