Lucknow, May 4: “Want to be a cop? Fine, but don’t copy Salman ‘Dabangg’ Khan”.

Rights activists in Uttar Pradesh today warned of a growing tendency among state police to model themselves on the supercop in Dabangg played by Salman Khan after the government was forced to pay compensation to the family of a man killed in an alleged encounter.

Police last week paid Mohammad Yakub’s family Rs 5 lakh following an order from the National Human Rights Commission, which rapped the department for the “illegal execution”.

Senior officials said it was the the rights body’s worst criticism of the state but conceded in private that films like Dabangg were “adding to the image of a cop as a high-handed executioner”.

In the film, which broke several box-office records after its release last year, Salman plays Chulbul Pandey, a no-holds-barred cop who busts criminal gangs and breaks into a jig with equal swagger.

For the state’s police, however, Chulbul, a cop who operates in the heartland’s Barabanki district, has been a “bad role model”, said former IPS officer S.R. Darapuri, now vice-president of rights organisation PUCL.

“The police in the state are imbibing a bad role model of police as portrayed in films like Dabangg or Ab tak Chhappan,” Darapuri, who retired as inspector-general of police, told The Telegraph.

However, unlike Ab tak Chhappan, a 2004 film that revolves around a Mumbai police encounter specialist, Dabangg was released after the alleged encounter that killed Bulandshahr resident Yakub.

So while Dabangg couldn’t be linked with the January 2007 “encounter”, what both Darapuri and the rights activists meant was such a film could be a bad example for cops in the state, where the film is set.

That the warning isn’t misplaced is evident from the state’s human rights record.

Uttar Pradesh tops the list of rights violations for 2009-10.

According to an NHRC document, of the 78,657 rights violations registered by the panel across the country between December 1, 2009, and October 31, 2010, Uttar Pradesh accounted for 46,917. Delhi came next with 5,498 cases, Bihar accounted for 2,742, Rajasthan 2,456 and Maharashtra 2,191 cases.

As for complaints against the cops, the National Crime Records Bureau says as many as 6,015 complaints were received against Uttar Pradesh police in 2009, the third highest after Delhi and Madhya Pradesh.

After Dabangg’s release, some district police chiefs in western Uttar Pradesh told their subordinates at a meeting not to copy Chulbul Pandey.

“If any inspector is found violating the law in dealing with suspects, he will face action, we told the officers in unambiguous terms,” state additional police chief Brij Lal said.