6 min readOct 30, 2026 07:18 PM IST First published on: Oct 30, 2026 at 07:18 PM ISTWhen two men in the custody of the West Bengal police were killed this week within 24 hours of each other, the accounts of the deaths were identical: Each accused was taken to the crime scene for a “reconstruction”, where he snatched a service revolver and fired, and was then killed in retaliatory fire. Prahlad Das, 23, accused of raping and murdering a 17-year-old in Gaighata, was taken out near midnight; Samaul Sheikh, 40, an undertrial in the murder of a BJP worker, was taken by the CID to Dhulian that afternoon; and at Baruipur in July, Prabhas Mondal had died in the same fashion.The repetition is the form the encounter now takes as a technique of governance. This mirrors Michael Taussig’s public secret: A story nobody is asked to believe and everybody is asked to accept. The government’s reply that the police had explained themselves confirms that the explanation was never meant to persuade — only to be recognised as the ritual of turning a killing into an incident.AdvertisementThe law is settled; compliance has become paperwork that follows the body to the morgue. PUCL v State of Maharashtra (2014) requires an FIR, an investigation independent of the officers involved, a magisterial inquiry and notice to the human rights commission for every encounter death; Jwadder v State of Assam (2025) called fake encounters extra-judicial killings and ordered independent inquiry into their pattern; Section 196 of the BNSS mandates a judicial magistrate’s inquiry into every custodial death. None of it impedes the killings, because the inquiry is now part of the choreography, following the shooting as predictably as the snatched revolver precedes it.There is a disturbing candour in the West Bengal government’s claim to executive impunity. The Chief Minister, who holds the home portfolio, said on Tuesday he had told the Assembly the police have “complete freedom” in “cases involving drugs and in cases of abuse against any daughter, sister, elder sister, or mother,” and the “police minister” would stand beside them “as a shield”; as opposition leader he had promised such men would be “deposited in the morning and spent in the evening”, and the phrase has now been honoured three times. This is a theory of the state in which Article 21 is suspended by announcement, with the announcement certifying its own lawfulness, whatever is said of legal means and constitutional oaths.Also Read | The brief uncomfortable honesty of ‘Prahaar’The licence is claimed in women’s name, and kinship locates them: Daughters, sisters and mothers, men’s kin whose avenging restores male honour — not persons with rights, including the right to the investigation and trial of violence against them. The protectionist state and the patriarchal family share an idiom, and the encounter substitutes the accused’s death for the trial that accountability requires. The Verma Committee set up after the protests over the December 2012 gangrape rejected the death penalty and located deterrence in certain investigation and trial; the women who reclaimed the night after R G Kar demanded exactly that, and the institutions they indicted now recast their demand as authority for midnight reconstructions. Of 2,454 rape cases registered since May, no one asks how many have a forensic report, charge sheet or trial date — because the encounter stages a response so investigation need never be discussed. Prahlad Das’s mother, who said her son deserved punishment but not death in this manner, stated the constitutional position more exactly than anyone in office.AdvertisementSarsuna, where the city police walked three men through their neighbourhood in shorts, roped at the waist, to “reconstruct” their stripping and parading of an eighteen-year-old, his friend and his father over a kiss, shows state and mob converging on sexualised humiliation of the body. Nakedness as punishment runs from the Mahabharata’s disrobing to the Kuki women paraded in Manipur in 2023. It stays gendered even when applied to men, feminising the body it exposes. The police, answering a family’s shaming with an official one, adopted the practice rather than punishing it — defying the Supreme Court rulings of 1980 and 2014 on handcuffing and parading and the Calcutta High Court’s June direction that the police may arrest but not exhibit.you may likeSet alongside the Chief Minister’s warning that those who share posts the government deems false will face police action, these events reveal a regime that kills, humiliates and regulates what may be said of either. It displaces the human-rights frame requiring independent investigation of every custodial death, with the state being the only witness to its own conduct. Bengal’s genealogy runs from the 11 men shot at Barasat in 1970 through Archana Guha’s torture at Lalbazar to Anis Khan’s death. The instrument passed intact between governments — May changed the party, not the police.Reform must sever the relation the Chief Minister celebrates, as Prakash Singh (2006) intended, through security commissions, fixed tenures and complaints authorities that were never seriously constituted. Accountability calls for a murder FIR in each case investigated by an agency outside the state police, a judicial magistrate’s inquiry with published findings, and a protocol barring reconstructions at night, without restraint or without a camera. A government asking to be judged on sexual violence should be judged by convictions secured, not bodies produced, and the trial denied to Prahlad Das and Samaul Sheikh should now be demanded for the state.The writer is an advocate at the Calcutta High Court