On July 1, 2018, police entered a two-storey house in Burari, north Delhi, and found eleven members of the Chundawat family dead. Ten hanging, one strangled, with hands bound, eyes covered, mouths gagged. Investigators recovered nine registers filled with ritual instructions, documenting years of escalating practices built around the belief that a dead patriarch was speaking through his son.

Delhi Police questioned 150 people, reviewed CCTV footage, read the diaries, and within weeks arrived at a conclusion: shared psychosis, mass suicide, and then the case was closed.

What's less discussed is that nobody on that investigation had any training in cult dynamics, coercive control, or ritual behaviour analysis. The conclusion may well have been correct, but India's police force had no mechanism to properly test it, and still doesn't.

A gap, not a scandal

This isn't a story about incompetence, but it is a story about an institutional blind spot. Ritual crime is a distinct investigative category, sitting at the intersection of three specialisms Indian policing simply doesn't have: understanding how belief systems override free decision-making (coercive control), reading a death scene for ritual indicators versus genuine religious practice, and investigating cases where the line between victim and perpetrator collapses, as it does when an entire family is simultaneously complicit and controlled.

The United States built exactly this capability from the 1980s onward with the FBI's Behavioral Analysis Unit trains agents specifically in ritualistic crime, cult psychology, and coercive control, and consults for state and local police nationwide. California's police training commission produced a standing manual, a Law Enforcement Primer on Occult Crime, that gives officers a protocol for ritual crime scenes. When American investigators encounter a death with ritual markers, there is someone to call, whereas, In India, there is none.

India keeps rediscovering this gap

Burari wasn't a one-off as, in 2024, when Delhi Police encountered another family death with occult overtones in Vasant Kunj, they said they'd study the Burari case for guidance, a tacit admission that the only precedent available was an unresolved 2018 file, not a specialist unit. In 2022, a Kerala couple confessed to murdering two women as human sacrifices on a self-styled tantric's instructions; the case was handled through standard homicide protocols, with little systematic effort to investigate the wider belief network or other potential victims. Cases of sexual abuse conducted under the guise of tantric ritual surface regularly across the country, and require an understanding most officers simply aren't given: how to tell genuine practice from predatory exploitation of it, and how to interview victims conditioned to see abuse as spiritually necessary.

Each time, police default to standard protocols built for ordinary crime, and either over-read the case as occult conspiracy or under-read it as unremarkable crime with irrelevant religious trimmings. Both failures are costly.

The law hasn't caught up either

The Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023 covers murder, abetment, and criminal intimidation, but has no framework for establishing when participation in a ritual that ends in death was truly voluntary or the product of years of psychological conditioning. Several states have Prevention of Witch Practices Acts, but these laws criminalise an outcome without giving police any investigative methodology to act on it. Article 25's protection of religious freedom is essential, but it also means untrained officers, unsure where legitimate practice ends and criminal coercion begins, tend to either overreach against ordinary religious groups or back off from genuine cult crime out of caution. A trained specialist can make that distinction professionally.

What would actually close the gap

Three concrete steps, that as follows,

First, the CBI should stand up a Ritual and Cult Crime Analysis Unit, modelled on the FBI's BAU, staffed with forensic psychologists, behavioural analysts, and scholars of Indian religious traditions, available to state police as a consulting resource rather than a takeover squad.

Second, the Bureau of Police Research and Development should build a mandatory training module on ritual crime indicators and coercive control, the Indian equivalent of California's primer, folded into state police academy curricula.

Third, the BNS should be amended to name coercive psychological control within religious or cult settings as a distinct offence, much as the UK's Serious Crime Act 2015 did for coercive control in domestic settings, giving prosecutors a statute that actually fits cases like Burari, where the harm is conditioning rather than force.

Burari was much bigger than a documentary

The Chundawat family had been escalating their rituals for over a decade. Neighbours knew something was unusual, though none of it triggered intervention, because nothing in India's policing framework is built to recognise the moment religious behaviour tips into criminal coercion. When the deaths came, investigators reached a conclusion with the only tools available to them, and that may have been the right conclusion. We will likely never know, because the investigation capable of properly testing it never happened.

Burari became a true-crime sensation instead of a policy turning point. The next case like it is already unfolding somewhere in India. Whether anyone will be equipped to investigate it properly is still, seven years later, an open question.

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