Thane: A sense of déjà vu prevailed on Monday evening, as news of the accused in the Badlapur sexual assault of two minors, Akshay Shinde, being shot dead in an alleged confrontation with the police broke. The details were eerily reminiscent of an equally sensitive and heinous crime committed in 2019 – the gangrape and murder of a 26-year-old veterinary doctor in Hyderabad by four accused, and their subsequent killing in an ‘encounter.’
Shortly after the incident, Maharashtra Chief Minister Eknath Shinde, giving a sound bite to the news media, said that the accused was being taken to Thane from Taloja Jail when he snatched a police officer’s service weapon and opened fire, injuring the cop. The other police personnel in the team opened retaliatory fire and Shinde was rushed to the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Hospital in Kalwa, where he succumbed to his injuries.
In the Hyderabad gang rape and murder case, too, the Cyberabad police had claimed at the time that the accused quartet was gunned down while trying to escape while being taken for a reconstruction of the crime scene exercise. In the Badlapur sexual assault case, what comes to mind is the government’s attitude so far. It is now public knowledge that there was an undue delay in filing the FIR. Even more serious was an allegation made by a woman journalist, who stated that a leader of the Eknath Shinde-led Shiv Sena had said she was covering the case “as if she herself had been raped”.
All of this contributed to a heavily negative public sentiment against the state government, and history bears witness to the fact that the easiest method of quelling rising public anger has been to bump off the accused in an encounter. Immediately, the tide shifts in favour of the establishment for “cleaning up the filth of the earth”, the cops become heroes and earlier sins are erased. Encounter specialists of yore thrived for years on this same sentiment, as did the Cyberbad police after the 2019 encounter.
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