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The prohibition on torture and arbitrary killing is among the few human rights norms recognized as absolute, admitting no derogation even in emergency, yet custodial violence remains routine, systemic, and largely unpunished across much of the world. India records thousands of deaths in police and judicial custody, with prosecutions vanishingly rare, revealing a machinery of impunity in which investigation, prosecution, and adjudication all fail the victim. The pattern is not confined to isolated abuse; it reflects a structural logic in which certain populations are governed through the constant possibility of violence. Giorgio Agamben's account of the state of exception illuminates this terrain: the sovereign capacity to suspend the ordinary law, to designate zones and persons where rights are held in abeyance, and to render that suspension permanent and normalized rather than temporary. Anti-terror legislation that permits prolonged detention without charge, the extrajudicial killing reframed as "encounter," and the emergency power that never lapses all instantiate this logic. Majoritarian politics sharpens it further, as the machinery of custodial and emergency power falls disproportionately on minorities, the poor, the lower-caste, and the dissenting, transforming the exception into the everyday experience of the marginalized. What makes the phenomenon analytically demanding is precisely its legal camouflage: violence authorized, procedural, and cloaked in the vocabulary of security and order, which places it beyond the reach of the accountability mechanisms designed for aberrant conduct. The central questions concern how impunity is institutionally produced and sustained, how emergency powers migrate from exception to norm, why majoritarian democracies prove especially prone to custodial abuse, and whether any domestic or international mechanism can pierce the protective architecture that shields the violent state from consequence.