Comparative Legal Perspective and Criminological Report of Infamous Serial Killers from India

Serial homicide to me resembles a two-edged sword in the world of criminology. The media love to be talking about it and we can find headlines and films that make it super scary. However, inside the universities and among the police departments it is still an under-researched topic, at least outside the West. In the US and the UK, there are no end of studies, books on profiling and special teams of detectives that study serial killers whereas in India, the whole area is rather patchy. We have little information, and it is usually only brought up when a serial murderer is apprehended. This is strange, keeping in mind the fact that India has a long history of repetitive murders that go back to the pre-colonial period. Serial killing does not just originate in the west. Ritual strangulations were a form of organised homicide performed by the Thuggee cult in central and northern India which existed for several centuries as ritual homicides, with a single individual, such as Behram, being said to have murdered over 900 by hand. Following independence, there were criminals like Raman Raghav that plagued the working-class neighbourhoods in Mumbai in the 1960s and many more. Despite that continuity, serial homicide in India is considered to be series of random spikes and not as a patterned crime phenomenon which is to be studied in a systematic manner. Indian criminal law does not recognise “serial homicide” as a separate substantive offence and instead, serial killers were prosecuted under the generic homicide provisions of the IPC, 1860. This doctrinal choice has important implications for the way in which courts conceptualise culpability, the way in which data is recorded and the way in which statutory implementation gaps come to light in cases of multiple murders.