Drawing from Agamben’s theorization of sovereign power and bare lives, we engage with the narratives of three sets of murders in the state of Gujarat. These murders in Gujarat followed a pattern—the victims were almost always Muslims and were labeled as terrorists who had come to assassinate important politicians in the state, and the police claimed that these terrorists were killed in cross-fire. We analyse the empirical material pertaining to these murders to understand the organizational and political processes that were mobilized to legitimize them. We also focus on possibilities of resistance and subversion on account of the contradictions that emerge in the mobilization of these organizational and political processes, and thereby hope to make a call for organizing social relations around anchors other than sovereignty.