Two months after the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) made history by winning its first majority in India’s West Bengal state, a horrific crime has thrown the region into chaos, reigniting long-simmering public anger over failures to protect women and children.
The tragedy unfolded in Surjyapur village, located in the Baruipur area on Kolkata’s outskirts, when an 11-year-old girl left her home Saturday afternoon to purchase a birthday gift for a friend and never returned. Her family filed a missing person report with local police at 8:30 p.m. the same day, but law enforcement dismissed their urgent plea, saying they would launch an inquiry the following morning. Frustrated by police inaction, the girl’s relatives and local residents reviewed closed-circuit camera footage from nearby shops on their own, identifying the child walking alongside Prabhash Mondal, a local resident of the village.
Early Sunday, a crowd of villagers gathered at Mondal’s residence, detained him, and turned him over to police custody. Hours later, investigators recovered the girl’s body from a nearby pond, with local media reports confirming Mondal led officers to the exact location of the remains. A post-mortem examination determined the child’s cause of death was drowning, leading her family to insist she was still alive when dumped in the water — and would have survived if police had responded immediately to their report. “Had the police acted earlier, she could have been saved,” the victim’s relatives stated publicly.
In the hours after the body was recovered, public fury boiled over into widespread violent unrest across Baruipur. Protesters vandalized public roads, local shops, and a regional railway station, leaving three separate police cases registered and 40 people detained. In a tragic turn of violence, an innocent young man was beaten to death by the angry mob, a fact later confirmed by West Bengal Chief Minister Suvendu Adhikari. Multiple police officers were injured, and dozens of vehicles were damaged as officers worked to regain control of the area. To prevent further unrest, authorities have implemented a ban on public gatherings and deployed hundreds of additional police and paramilitary forces to the tense region.
Less than 24 hours after Adhikari visited the victim’s family to promise swift justice, Mondal was killed in what police described as a justified encounter shooting. In an official statement released Wednesday morning, Baruipur police said Mondal was being taken to the pond to reconstruct the crime scene as part of the investigation when he attempted to grab an officer’s service weapon and opened fire on the law enforcement team. Officers returned fire, striking Mondal, who was pronounced dead after being rushed to a local hospital. Shockingly, Mondal’s own mother publicly disowned her son following his death, refusing to claim his body and saying he deserved his punishment. “My son has been punished for what he did. I will not accept his body, I will not even bring his body home,” she told news agency ANI.
Three other men suspected of involvement in the crime remain in police custody, and charges have been filed under India’s Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act, the country’s harshest legislation for child sexual abuse crimes. The case has also raised alarming questions about potential police negligence, and a local BJP politician has been dragged into controversy after accused of aiding the suspects. Sushant Mondal, whose home was attacked and ransacked by an angry mob, has denied all claims, asserting he actually assisted in catching the perpetrators. The incident has also threatened to escalate along religious lines: the victim was from the Muslim community, while the three men arrested are Hindu, stoking sectarian tensions in the already volatile region.
The horrific crime has quickly snowballed into a major political firestorm for the new BJP government. Opposition parties have slammed the administration for failing to deliver on its core campaign promise of making West Bengal safe for women and children. Political analysts note that the BJP’s historic May election victory — which ousted three-term incumbent Mamata Banerjee and her Trinamool Congress party — was partly fueled by public anger over Banerjee’s poor handling of the rape and murder of a junior doctor at a state government hospital, a case that also centered on failures in women’s safety.
Critics, including human rights activists and opposition leaders, have also questioned the legitimacy of Mondal’s encounter killing, arguing it violates fundamental rule of law principles. Ranjit Sur, a leader with the Association for the Protection of Democratic Rights, called the circumstances of the death suspicious, noting a familiar pattern in extrajudicial police killings across India: the accused almost always tries to snatch an officer’s weapon before being shot dead. The 2026 West Bengal killing echoes a 2019 incident in Hyderabad, where four men accused of raping and murdering a young woman were killed in a controversial police encounter that sparked national debate over extrajudicial justice.
So far, West Bengal police have not held any public press conference to address the growing list of allegations against the force. In response to the mounting pressure, the state government has formed a special investigation team (SIT) to lead a full inquiry into the child’s death and the allegations of police negligence surrounding the case.