NDTV Investigates UP's Increasing Police Encounters

Ever since Yogi Adityanath came to power in UP, there has been a dramatic rise in police encounters. Since March 2017, the police say they have engaged in 1,142 encounters - shootouts with wanted criminals - which have resulted in 34 deaths, and more than 265 injuries as of January 31. The police say the shootouts have wiped out some of the state's notorious criminals. When we examined the record of those killed, we found that in most cases, the person killed did have a serious criminal record. But questions have been raised about whether these shootouts are genuine or staged, done for glory, for political mileage, and for the bounty placed on the heads of these criminals. In the course of an investigation, NDTV examined the evidence in 14 of the 34 encounter killings to find that patterns one that raise the question whether a large number of these encounters were not shootouts but of killings by the police in cold blood.