Khaki Confidant

Richie Mehta humanises the police in Delhi Crime, his new series on Netflix

- Priyanka Bhadani

December 16, 2012. Delhi. A 23-year-old woman was raped and brutally attacked in a moving bus while she was returning after watching a movie with a male friend. The friend, too, was assaulted. While the girl fought for life in Safdarjung Hospital, the public raged in protest; the Delhi Police raced against time to capture the six culprits.

Seven years later, Delhi Crime, a seven-episode Netflix series conceptualised and directed by Indo-Canadian director Richie Mehta, captures the Delhi Police’s investigation into the crime. Mehta was in Delhi at the time and was shaken by the incident. “It was not something that could be taken personally. It was an attack on everybody in a way, I believe,” he says. “Nobody could get the facts straight. You do not know what source to go to. And then, by evening, it was on every news channel. That is when you realised what had happened.”

Everyone wondered how it could happen—the mechanics of it, the morality of it, the ethics and the power. “The anger comes from within you. How can we let this happen? I was thinking what I would have done. How much do you intervene—do you get killed? It becomes like the Medusa complex. Do I not walk on the streets where this could happen?”

It was complicated. For Mehta, the feelings culminated on New Year’s Eve 2012, when he went to Jantar Mantar and saw six effigies hanging from a tree. “That was the most chilling thing [I had seen],” he says. “This was not as a filmmaker, this was as a person. You do not know what to do with it. It just sits in a swirling space.”

That visual, now, has found an apt place in the series climax.