News channels are televising footage of former lawmaker Atiq Ahmed getting out of the back of a police jeep only to be shot mere seconds later by a group of men posing as journalists. It was all over in less than a minute-that’s how long it took to murder Ahmed and his brother, that too by Hindu nationalists who couldn’t wait to start chanting religious slogans the second their fingers hit the trigger. Ahmed, a convicted criminal, had previously expressed concern that there was a serious threat to his life, but his petition for security was rejected last month by the Supreme Court. He was surrounded by police at the time of his death. Why is it then that they weren’t able to act on time, and intervene the second the assailants revealed their motives? Death in custody is one thing, but murder inhabits a world of its own. It isn’t lost on us that Uttar Pradesh, where Ahmed was killed, is a BJP stronghold, and his death was likely a security lapse, unveiling a dark and murky track record of police incompetence in the state. If the police can’t protect the people in their custody, we can only imagine how they’d respond to a threat against civilians. Ahmed’s son was killed just a few days ago in a police encounter, the third of its kind in the first two weeks of April alone. Since 2017, 180 people in UP have been killed in police encounters, which are just staged confrontations that almost always end with the police coming out unscathed. Critics have also raised questions about the sectarian nature of these crimes, but they are never investigated as such, because that would mean admitting that minorities have never had a leg to stand on in UP. Police violence is symptomatic of a larger malaise-that is, the legal system’s tendency to treat criminals as less than human beings, especially in UP, where the chief minister himself has given his yes-men the green light to do whatever they want. Does a criminal not deserve to be treated humanely, or are their lives simply less valuable to the police, particularly when they are Muslims? *