Soon after Asad Ahmed, the youngest son of gangster-turned-politician Atiq Ahmed, was shot dead in an encounter with the Uttar Pradesh Special Task Force in Jhansi, sections of social media were replete with posts celebrating his death.
Most of the mainstream television media also came together to cheer on the extra-judicial killing; while there was a modest effort to maintain sobriety on some channels, the tone for the most part remained congratulatory.
This hardly came across as a surprise though, as for the last few weeks, news channels had been single-mindedly egging on the state machinery to do ‘justice’ in the matter of Atiq Ahmed and his many alleged crimes.
For days on end, prime time television dog-whistled vulgar euphemisms for his death; star anchors kept asking if the police van carrying Atiq will ‘overturn’, something which infamously happened in the case of Kanpur gangster Vikas Dubey around three years ago. On Thursday, it was as if their call for blood had finally been answered.
Later in the day, Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath lauded the efforts of the STF and praised them over the encounter. His office communicated that a ‘report’ on the encounter was placed before the Chief Minister.
Notably, the communication made no mention of any first information report having been registered against the concerned police personnel, something which is the first standard procedure for investigation in matters involving death due to police encounters under the law propounded by the Supreme Court in 2014.
One would wonder that a violent incident which took place against this murky a backdrop would spark outrage amongst the civil society and stir relevant stakeholders such as, say, the constitutional courts. But where transgression of law is a regular affair, illegality becomes banal.