Law Enforcement in India - Encounter Squads

Encounter Squads

The Mumbai Encounter Squad is an unofficial group within the police force of Mumbai, India. It consists of several high-profile officers from the Detection Unit. The squad primarily deals with members of the Mumbai underworld and other criminal gangs and carries out the elimination of criminals. At one point it was headed by Pradeep Sawant.

The Mumbai police's Crime Branch is controlled by Joint Commissioner of Mumbai Police, and has a force of approximately 1500 officers. The Detection Unit at the Crime Branch is considered most important, as it deals directly with the underworld and terrorists. Fourteen units, including the Crime Intelligence Unit, and the Fingerprint Unit, work with the Detection Unit. The expertise of Detection Unit is used controlling Mumbai underworld and Gang-wars.

This is a tit-for-tat technique used by the Indian police to kill those criminals who use loopholes in justice system to escape justice. Considered as Men of the Moment—created by the police around 1997 to deal with the growing extortion demands and threat calls to builders, realtors, businessmen, Bollywood denizens—and also the bloodbath spilling over onto Mumbai streets as a result of inter-gang wars—the encounter policy was heavily dependent on men such as Nayak and Sharma. But they were just two members of the five four/five-man squads created with the blessings of then deputy commissioners of police Satyapal Singh and Parambir Singh, who had the task of gathering information about the underworld and cutting it to size.

The squads soon came to be associated with "encounters", a euphemism for a situation in which a gangster is cornered, asked to surrender, ostensibly attacks the police or tries to escape, and is shot dead in retaliatory action. As the encounters increased, so did the popularity of the "encounter specialist". Daya Nayak, Pradeep Sharma, Ravindra Angre, Praful Bhosale, Raju Pillai, Vijay Salaskar, Shivaji Kolekar, Sachin Waze and Sanjay Kadam became cult figures, mythologised by the media and hero-worshipped by the common man. "In fact, through 'Encounters' which are now known as 'Police Operations', they and their key men like Police Inspector Daya Nayak and Sachin Waze have wiped out the underworld from Mumbai and neighbouring Thane district."