n the night of April 15, a posse of policemen was escorting Atiq Ahmed and his brother Ashraf to a hospital in Prayagraj in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh (UP). Atiq Ahmed was a gangster and a former elected member of the UP assembly and Indian parliament.

Ahmed was brought to Prayagraj a month earlier in March for interrogation in several cases. He and his brother were produced in a local court for sentencing in a kidnapping case when the incident occurred.

Television cameras captured the killing in full view and carried it live. The brothers were handcuffed to each other at the time. As Atiq Ahmed answered a question posed to him by a journalist, a hand pointed a gun at his head. The shots were fired in quick succession. Live television in India had never seen anything so horrific and dramatic.

The incident took over the media-scape as snippets of video reels of the killing went viral to cater to morbid curiosity of a people.

It reminded me of Saigon Execution; a photograph that changed the course of the Vietnam War. In 1968 a photojournalist had captured the precise moment when Brigadier General Nguyen Ngoc Loan shot Nguyen Van Lem, a Vietcong prisoner, in his frame. The still image diffused with multiple reprints around the world to emerge as an iconic representation of the brutality and nihilism of the war.

It seemed as if the pathology of a “normal” state apparatus was playing itself out in front of the camera. Kyle Grayson, in his book Cultural Politics of Targeted Killing: On Drones, Counter-Insurgency and Violence, parses out, “how the current social relations prevalent in liberal societies contain the potential for targetted killing as a normal rather than extraordinary practice. Assassination and targetted killing embody cynegetic relations of power that separate the predator from prey.”

But the incident in India was not an event in a war. The killing on live television in India tells “a story not only of impunity but also of a fumbling police force caught clueless - as citizens conduct their own encounter,” as an editorial in an Indian publication put it.

Other editorials followed suit to define, substantiate and question the killing. Talking heads on television had a field day polarising the narrative that some contrived to suit the ruling party. In their bid to shuffle the news agenda from the previous day’s explosive interview with former Jammu and Kashmir governor Satay Pal Malik by Karan Thapar, published in an Indian newspaper, some of the spin masters spoke of these killings as something to be celebrated and justified.

A lot has changed, and a lot remains the same since news value became a subject of debate. Today, the story is not about whether the video was disturbing. The real question here is whether television had any role to play in shaping a society that found it acceptable to repeatedly consume such violence. Constant exposure to such brutality only coarsens us. It numbs the society and makes violence acceptable.

We all know that in a highly saturated mass media world of live-streaming and social media the conventional wisdom is that violence sells.

As an organisation working for media literacy puts it, “Violent content costs less to export, it costs less to translate, and it has way fewer problems being picked up by markets in different cultures than ours. As a language, violence is easy to understand and requires little context in order to present a plot.”

This is nothing new. By the end of the Cold War, journalist Eric Pooley had coined the phrase “if it bleeds, it leads,” in pursuit of ratings in the advent of 24-hour news television.

The event is reminiscent of the time of the cold-blooded murder of a man in his car at a traffic stop in St Paul, Minnesota, in the summer of 2016. The victim’s friend, who recorded the episode on her camera phone streamed it live on Facebook and later posted the 10-minute video on YouTube.

One may point to another instance in March 1991, the infamous Rodney King tape which went viral for the first time in history. George Holliday, a local businessman in Los Angeles had shot that tape on his handheld camera.

Holliday had filmed the gruesome beating of the taxi driver, Rodney King. The Rodney King Tape sparked the 1992 Los Angeles riots a year later when the four officers involved in the brutal beating were acquitted of all charges.

In the white noise on the Indian media what got lost was the ethical question about telecasting a killing live on television.

In 2015, a similar question was posed when two television journalists, 24-year-old reporter Alison Parker and 27-year-old photographer Adam Ward, were shot and killed during a live broadcast in Virginia.

When asked about watching such live telecasts, Randy Cohen, a former ethics columnist for the New York Times Magazine, said “It’s tricky, because there’s a thin line between viewing something to increase your understanding of your world and the human heart and wallowing in it — you know, when does education become pornography? I’m not suggesting that we should avert our glances from every disturbing fact of life. On the other hand, if you find that you regard human suffering as a form of entertainment, I think something really bad has happened to you.”

Talking of killing and a photographic frame, one cannot but mention here Polish filmmaker Krzysztof Kieslowski. Originally made for Polish television in 1988, Kieslowski’s loose commentaries on the Ten Commandments, Dekalog series, out of which two were extended into feature films; A Short Film About Killing and A Short Film About Love.

A bleak and depressing reality is not the backdrop but the foreground. Based on the commandment, ‘thou shalt not kill’ the film tells a tale of killings; not one, but three.

It tells us the story of a young adolescent Jacek who kills an innocent taxi driver for no reason. Subsequently, he is tried and executed by the state for the crime.

The film narrative and cinematography sucks in the undiscerning viewer and puts them in the midst of unfolding drama. It is a complex indictment on all forms of killings - in this case: an unsuccessful suicide (killing by self), a gruesome murder (killing another human) and capital punishment (killing by the state).

Such was the powerful impact of the film that it led to the suspension of capital punishment in Poland. Unlike Kiesloswki’s films, Indian television now functions at the level of the real, mythic and historical.

Television is now emerging as a site similar to a concentration camp where viewers “are reduced to bare life as they are exposed to the sovereign’s power over life and death.”

French philosopher Michel Foucault conceptualised power over life, in the notion of biopower - “the right to make live and let die.”

The realities of bare life, where sovereign power does not extend to protect individuals, are pervasive at the site of the killing as much as on television.

To borrow from Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, there is a new space of contemporary politics in which individuals are no longer viewed as citizens but are now seen as TV inmates, stripped of everything, including their right to live and feel.

Narendra Pachkhédé is a critic and writer who splits his time between Toronto, London and Geneva.