Indian police shoot hundreds of alleged cow smugglers in the legs

Police in Uttar Pradesh, India's most populous state, have shot hundreds of suspects accused of cow smuggling in the legs in near-identical incidents, an Associated Press investigation has found. The Washington-based Center for the Study of Organized Hate compiled records of nearly 650 such shootings since 2020, shared exclusively with the AP, which independently reviewed a sample of more than 200 cases. In case after case, the bullet struck the same part of the body: the leg, most often just below the knee.

Over 90 percent of the injured suspects in cow-smuggling-related shootings with identifying information were Muslim, according to the center's analysis of 627 cases. Muslims make up roughly one in five of Uttar Pradesh's population. State police data obtained by the AP shows that from March 2017, when Yogi Adityanath — a Hindu monk-turned-politician from Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party — took office as chief minister, through October 13 of this year, 316 suspects were killed in police encounters, 110 of them Muslim. Over the same period 12,890 suspects were injured. The count almost certainly understates the total, since it draws only on incidents police themselves publicized.

The tactic is known locally as "Operation Langda" — Operation Lame — and has spread to other Indian states and to other alleged crimes including theft and rape. Police present the shootings as self-defense against fleeing suspects who opened fire, part of Adityanath's "zero tolerance" crime policy. But a forensic medicine professor in Uttar Pradesh, Dr. Mohd Kaleem Khan, told the AP that a bullet passing horizontally through a fleeing person's calf without hitting bone would be highly unlikely, particularly at distance — such wounds suggest deliberate shots fired at close range. India has a long history of "encounter killings"; some activists argue police have shifted to shooting to injure, in "half encounters," precisely because it sparks less outcry.

Senior police official Amitabh Yash said officers are instructed to respond only in self-defense, that there is no order to aim at the leg, and that he would investigate the injury pattern if an appropriate complaint were lodged. He noted that in the last year there has been no reason to punish any officer for inappropriate use of force, and said the high proportion of Muslims among injured cattle-smuggling suspects reflects their prominence in the cattle trade. Human rights lawyer Mangla Verma's assessment is shorter: "Instead of investigating, police kill or injure a person and justice is done."

The state's own numbers show 316 dead suspects and 18 dead officers in eight and a half years — and no punished officer.