The Nirbhaya gangrape was a tear jerker which shook the souls of humanity. This harrowing re-enactment is much more than a police procedure. In Episode 2 of Delhi Crime, a series on Netflix of March 22, police officers start a crucial interrogation. The gang-rape suspect blurts the details once the screws are tightened. He confesses that there was indeed a gang rape and the details of the crime is sure to make a human being squirm. Chief investigating officer Vartika Chaturvedi, played by Shefali Shah, deputy commissioner of police (DCP), South District, asks the trainee IPS officer Neeti Singh played by Rasika Dugal to slap the convict. Neeti refuses and she is repelled by the thought of touching the psychopath.
The male station house officer (SHO) is disgusted as Neeti and spits on the criminal. These manifestations of rage and repulsion underscore the gender dynamics besides humanizing the police force in a manner that is usually not done in the conventional glamorized screen depictions.
Delhi Crime is written and directed by the Canadian filmmaker Richie Mehta and it is gritty, grim, and grounded. It is a detailed account of the real-life investigation in the December 2012 gangrape that seared the nation’s conscience y showing the condition of the cops on the ground. One has a foot infection and limps, another has a back problem while the third has a sick wife to take care of. Leaving all their problems aside, the force shrugs off their discomfiture and plunges in solving the Nirbhaya case.
The seven-episode series unravels the ways by which the six perpetrators gets nabbed in five days and brings justice to the woman who was a fighter till the end. Though there is nothing hidden about the case- what the series portrays is the lack of safety for women in a city that annually records 11,000 heinous crimes. It exposes the uneasy issues of an understaffed force and a jurisdictional tussle between the Union home minister Gururaj Dixit (Avijit Dutt) and the state chief minister Sanjeev Goswami (Sanjiv Chopra), with the police commissioner Kumar Vijay (Adil Hussain) caught in a game that is best not played. The actual crime is not shown but when the camera focuses on the anguish on the faces of the girl’s parents outside the hospital’s emergency ward that the sheer horror hits home. The act has been described a couple of time by the prime accused, then by the Safdarjung Hospital surgeon and then finally by the survivor who is hardly audible in the presence of a magistrate. Each is as heart rendering as the other.
Mehta has done in depth research by adhering to the smallest of details from the police files to correctly portray the horror and the emotional trauma of the brutalized girl. Mention has to be made of the cast who top- notch performance has ensured that there is no dearth of thrill in the series.
