Dark drama from Delhi

Five years ago I watched the Richie Mehta drama, Delhi Crime, and this week binged on it again at Netflix, devouring the dozen episodes of series 1 (with series 2 just as good) three or four at a time. I’ve always been greedy that way.

Think Jimmy McGovern meets modern India, though the material mined here is the real life case of a gang rape by six men and an iron rod, on a bus speeding through the now permanent Delhi fog late one night in 2012, which would take six lives: that of the victim, who died of truly horrific injuries a fortnight later, that of the ringleader found hanging in his cell pending trial, and those of four fellow rapists who in March 2020 – a year after Delhi Crime  was first aired – went to the gallows in Delhi’s Tihar Jail.

The sixth rapist, a juvenile – though this was contentious given hit and miss record keeping for those born into India’s teeming slums – got three years.

I liken to Jimmy McGovern for the powerful writing, highly nuanced characterisation, and ability of Richie Mehta, writer and director, to draw riveting performances from a superb cast. Shefali Shah is outstanding – described by one Indian critic as “like a tornado that blows through every scene and leaves a permanent mark” – as Vartika “Madam Sir” Chaturvedi, the Deputy Police Commissioner for South Delhi whose sense of outrage and horror as woman, cop and human being confer the steely resolve to drive through so politicised a case. Outstanding too is Rajesh Tailang as her subordinate, Inspector Bhupendra Singh; rock of diligence, loyalty and honesty in a mire of incompetence, corruption and systemic indolence.

Utterly compelling for me, who first visited India fifty years ago and whose fascination with the country never left me. For drama this good, however, you don’t need my excuse.

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I spoke of Tihar Jail and hit and miss record keeping. Both bring me to Black Warrant. The prison because this seven part series is set there. It’s equally riveting, and for the same reasons of pace with nuance, and powerfully drawn characters in a moral maze to which cynicism is the easiest – in fact the near inevitable – response.

The poor record keeping because, while India professes to apply the death penalty in only a few egregious cases, opponents at home and internationally say that at state level more executions are carried out than declared – or even known – by the federal government in New Delhi.

Black Warrant – jailhouse slang for the notice of imminent execution of death sentence, the pen nib by sombre tradition broken after its signing – merges that progression to the scaffold with cell-block realpolitik and corruption in spades; both Tihar’s and that of India’s justice system.

Take the case – while bearing in mind that just like Delhi Crime, Black Warrant  by Vikramaditya Motwane and Satyanshu Singh is based on real life – of brothers Raja and Ujagar Singh. Petty criminals, they were paid 500 rupees – less than five pounds in the UK ¹ – by a doctor to kill his wife after she discovered his affair. Their story full of holes, doctor and the mistress who plotted with him were charged, as were the Singhs, with conspiracy to murder. All four were handed life sentences but, on prosecution appeal, those of the two brothers were ‘enhanced’. They went to the gallows in 1983 while the lovers who’d hired them were released after sixteen years.

It may not be altogether coincidental that the doctor had been the personal physician to India’s then president. In any case it’s hard to gainsay the observation on the eve of the hanging by the drama’s central character – an idealistic young jailer who grows tougher with each successive episode – that, had the hapless brothers been able to afford legal representation,“they would be free now”.

With no shortage of the heavily formulaic on our screens – even the good stuff, like the classy early Scandinoir, gives way to pallid imitation as the seams are overworked – these offerings from India are dark diamonds.

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1. My rupee to sterling conversion is based on exchange rates today. The India I first visited (1974-5 under Indira Gandhi’s Emergency as her government pursued the protectionist austerity, only possible by playing off Washington and Moscow, which allowed it to build a strong manufacturing base) set them at eighteen rupees to the pound, with the black markets on New Delhi’s Connaught Circus offering up to twenty-five if they didn’t scam you. Do the sums: the Singh brothers’ wages of sin were indeed death, plus £25 tops.