Fake encounter

The fake encounter, also known as an encounter killing, is the practice by which Mumbai police officers execute suspected gangsters in staged shootouts, claiming the victims fired first and were killed in self-defense. Throughout Mafia Queens of Mumbai, this extrajudicial killing method recurs as a central, defining feature of the city's underworld, a shadowy instrument of state power that shapes the fates of gangsters and, most poignantly, the women who love them. The book presents the fake encounter not as an aberration but as a systemic practice, one that the women of the underworld must navigate, mourn, and in some cases, strategically outmaneuver. It is the mechanism by which the state attempts to control organized crime, and it is the source of some of the book's most devastating scenes of personal loss and grief.