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FAIRLY EARLY in the new season of Delhi Crime, Vartika Chaturvedi, the famed DCP at the heart of the franchise, is referred to as ‘madam’, a departure from the hybrid ‘madam-sir’ title she carried till now. It’s a slight change but a telling one: although still clad in uniforms, the characters, it appeared, were becoming less dependent on crude identifiers. They were letting loose. But six episodes in, the ease transpires to something flaky that ends up generalising the cops at the expense of familiarising them.
This upends Delhi Crime – a rare procedural drama that earned its identity through the distinctiveness of the officers rather than the uniqueness of cases. Across the first two seasons, the crime was a mirror that magnified the ills of the nation but, more lucidly, highlighted the humanity — blind spots included — of the officers in charge. Since its onset in 2019, Delhi Crime explored a city that erred too often and the bastions of law that felt too much. But by the third season, the geographical and ethical centres are reduced to footnotes in service of a sprawling new season that goes everywhere but heads nowhere.
Still from Delhi Crime Season 3.
If this were inevitable, then it should have happened earlier. At its start, the series (helmed by filmmaker Richie Mehta) lent an insider’s perspective to a system that, hitherto in pop culture, was understood in terms of external achievements. And by doing so, it made people out of decorated posts. Although novel, it ran the risk of glorification, which the sophomore season (directed by Tanuj Chopra) course-corrected by acknowledging the prejudice within the force. To forfeit this and lose its intrinsic value is not an impossible lapse, but it’s unfitting for a third season.
Take, for instance, the sweeping nature of the crime at hand. Season 3 opens with Chaturvedi (Shefali Shah) and her punishment posting in Assam. While looking for arms smuggling, she comes across a truck full of women being trafficked. This brings her back to Delhi and initiates an inter-state level investigation. Things get more intense when an ongoing case in the capital, headlined by ACP Neeti Singh (Rasika Dugal), about a fatally hurt child abandoned at AIIMS, overlaps with this and the perpetrators, an underage girl and her husband, go missing.
Still from Delhi Crime Season 3.
Chopra and writer Anu Singh Choudhary bring a straightforwardness to the proceedings reminiscent of the first season, but scoop out the urgency. Organised trafficking and financially deprived girls being vulnerable to it is not a groundbreaking reality in India, nor is the presence of an injured child left alone at a hospital in Delhi. One would assume that Delhi Crime, unlike a film like Mardaani centring on a similar theme, would look beyond the search for the criminals and explore the greater crime in the country of being a woman. But the series remains rigid in its outline and parades basic facts with the gravitas of existential awakenings. In one scene, Chaturvedi says, “No one misses missing girls.”
Still from Delhi Crime Season 3.
The process is no less opaque. Ironically, for a show named after a city, Delhi Crime season 3 treats Delhi as a pitstop. Such a decision, prompted possibly to cushion its notorious apathy towards women, backfires. With the storyline moving from Assam to Haryana, Delhi to Mumbai, a decentralised and defocussed narrative comes to the fore, which is, at once, a far cry from the series’ previous iteration and imbued with the fatigue of a franchise.
Still from Delhi Crime Season 3.
Perhaps this distils the nagging disappointment of watching Chopra’s show, which plays it so safe that the game looks boring. Conveniences are littered everywhere. A jarring shortcut deflates an elaborate climax, but there are more: Arching on motherhood, there is a subplot of Neeti wanting to adopt after separating from her husband. Delhi Crime does not stop there and includes a scene where she sits with adoption papers, no less, at the office and Chaturvedi, more tactile than she has been, walks in to state, “this is the most selfish and selfless decision you will ever make” (dialogues are mostly thorny; in another scene, when asked why she is looking radiant, Neeti quips, “divorce”). Chaturvedi’s daughter is now a journalist — a detail pencilled in for that one shot towards the end where she looks at her mother with awe, egging us subliminally to applaud the cops for the effort they have put in.
Still from Delhi Crime Season 3.
But here’s the thing: Delhi Crime drew out a similar reading without trying so hard. This time around, the aggrandisement comes across as too orchestrated, almost deliberate, which stings because the India in which season 3 has dropped bears little resemblance to the country in 2019 when the series premiered. In the meantime, the brutality of the force has only compounded, and to address none of this renders a hollow depiction of a cluster of officers who might be better than their colleagues but still wear the same uniform.
Still from Delhi Crime Season 3.
Such tepidity is most evident in the writing of the characters. Core officers, including Bhupendra (Rajesh Tailang), Sudhir (Gopal Datt), Subhash (Sidharth Bhardwaj) and Neeti, are retained, but their personhood is grounded and limited to lines. Ditto for the antagonists. Huma Qureshi is Meena, the main force behind the nexus. She lures young women for jobs and either gets them married off to men in Haryana (where rampant female foeticide has made this difficult) or trains them (Mita Vashisht and Sayani Gupta play associates and both ham it up) and ships them off to Thailand. Her reasoning is old and tried: years back, she was married off young and abused. Meena was one of them. There is no patriarchal conditioning, no deficiency of judgment here. In the absence of nuances, Meena comes across as a frustratingly linear character – serviceable and forgettable. Like the performances.
Still from Delhi Crime Season 3.
Shah and Qureshi both are excessive in their portrayals, as if compensating for the timid apolitical stance of the series. Shah is particularly overindulgent, conveying the humanness of the character with a high-strung portrayal. In between, the camera zooms in to a frightening degree. At one level, it might be mimicking a male gaze, but the reading is lost in close-ups. Each frame is accompanied by the familiar, and a procedural about a handful of police officers is reduced to a police procedural. The Netflixication of Delhi Crime is now complete.
Delhi Crime season 3 is currently streaming on Netflix.
