The word encounter — neutral in standard English, meaning a chance meeting or clash — has acquired a distinctly Indian legal and political identity over decades, effectively becoming a euphemism for the extrajudicial killing of suspects by police. A recent incident in West Bengal has once again thrust the term into the national spotlight, reigniting long-standing debates over rule of law, due process, and accountability.

The West Bengal Case That Revived the Debate

The West Bengal government has assigned the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) to probe the 'encounter' killing of one of the four individuals accused in the alleged rape and murder of a 12-year-old girl at Baruipur in South 24 Parganas district. The CID has been directed to submit a formal report. The case has drawn sharp attention to how suspects die in police custody before courts can determine guilt — and whether such deaths are ever truly the result of armed confrontation.

How the Term Took Root in India

Linguists and historians of Indian policing trace the word's transformation to the late 1960s, with its unique meaning firmly embedded in the lexicon by the mid-1970s. The rise of Naxalism in West Bengal, marked by daily reports of violence and bloodshed, is widely credited with giving the term its altered meaning — even entering the Bangla language. News reports of the era routinely carried phrases such as 'killed in encounter', implying an exchange of fire with activists or criminals who could not be subdued and were eliminated in self-defence.

The term spread beyond West Bengal as police forces in cities including Mumbai, Chennai, Kolkata, and Ghaziabad reported a high frequency of such incidents from the late 20th century onward, according to widely cited accounts. Some killings were celebrated publicly; others were later found by investigators to have been staged.

The Daya Nayak Chapter

No figure better illustrates the encounter phenomenon than Daya Nayak, a Mumbai Police officer who earned the epithet 'encounter specialist' during his tenure in the late 1990s and early 2000s. He reportedly led around 86 police encounters against hardened criminals, including noted gangsters and terror elements, making him one of the most prominent figures in the Mumbai Police. His operations were documented in books and depicted on screen. His career, however, was not without controversy — he faced corruption allegations and a prolonged suspension before being acquitted and reinstated, eventually retiring from service.

What Dictionaries and Legal Bodies Say

The shift is now formally acknowledged by major lexical authorities. The Oxford Learner's Dictionaries lists, under a parenthetical note reading 'Indian English', the definition: 'an incident in which police shoot dead a suspected criminal.' The Cambridge Dictionary defines encounter broadly as an unexpected meeting or an unpleasant experience, while Merriam-Webster includes 'a sudden often violent clash' among its meanings.

According to widely cited reference material, encounter killings are described as a euphemism used in India and Pakistan to refer to extrajudicial killings by security forces, with officers typically describing incidents as shootouts — often allegedly initiated when a suspect reaches for an officer's weapon. It is also noted that police officers are occasionally killed in such incidents, though relatively rarely.

The Rights Concern and What Comes Next

Human rights organisations have long cautioned that normalising the term erodes due process. Critics argue that when 'encounter' becomes shorthand for a desirable outcome, institutional incentives shift away from investigation and trial toward immediate lethal resolution. High-profile encounters have, in some states, bolstered political careers; in others, subsequent inquiries exposed staged shootings and custodial abuses.

The transformation of the word is, as observers note, not merely a matter of linguistic drift — it is social and political, reflecting decades of tension between law enforcement imperatives and constitutional guarantees. With the West Bengal CID inquiry now under way, the question of accountability in encounter cases is once again before the public and, potentially, the courts.