Mehta says he received the blessing of Singh’s parents to make the series, which he hopes will challenge the reputation Delhi has as one of the most dangerous cities for women in the world. India’s Daughter, a powerful BBC documentary on the subject that included interviews with the rapists, was banned from being screened in the country in 2015. More than five years later, the crime against Singh is still a raw issue. “I can’t walk down the street without getting harassed, I can’t take the metro without men staring at me, and every college that I apply to has 50,000 applications – and it’s only getting worse,” the teenager tells her mother in the first episode. Officers really did wade across a river to find a suspect – and persuaded him to cooperate by threatening to report his crimes to his mother.Ĭhaturvedi’s daughter, a restive teenager eager to leave Delhi for Toronto, is a composite of several people, and serves as a stand-in for wealthier young Indians wrestling with the question of whether to stay and help improve their city or decamp to the US, Australia or Europe. The deputy police commissioner, Vartika Chaturvedi, who oversees the investigation, is based on a real official. The drama is a blend of fact and fiction. Yet a core group of officers doggedly work to catch the six perpetrators, four of whom are still on death row (one ended their own life in prison in 2013 and another, a juvenile, was released in 2015). The depiction of the investigation is warts-and-all: suspects are frequently beaten officers keep trying to bunk work to go home or to the gym lights flicker and then go out when a station can’t afford to pay its fuel bill. “Like that they don’t get to see their families for weeks at a time during an investigation, or that an officer didn’t even have a vehicle to get to the crime scene.”
“ as they talked me through their experiences I started to see the limitations they faced,” Mehta says.
Delhi’s underfunded, undertrained and endemically corrupt police force were a particular target of the protests that swelled after Singh’s murder.
The crime was so atrocious that the rage of whole of the country could be seen, heard and felt.
DELHI CRIME REVIEW NETFLIX SERIES
The seven episode series showcases the minutest of details of the heinous crime that took place in December 2012 in Delhi - a girl gang rape. The series emerged from six years Mehta spent reading case material and interviewing the authorities involved in the investigation. Delhi Crime is an Indian web series released as a Netflix original. Capital punishments and fast-track courts are a long way from addressing everyday acts of violence.Īn Emmy is all well and good, but I’ll only celebrate when even things on the ground are changing.A still from the new Netflix series Delhi Crime Photograph: Netflix A month before that, yet another judge in Karnataka gave bail to an accused because the rape survivor slept after being “ravished”. In July this year, a judge in Bihar ordered the arrest of 22-year-old gang rape survivor for being “agitated” in the court due to prolonged questioning. The justice system also dictates how women should act when they’re raped.
Some states have not set up the recommended fast-track courts because they don’t have the funds for it. But as of 2019, nearly 90 percent of the fund was lying unused. How the later episodes draw out these comparisons. The Nirbhaya case led to a promise of fast-track courts to deliver justice, and a government-controlled fund that aids that form of justice. The series is toeing a difficult line: The crime is so awful it’s alien, yet still meant to be emblematic of a larger problem within the city. A 2015 BBC documentary on the Nirbhaya case was banned.
DELHI CRIME REVIEW NETFLIX MOVIE
In fact, Netflix got lucky their movie was allowed to air at all. Out of the chaos that erupts every time this kind of news takes centre stage, one thing is clear: Such stories make for great headlines. House of Secrets The Burari Deaths review: Netflix Indias new true crime documentary goes beyond the gory details and asks the questions that really matter.