In 30 Seconds
The word encounter entered Punjab’s vocabulary as a description and left it as a euphemism. In the official record of the insurgency, thousands of militants died in armed exchanges with the security forces, and many of those exchanges were exactly that: firefights in the sugarcane and the border villages between armed men and the police hunting them. But threaded through the same record, and eventually documented by courts, the CBI, and the testimony of policemen themselves, runs the other kind, the staged encounter, in which a man already in custody was executed and a battle written afterwards. Distinguishing the two kinds, and refusing to let either erase the other, is among this series’ most necessary tasks.
The Anatomy of a Real Encounter
Nothing in this article should suggest the shooting war was fiction. Punjab Police and the paramilitary forces fought a heavily armed insurgency at close quarters for a decade, and their casualty rolls, more than 1,700 police dead, with families often murdered alongside, testify to battles that were entirely real. The hunting of the militant leaderships in the endgame years, the interceptions along the border, the raids on hideouts that ended in exchanges of automatic fire, fill the era’s newspapers and the force’s honour rolls alike, and the villagers of the Majha, who heard the firing, needed no press note to know it happened.
The Anatomy of a Staged One
The staged encounter had its own recurring signature, reconstructed from case after case in litigation and investigation: a man detained, often witnessed by family or neighbours; a period of unacknowledged custody; then a police account of an exchange of fire at some remote location, a body, a recovered weapon, and a cremation as unclaimed before the family could reach it. The CBI’s Punjab investigations of the late 1990s and after, ordered by the courts in the cremations matter and in individual cases, confirmed the pattern in specific instances, and a number of prosecutions, some ending in convictions of police personnel decades later, established judicially what the affected villages had said all along. Former officers, in testimony and memoirs, described the mechanics candidly: pressure for results measured in bodies, head money that rewarded a corpse over a prisoner, and the certainty that a militant released or acquitted, as TADA’s collapse rate promised, would return to kill the arresting officer’s family.
The Numbers Problem
How many of the era’s encounter dead belong in each column is a question the Indian state has never permitted to be answered. Official casualty statistics for the insurgency, running past twenty thousand dead in aggregate with militants counted in the thousands, do not distinguish battle from execution, and no commission was ever constituted to audit them. The scale of the second column is indicated rather than counted: by the 2,097 illegal cremations the CBI verified in three Amritsar district grounds alone, by Khalra’s extrapolation of many thousands statewide, examined in the following articles, and by the volume of individual cases in which courts, decades on, ordered compensation or convicted policemen after finding the recorded encounter false. Estimates therefore range widely, and this journal reports the range rather than choosing within it, because choosing without evidence is what both partisan camps have done for thirty years.
What the Euphemism Cost
The staged encounter did not merely kill men; it corrupted the record by which the war would be judged and the institutions that fought it. Honest officers who fought real battles were draped, unasked, in the impunity that shielded executioners, and the force’s genuine dead were conscripted posthumously as justification. Villages that might have credited the state’s necessity learned instead that its paperwork lied, a lesson with a long half life. And the judiciary, confronted for decades after with cases in which the state’s own account was fiction, was schooled into the scepticism that still marks encounter jurisprudence across India, from Manipur to Mumbai, where the Punjab pattern’s descendants have been litigated since. Punjab counted its dead in categories designed not to be audited. The remainder of this batch follows the men and women who audited them anyway.
