For me, the most revealing moment in Delhi Crime arrived a day or so
into the Netflix series’ recreation of how the Delhi Police apprehended the six
men later charged in the December 16, 2012 rape case. In director Richie
Mehta’s screen version, a man called Banke Lal arrives at the Vasant Vihar
police station to tell the cops that at about 8.30 pm on December 16, a little
before the rape took place, he had boarded a similar white bus from Munirka Bus
Stand, been attacked and robbed of his phone and wallet by the six men on
board, and thrown out of the bus near the IIT overpass.
“Had I landed on my head, I’d be dead,” says Banke Lal.
“Why didn’t you report it that night?” asks Vartika Chaturvedi, the
senior cop in charge of the case, played by Shefali Shah.
“Who would I have complained to? I was asking everyone for help, no one
listened,” Banke Lal replies. “I managed to borrow a phone from a passing auto
driver and called my brother, who told me to come home. I figured, what would
the cops do? It was only when I saw the news that I realised that this had to
be the same gang.”
The sequence ends with Chaturvedi thanking Banke Lal for coming to them
and asking for another case to be filed against the same suspects. She then
goes out of the room, leans against a wall as her right-hand man Bhupender
(Rajesh Tailang) wonders if there might be other victims to be found.
“If he had made a complaint that same night, maybe we could have
prevented this,” responds Chaturvedi.
“We don't know that,” says Bhupender. “Ismein hamari kya galti hai?”
“Try saying that to Deepika,” says Chaturvedi, half swallowing her
words.
As I watched the sequence, I couldn’t stop thinking about the fact that
we live in a country in which a citizen who has just been robbed, beaten up and
thrown off a bus can respond to his predicament with “What could the police
have done in this?” It seemed to me to offer an involuntary glimpse of
something the show appears to take entirely for granted: that we as a citizenry
have so little faith in our police force that we don’t go to them for help,
even when we’re victims of an act of targeted violence and robbery, bang in the
middle of the country’s capital.
Then, as I sat down to write this column, reliving my own memories of
December 2012, as all Indian women who watch it will do, I remembered that
there had indeed been such an incident. A man had been robbed on the night of
the gang rape, by the very same men, aboard the very same bus.
It didn't take much looking up online to find reports. What I found in
them was distressing. The Times of India reported on December 23, 2012, that
three constables from the Hauz Khas police station had been suspended for their
failure of duty when approached on December 16 by one Ramadhar Singh, who had
been picked up “from RK Puram Sector 4 by the six gang rape accused, and robbed
and dumped near IIT”.
The report continued: “The three cops were on patrol duty around 8.15pm
when they were approached by Ramadhar. He had told them that he was robbed and
that he had lost his mobile and, hence, cannot call 100. The cops, however,
told them they were from the Hauz Khas police station and he needs to go to
Vasant Vihar to register a case. They neither sent out a wireless message to
track the bus nor had they informed Vasant Vihar cops about the incident,” said
a source.”
I describe this incident in such detail not to make the point that the
heinous gangrape that would end up making Delhi the notorious site of frenzied
international attention was preventable. That may be true, or it may not. The
“what if” that it becomes on the show is easily voiced — and almost as easily
dismissed. Richie Mehta’s version is so insistent on showing Delhi Police in
good light that he simply erases the inconvenient truth that the victim of the
robbery did in fact try to report it and was turned away by cops. It then
absolves the police of even the glimmer of responsibility by making his female
cop protagonist have a moment of guilt, that can, however, be painted as
emotional, even irrational — since in Mehta’s version the onus is on the
citizen who didn’t come to the police earlier.
In many ways, this is transparently the position the show takes: it
makes the police the put-upon heroes, under-appreciated figures whose valiant
efforts to fight crime while being enormously understaffed and under-budgeted
are not appreciated by a thankless citizenry. All we ever see are good cops
being treated badly. The DCP who hasn’t gone home for three nights is taunted
by a judge as being someone who spends her time at parties and has probably
never been to a crime scene. Children in a posh South Delhi school regurgitate
their parents’ assumptions about the cops being corrupt. In a less monied
class, too, Bhupender tells Vartika that he hides his job from any prospective
in-laws he’s meeting because “no one wants either a dosti or dushmani with the
police”.
Vartika chastises Bhupender for not seeing that a family that doesn’t
respect his job will not “protect his daughter”. But the larger issue, the fact
of why a city of 20 million people has a relationship with its police force
that is one of “Best if we never have to deal with them” rather than “They will
help us get justice”, is never really discussed. When we get unwitting glimpses
of the reasons why — such as when some constables on duty taunt and torture the
not-yet-convicted suspected rapists, driving three of them to attempt suicide —
it is not treated as an abuse of power, but simply as something strategically
unfortunate that happens.
But surely if the police in Delhi and in the rest of India are assumed
by the man on the street — and even more so, by the woman on the street — to be
not just professionally incompetent, but a power-seeking, corrupt and
potentially malign class of people that is best avoided, there must be some
reason why. Surely the answer cannot be the one Mehta provides by
ventriloquising the ex-police commissioner Neeraj Kumar, who is a consultant on
Delhi Crime: that it’s every other constituency who’s wrong — the politicians,
the media, the judiciary, ordinary people, students — and the police who are
right.
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