Killing on Live TV Renews Alarm About India’s Slide Toward Extrajudicial Violence

When the police in India’s largest state put a notorious mobster-politician’s associates in their sights, they unleashed a take-no-prisoners campaign that at times mirrored the brutality of their underworld targets, who had been implicated in a brazen murder.

In three separate raids, officers in the state of Uttar Pradesh shot dead four of those associates, including the mobster-politician’s son. The deadly “encounters,” as such apparent extrajudicial killings are called in India, won praise from the state’s leader, Yogi Adityanath, a hard-line Hindu monk who is seen as a potential prime minister.

Members of Mr. Adityanath’s Hindu nationalist governing party and loyal broadcast media outlets echoed the praise, but also posed a prodding question: Why had the mobster-politician himself, Atiq Ahmed, who was already serving a life sentence and had 100 other cases pending against him, been spared a similarly abrupt and bloody end?

That came on Saturday night.

Mr. Ahmed, along with his brother, was fatally shot at close range on live television as the two were being taken by the police to the hospital for what had been described as a routine checkup.

The three assailants — one of whom extended his arm in front of an officer’s face to fire the bullet as the gun touched Mr. Ahmed’s head — rained several rounds of bullets into the two men and continued firing after they had crumpled to the ground, before officers in a 17-person security cordon stepped in to tackle them. As they were taken away, the attackers repeatedly shouted “Jai Shri Ram” — hail to the Hindu lord Ram. Afterward, two state ministers described the murders of the two Muslim mobsters as akin to divine justice.