Justice By The Gun

With nearly 4,000 shootouts between the police and gangsters in the past two years, Uttar Pradesh has become India’s encounter capital. THE WEEK looks at the changing face of policing in the badlands of western UP.

- Namrata Biji Ahuja

At 2.30am on June 17, 2017, a special police team led by Ajay Pal Sharma, IPS, entered a dense mango orchard in Uttar Pradesh’s Shamli district. Sharma was senior superintendent of police in Shamli, and he had received a tip-off that a fugitive with a 050,000 bounty on his head had turned up at Bhabisa village to plan the killing of a businessman.

The fugitive was Vipul aka Khooni (murderer), a tag he earned after he decapitated a victim. There were nearly two dozen murder and extortion cases against Vipul, the most notorious ones being the killing of a woman grampradhan in Saharanpur and a bank robbery in Muzaffarnagar. The police had also identified him as one of the two motorcycle-borne assailants who had shot dead local BJP leader Raja Valmiki outside his shop in Khatauli, Muzaffarnagar, in April 2017.

Sharma’s tip-offwas that Vipul would take a concrete road that ran through the orchard to travel to the nearby Hurmajpur village. The police team’s plan was to ambush him.

A police team of this kind usually has five or six policemen led by an SSP or SP. There would be surveillance and intelligence experts and marksmen, all prepared for any eventuality. That night, though, Sharma’s team had to improvise. Vipul and his gang spotted the police and opened fire. The gunfight lasted an hour and a half, during which Vipul was shot in both legs; two constables were also injured. Vipul is now in Meerut jail.