New Delhi:
Given the high benchmark it has to reckon with, Delhi Crime Season 3 has its task cut out. It does all it can to measure up but falls just a tad, (yes, just a tad!), short of replicating the powerful wallop that the first two seasons packed.
The thrilling and disquieting true-crime drama is not the sort of gut punch that would send one reeling, nor is the nature of the violence that it depicts as terrifyingly severe as it was the last time around. Much of the brutality on show – the victims are teenage girls captured by a gang of vicious traffickers – is either only suggested or palpably curbed rather than shown in graphic detail.
It is the subject – interstate human trafficking of girls from indigent, troubled families – that lends potency and relevance to Delhi Crime S3. Despite being a few notches lower than its stellar precursors in the matter of visceral and emotional impact, it holds its ground when it matters.
Director Tanuj Chopra, who also helmed Season 2, and his crew impart enough pace and strength to these six episodes for them to add up to another worthwhile and watchable chapter in the investigative drama series.
In the garb of a police procedural, the season conveys urgent truths about the harrowing social realities that fuel human trafficking across state and international borders. The clash at its heart is between two unyielding women – one doggedly fighting for the law, the other, equally determinedly, against it.
The final showdown is a bit of a letdown. The latter, with a loaded service revolver pointed at her, has the time and the inclination to fill her adversary in on the reasons why her life turned out the way it did. Her words carry a whiff of a laboured justification for her actions. Yes, the woman is delusional, and her foe says as much to her face.
Delhi Crime Season 3 does not do much wrong in its intriguing run-up to the finale. It plunges headlong into the heart of the action and, without much ado, brings to the fore all the narrative elements that constitute the core of the tale that spans from Silchar to Rohtak to Muzaffarpur.
In the opening sequence, “Madam Sir”, DIG Vartika Chaturvedi (Shefali Shah), now posted in Silchar, Assam, waylays a van believed to be transporting illegal weapons. What she stumbles upon shocks her. The vehicle is packed with girls being smuggled to Delhi to service the marriage market or the flesh trade.
Centred on a 2012 real-life case of a battered toddler left in the trauma centre of AIIMS Delhi with a fractured skull and bite marks on her body, the script by Tanuj Chopra, written along with Mayank Tiwari, Shubhra Swarup and dialogue writer Anu Singh Choudhary, expands the canvas.
It builds a fictional world in which the story imagines and details the scenario that would have forced a 14-year-old girl like Khushi (Aditi Subedi) into an act of shocking criminality followed by crushing contrition.
Vartika receives information of a missing person report filed by an old woman whose granddaughter, Sonam (Celesti Bairagey), a class topper, has not returned home for days. The senior police officer suspects the missing girl is among those being carted around the country like hapless cattle for sale at a village fair.
Triggered, Vartika decides not to let the perpetrators go scot-free, although finding them is a near-impossible task because they leave no trails. Despite the reservations of her boss, she returns to Delhi with the aim of getting to the bottom of the truth with the assistance of Inspector Bhupendra Singh (Rajesh Tailang).
Vartika needs all the help that she can get. The case quickly balloons into a full-blown mystery. One clue after another points to the existence of a sinister gang of traffickers that works in the shadows with complete impunity. It is led by ‘Badi Didi’ (Huma Qureshi), unrelenting in her pursuit of power and pelf.
Vartika’s husband, ACP Vishal Chaturvedi (Denzil Smith) and daughter Chandni (Yashaswini Dayama), now an eager-beaver journo (who does not get much screen time), are happy that she is back home, no matter how briefly, but Vartika has little time for them.
For her and her team, it is a race against time, as it also is for the gang they are out to eliminate. Badi Didi has only a week to herd 40 girls together and send them to Thailand.
As Neeti Singh (Rasika Dugal) investigates the case of a brutalised two-year-old girl left in a hospital, linkages emerge between her probe and the larger one initiated by Vartika, caught between duty and protocol. Her commitment to justice is at odds with a policing system that thrives on clipping the wings of those that dare to go beyond the mere burden of a job.
Many of the key supporting cast members – Anuraag Arora, Gopal Datt, Jaya Bhattacharya, Sidharth Bhardwaj, all effortlessly effective – reprise their roles as the cops of the Hauz Khas police station. Aakash Dahiya once again plays Devinder, Neeti’s now-estranged husband.
Devinder remains largely in the background, only to emerge when the focus turns to a woman in uniform grappling with her personal needs while responding to the demands of a high-pressure profession.
The actors cast as the lawbreakers are expectedly all new to the series. Led by Huma Qureshi in the guise of a criminal mastermind, members of her gang and her associates are played by performers of proven mettle who significantly enhance the solidity of the show: Mita Vashisht, Sayani Gupta and Anshuman Pushkar.
The personal and the professional intersect in the lives of the Delhi Police personnel deployed to probe another harrowing crime in a procedural that starts in the Northeast and then extends beyond the boundaries of Delhi and into the North Indian hinterland, where young women are thrown to the wolves.
When one police officer offers to rescue a young girl from Bihar sold as the bride of a much older Rohtak man, the latter pipes up: “Hum yahaan jeena seekh liye hain (I have learnt to live here).” These girls have lost the will to fight, which complicates the task of the police.
Shefali Shah, Rasika Dugal and Rajesh Tailang are as good as they ever were in the previous two seasons. They do their reputation no harm here. Huma Qureshi as the Haryanvi-speaking trafficker and Mita Vashisht in the role of a feisty pimp are rock-solid. Sayani Gupta, playing a key member of the gang who has her ups and downs with her boss, gives the role all she has.
Delhi Crime Season 3 is not as good as, let alone better than, the two previous seasons, but it isn’t, for sure, much worse. And that is no small feat.
