बेबाक · Editorial
Encounters, overreaching agencies and the courtroom police forces keep bypassing
When an accused dies in an encounter 'while escaping', or an agency tries to act as its own prosecutor, it is due process that has been shot at, and India cannot afford to cheer.
What has happened
Recent reports from Assam and Karnataka share one theme: law enforcement working around the process meant to restrain it. In Assam, Sivasagar police arrested Ghanakanta Gogoi, an accused in the Guwahati hotel firing case, on Tuesday in a 2024 bank fraud case. This came hours after a court in Guwahati had remanded him to judicial custody, once seven days of police remand in the hotel firing case had ended. He has since died in what police describe as an encounter while trying to escape. In Vijayapura, Karnataka, police shot at Sameer Mulla, the prime accused in the murder of Yaseen Zuberi. Their account is that he fired at a police team with a country-made pistol and tried to escape arrest. Separately, the Karnataka High Court has held that the Enforcement Directorate is not a 'super cop', quashing ED cases against the MLA from Malur.
The core tension
The question is not whether these men are guilty. That is for courts to decide, and none of these reports records a verdict. The question is who holds the authority to punish, and on what terms. A court in Guwahati had placed an accused in judicial custody, a protective status, and within hours he had been arrested by another police unit; he is now dead. The Karnataka High Court has ruled that the ED cannot file a private complaint when other agencies decline to act on its information about alleged offences. In both cases, a decision that belongs to an independent authority was pre-empted by an enforcement arm. One is a death, the other a prosecution, and the gravity is not comparable. The logic, though, is shared: the agency decides first and the system is asked to ratify later.
The strongest case for the police
The other side deserves its full weight. Officers who confront armed suspects face real danger. If the Vijayapura account holds, a man who opens fire with a pistol cannot expect officers to hold theirs. Prosecutions can collapse, witnesses can turn hostile, and trials can stretch on for years. Many citizens therefore see swift force as rough justice in a system that too rarely delivers the smooth kind. The ED, likewise, can argue that credible leads it passes to other agencies are sometimes left to languish. These frustrations are real and widely felt. But they describe a broken justice system, and the remedy for a broken system is repair, not a parallel one run by whoever carries the gun or the summons.
What the evidence shows
The police accounts in the Gogoi and Vijayapura cases remain, so far, the only accounts, and they should be treated as contested until independently examined. The 'trying to escape' explanation is familiar enough to warrant scrutiny every single time, not acceptance by default. Meanwhile, the same week's reports expose where policing actually falls short. In the Rajajinagar murders in Bengaluru, neither a patrolling vehicle nor a checkpoint detected the accused, Indushekhar, even as he crossed State borders while bodies were moved across locations. A police force that cannot detect an accused crossing State borders, yet keeps finding reasons to open fire on the men it is trying to hold, has its priorities inverted. By contrast, the Hyderabad Traffic Police booked 4,197 motorists for using mobile phones while driving during a week-long special drive from November 1 to 7. That is unglamorous, lawful, preventive enforcement.
The way forward
Every death or firing involving an accused in custody or under arrest should trigger an automatic, independent inquiry. It should be conducted by an authority outside the force involved, with the findings made public within a fixed period. Any fresh arrest of an accused who is in judicial custody should be reported to the court that ordered that custody, with reasons recorded. Central agencies should treat the Karnataka High Court's ruling as a boundary, not an obstacle. If other agencies refuse to act on credible information, the answer is a statutory mechanism for review, not self-authorised prosecution. And State governments should measure police performance by detection, checkpoint integrity and conviction rates, the work Rajajinagar shows is missing, rather than by the drama of the encounter.
A police force that cannot detect an accused crossing State borders, yet keeps finding reasons to open fire on the men it is trying to hold, has its priorities inverted.
What this editorial rests on
Drawn from our live multi-newsroom feed — read the reporting at source.
An editorial is the considered opinion of the Aad Tak desk, argued from the sourced reporting above and written under our published persona, बेबाक. We name institutions, not parties. If we are wrong, we will say so. How we work →