By Omar Rashid ,
New Delhi: Ever since Adityanath took over the chief minister’s post in Uttar Pradesh in March 2017, police have shot dead 190 persons in incidents of alleged exchange of fire that the state terms as “encounters”. During the same period – March 2017 to September 2023—the police in UP also shot and injured 5,591 persons in these incidents.
The high number of people shot by the police reflects the normalisation of the phenomenon.
Releasing the above figures at the Police Smriti Diwas (Police Commemoration Day) event in Lucknow, Adityanath said the “highest priority” of his government was to strengthen law and order in the state, create a sense of security among the public and instil “the fear of the law in criminals”.
While the government flaunts these “encounter” killings and shootings as a hallmark of its “zero tolerance policy” against crime, human rights activists have regularly questioned these operations and called them staged killings rather than spontaneous shootouts. The police claim they shoot people only in retaliatory self-defence, a theory that is often under the scanner due to the similarities in the sequence of events and doubtful details of the alleged encounters.
In Lucknow, Adityanath also said that since March 2017, 16 police personnel had been killed while 1,478 were injured in these operations.
The BJP government has also in an unrestrained manner used the provisions of The Uttar Pradesh Gangsters and Anti-Social Activities (Prevention) Act, 1986 against alleged criminals. The law, which allows the administration to designate people as gangsters and seize their property, has been at the heart of the Adityanath government’s policing tactics even though the Allahabad high court has on a few occasions expressed concerns that the state was misusing the Act. Opposition parties and activists have often accused the government of using the law to settle political scores, intimidate opponents and harass ordinary citizens. The BJP government has regularly invoked it against not just people designated as “mafia” but also opposition party MLAs and leaders.
The numbers speak for themselves.
On Saturday, Adityanath announced that ever since he came to power, the administration had slapped the Gangsters Act against 69,332 persons and the National Security Act against 887 persons.
The UP Gangsters Act, as it is better known, defines a gangster as a member or leader or organiser of a gang and includes any person who abets or assists in the activities of a gang. According to the Act, a gang is a group of persons who act either individually or collectively by violence or threat or show of violence or intimidation or coercion with the object of disturbing order or gaining any undue temporal, pecuniary, material or other advantage for himself or any other person. Section 14 of the contentious Act empowers the district magistrate to attach properties of alleged gangsters.
This story was originally published in thewire.in. Read the full story here .
