#NewReport: A new investigation by the Center for the Study of Organized Hate (CSOH) and
@AP exposes a disturbing pattern of police shootings targeting Muslims over allegations of cow smuggling in India’s Uttar Pradesh state.
Known as “half encounters,” these shootings often involve people being shot in the legs, leaving many with lifelong injuries.
We documented 645 such cases involving 772 victims since 2020. Nearly 93% of those injured were Muslim. Across hundreds of encounters, people were shot in strikingly similar locations, often just below the knee.
Since 2017, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) came to power in Uttar Pradesh, 12,890 people have been injured in police shootings across the state. The state government has not publicly released a religious breakdown of those injured.
We shared our findings exclusively with The Associated Press, which independently reviewed more than 200 cases and interviewed affected families, police officials, and experts.
The evidence collected on hundreds of shootings clearly shows that the state institutions, particularly the law enforcement, are increasingly being used as the vehicles for the persecution of Muslim minority. This appears to have evolved into a bureaucratization of persecution, where policing increasingly seems to appear to be intertwined with majoritarian politics.
Read the full investigation:
