Spoilers ahead
Delhi Crime’s season two, which is currently streaming on Netflix, aims to provide an honest picture of the capital’s police force. However, in an attempt to cover a complex topic empathetically, the creators fail at both fronts – they lack the empathy to tell the story in a manner that centers the marginalized and they lack the awareness (or courage) to actually deliver on their key message. While the show underlines the issue of the police’s understaffed and overworked nature, it does nothing more and the talents of its brilliant cast seem to have achieved nothing of substance.
What has policing meant in India?
Policing in India is, essentially, an archaic activity. There might not exist a more obvious fact than this one. While some form of public management and administration has been a part of the sub-continent’s history for centuries, today’s police, is a product of the colonial rule. In fact, the forces in Khaki find their origins in the police commissions of 1860 and 1902. For an imperialist power to manage its colony, efficiency is paramount, and one way to ensure efficiency is to reuse existing systems. Policing, like other forms of governance, also relied on norms and practices that were already in place. One such set of norms was the caste system.
Simply put, instead of dismantling the caste system, the Britishers utilized it for ease of governance, often borrowing diktats and presumptions that were casteist in nature. Primarily, the practice that a caste’s descendants perform the same occupation led our colonial masters to assume the same about ‘professional criminals’. This assumption formed the key tenet that led to the establishment of the Criminal Tribes Act of 1871. The Act’s core thesis was the existence of communities that were labeled as habitual criminals and were considered to be “addicted to the systematic commission” of offenses. Basically, the system presumed complete tribes to be ‘habitual criminals’ and followed a process of policing by caste.
What followed has had its effects trickle down over the centuries. While the Act was repealed, officially, in 1947, the colonial policing structures and methods have retained its core tenets. Simply relisted as denotified tribes, or DNTs, these ex- “criminal tribes” have continued to form our current police force’s premier modes of identifying potential suspects. Additionally, multiple committees that have been set up for identifying and “mainstreaming” these tribes have failed to support them economically or socially. In fact, the Renke Commission report, of 2008, highlighted how these communities become “almost invisible, and the ‘mainstream’ communities, governments virtually lost sight of them.”
In this invisibilizing environment, it was quite a change of pace to witness a popular Netflix show trying to tell the story of these tribes. The show relies on the extremely talented Shefali Shah, a plethora of moving supporting actors, and a nerve-racking cinematography. At its center is the Kacha-Baniyan gang – a group of undergarments-donned individuals who executed a series of robberies and home invasions in 90s and early 2000s, but some of whose members were also recently arrested in 2016.
In this second season, the show tries to achieve a progressive goal, but fails at it in two significant ways. Firstly, the show fails on the grounds of empathetic storytelling. It ignores the social location of its protagonists and delivers a lesson that finds its basis in the savior complex. Secondly, the show also falls flat on its ability to drive home the one lesson it seems most aware of, that criminals are not born, but made.
The hangover of the savior complex
While the show’s intentions at telling a buried story displays some form of goodwill, I feel it fails to overcome its savior complex. The show’s plot follows the typical recipe of covering the lives of the marginalized in Bollywood:
- Step 1: Introducing the marginalized
It all begins with a depiction of the oppression faced by the marginalized group. For the purposes of Delhi Crime’s season 2, this refers to the DNTs, as they are so commonly called on the show. Their history of being criminalized by the Brits is brought up by multiple characters to establish their marginalized status for the viewers.
- Step 2: Establishing a protagonist
The next step of this savior recipe usually involves introducing our protagonist – be it Ayan Ranjan (Ayushmann Khurrana) in Article 15 or Vartika Chaturvedi (Shefali Shah) in Delhi Crime – who, most probably, does not belong to the marginalized community in question.
- Underlining the protagonist’s sainthood
Next comes the task of highlighting our protagonist’s good nature, usually by portraying them against an archaic standard. For our show, this took the shape of veteran inspector Viren Chaddha, a retired SHO, a pension-seeking mansion-owner, who doesn’t flinch at relying on his casteist and, in Vartika’s words, “bigoted” instincts. The show portrays Chaddha as belonging to the outdated cadre of officials who are now unacceptable. In contrast, DCP Chaturvedi, our protagonist, is shown to be progressive and above the biases of the past.
- Turning the protagonist into the Protector
The last step includes creating a plot that enables our beloved protagonist, who, by now, is seen as an outsider to the bigoted system, to protect the marginalised people. This last step provides the viewers, who are much more likely to relate with Vartika than the people belonging to DNTs, with a form of self-gratification. It gives us a sense of superiority that we, through the protagonist, did the right thing.
Although this is an overused and, by now, a lazy trope in mainstream ‘modern’ shows, it lets the creators display their progressiveness under the garb of protection. And it lets us, the audience, feel good at our favorites’ actions on screen. Delhi Crime does this in no hidden ways. The third episode of the season ends with Inspector Bhupendra Singh (Rajesh Tailang) dropping off the two suspects (who belong to a DNT) back to their slum. By having the suspects tell the inspector: “Ye gaadi na aaj tak khaali uthane hi aayi hai humesha. Chhodne pehli baar aa rahi hai” (“This police car has always only come to pick us up. This is the first time it has come to drop us off”), we, the audience, are made to feel proud of Singh and applaud Vartika for doing the right thing.
Through this exercise, we are easily made to forget the fact that it was the same police team that had, a mere episode ago, supported Chaddha in fully executing his casteist practices, often through the same people who are “like Vartika’s own family”. We are given single shots of Vartika’s concerned face throughout the ordeal, telling us how our empathetic protagonist is deeply moved by whatever is happening. In the first two episodes, it is the same Delhi police that rains havoc on a Shahdara slum, arresting tens, if not hundreds, of men, women and children without cause and later torturing them in Mrs Chaturvedi’s own station. The consequences of these actions are never seen. Instead, using a lawyer, who also belongs “to a tribal community”, the creators provide our darling protagonists with a clean chit.
We are forced to accept that no matter what these custodians of justice did, no matter their reliance on a casteist retired officer, and no matter their use of brute force, their good intentions and their acceptance by the “community” rids them of all their sins. It is self-praise of the highest order, bordering on arrogance and pure impunity.
Does Vartika observe or does she just see?
My second criticism of the show is aimed at its poor conclusion. I argue that besides putting Delhi’s cops on a pedestal, it achieves nothing. Bear with me for a minute. The first episode of this season begins with a monologue that seems to be right out of an Arundhati Roy novel and, frankly, it was this monologue that got me hooked to the season in the first place. Over an aerial night shot of Delhi’s constrained roads and dingy apartments, we hear DCP Vartika Chaturvedi utter the following words:
“One-third of Delhi’s population lives in unauthorized slums and serves the elite. The elite, who earn the highest per capita income in India. Aise shehar ko police karna pecheeda kaam hai, voh bhi ek understaffed force ke sath. Afterall, we can’t police the lifestyle of the wealthy, nor the aspirations of the less privileged. Is sangharsh mein kabhi kabhi aise gunaaho aur gunehgaro ka chehra dikh jaata hai, jo hamari samajh ke baahar hota hai.”
(“One-third of Delhi’s population lives in unauthorized slums and serves the elite. The elite, who earn the highest per capita income in India. Policing a city like this is a complex task, and for an understaffed force at that. After all, we can’t police the lifestyle of the wealthy, nor the aspirations of the less privileged. Sometimes, amidst this conflict, we encounter criminals and criminal activities that are beyond our comprehension.”)
In a film industry where police films are made only to display the cops as one-dimensional characters who would go to any length to arrest the criminal (Singham, Simbha, Dabangg, Rowdy Rathore – I can go all day), Vartika’s insight into the social conditions of a crime is unexpected, to say the least. It introduces us, the viewer, to her informed outlook towards policing, which, thanks to its understaffed nature in Delhi, faces a challenge like no other. By locating a criminal and a criminal activity inside the conflict between the slum dweller and the elite, the show’s creators signal to us that Vartika might not be an ordinary cop. While existing viewers might already know that, this shot helps establish her maturity in an archaic system immediately for season 2.
As the show progresses, we also see Vartika question Chaddha, a retired casteist SHO, even going to the extent of calling him a ‘bigot’. Although she never really acts against him in any substantial manner, her opposition in itself is supposed to signal her maturity. After it is done glorifying the Delhi police at the end of episode 3, the show picks up pace in another direction, taking us through the tough lives of the ‘real criminals’ – be it Lata’s life as a beauty parlor employee or Guddu’s life in a dilapidated house. After Lata, the sole gang member at the end of the show, is captured, the creators even go to the extent of further underlining her desperation – highlighting her forced motherhood, her frustration as a housewife, her need to fulfill her dreams, and her failure at winning the elite’s support. In an iconic piece of acting between Tilotima Shome and Shefali Shah, the season sets the ground to deliver the message it began with – crimes in a city like Delhi are born out of an economic need.
Gritting my teeth and clenching my knees, I wait for Shefali to articulate this, in the same way that she spells out other more obvious details of the show for the viewer. But, this end never comes. In fact, the creators, for some reason, also don’t wrap up the show there. They choose to backtrack on any social insight by making Vartika call up the first victims’ daughter – the same victim that had denied Lata the economic support she needed. On being asked by the daughter: “Why did she (Lata) do this?” Vartika says, “Unfortunately, we seldom understand why people commit these kinds of crimes. The criminals can’t explain it when we ask. It haunts us. But there are no answers in the eyes of a killer.”
By denying Lata the truth that Tilotima articulates so beautifully in the last 10 minutes of the season, the show undoes its entire arc, and commits the same injustice that the mainstream cop movies have committed over the years. It ends up locating the intent of the criminal in the hidden, burying the economic reality of their actions, and absolving the society, at large, of being an accomplice.
In the end, what remains is Vartika alone, her superiority as an ace and vaguely empathetic cop, and her future, which consists of a transfer to a remote location. To me, this might be the only reality that the show reveals at the end – that of a mildly good cop being transferred.