bollywoood:
Two Delhi police officers drive along a dark highway to the home of an accused rapist, reflecting on the increasingly sadistic violence they are seeing in the Indian capital. “It’s simple,” one tells the other. “The bigger the gap between the rich and poor, the more the crimes.”
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Delhi Crime, a Netflix miniseries debuting globally on Friday, reconstructs the police investigation into the notorious 2012 gang rape and murder of Jyoti Singh. The student’s killing triggered protests across India, reform of the country’s sexual assault laws and an ongoing reckoning about women’s safety in the country.
The appropriately moody drama dwells on the role that India’s widening inequality could have played in Singh’s murder and crimes like it, though that isn’t the only culprit identified over seven hour-long episodes.
In the same scene in the car, one of the officers describes an India “exploding” with poorly educated young men fighting over a small pool of jobs, with ideas about sex and women drawn either from patriarchal custom or pornography. “If they don’t get it, they take it, with no regard for the consequences,” he says. “After all, they have nothing to lose.”
Despite the dark subject matter, the director Richie Mehta says he set out to tell a positive story. “It’s not about the illustration of evil,” the Canadian-Indian says. “It’s about the aftermath and the people who deal with it.”
The series emerged from six years Mehta spent reading case material and interviewing the authorities involved in the investigation. Delhi’s underfunded, undertrained and endemically corrupt police force were a particular target of the protests that swelled after Singh’s murder.