These are hard times for the ‘encounter’ specialists. A leading practitioner was shot dead by his own clandestine business partner in Gurgaon on the outskirts of Delhi. Three of his counterparts in Mumbai are under suspension for possessing assets disproportionate to their incomes or for deaths in custody. Another is under a cloud in the Khwaja Yunus disappearance case.

In better days, they were the darlings of the urban middle class in whose perception they assumed larger-than-life proportions. Popular Hindi cinema even went to the extent of glorifying their exploits on screen. All this adulation made them reckless, leading them later to the inevitable denouement.

The same public that once looked up to them for deliverance from the dreaded world of extortionists and contract killers now understood that they had turned into criminals in uniform. The same police leadership — that out of desperation leaned heavily on these specialists for relief from the public pressure at its inability to subjugate the underworld — now tried to distance itself from these men.

Take the case of Daya Nayak, an Udipi restaurant worker, who was recruited as a sub-inspector of police and posted to Mumbai. His derring-do soon earned him a slot among the encounter specialists. Name and fame followed. The film fraternity, equating money and fame with status, began inviting him to dinner parties, where the commissioner of police was also a guest. This misplaced egalitarianism emboldened Naik to accuse his boss of corruption when he himself was caught for acquiring assets totally disproportionate to his known sources of income. This only shows that these specialists soon outgrow their boots.

... contd.