Delhi Crime Season 3: Madam Sir is back! This time her team is battling Badi Didi

If you are a fan of Shefali Shah and her team then this season you will travel from Silchar and Aizawl to Delhi, Rohtak, Surat and Panvel in search of a gang that lures young girls and sells them.

In a world where female fetuses are killed, where young girls are married off to elderly men, who would report a missing girl? But a grandmother reports that Sonam is missing, and DIG Vartika Chaturvedi sets out to find her. Her fantastic team of Bhupendra, Vimla, Jairaj, Ashutosh, Neeti and ASI Simran Masih follow every lead that leads them to Meena and Vijay - the names so ordinary that you wouldn’t think of them as villains capable of selling fourteen year olds to men.

The men in the team - usually super reliable at the legwork - seem to be relegated to the background simply because the issue is woman centric. Even though Vartika’s husband, who is himself a cop, tells her, “As the Additional Commissioner I think that you have behaved irresponsibly. And as a husband, I am just fed up.” The man of the main character of this show is compelled to tell her to follow protocol, that hobnobbing with the bosses is important and that she should learn to delegate… She tries to tell her that every minute she spends away from the case they have that much less time to figure out where the 30 missing girls are…

Watch the trailer here:

If you step back from the show and just listen to what the men surrounding these amazing women are saying, then you would realise how deep seated the patriarchy is.

Here are a few of the things women hear in the show:

“You would be a great mother.”

“You should have joined the military. How did you become a policewoman?”

“I’m not selling girls, I’ve been doing social service for the last 30 years”’

"Your hands are too weak, he used to say… How can you make rotis with these hands? So he beat me every day… Now I’m strong”

“Why should we worry if a female ASI has not come to work? She must be at home doing some work…She will show up…”

‘If he realises I have spoken with you, he will break my bones. You can’t help me. I’ve learnt to live here.”

“My mother never had any money and the man who bought me is nice to me. Why should I go back to her?”

As much as I loved Vartika, Vimla and Neeti as strong female characters, I did love Meeta Vashist as the awful Kalyani. She’s terrific and unrepentant and I wish they hadn’t ended her role the way they did. Also liked the lovely Sayani Gupta who plays the trainer for the kidnapped girls, teaching them to literally put their best face on.

The show is single minded in the pursuit of the missing girls who are being transported in trucks after being drugged. But some parts are rather frustrating - why does Bhupendra drink tea when he’s at the hospital on a lookout for the duo who may be the parents of the injured baby? Why does he aim for Vijay’s shoulder rather than shoot at the legs - the latter might prevent him from running away…

And yes, there’s the long winded ‘let me tell you my story’ part in the end when Badi Didi and Vartika have a face off. Why does the hero always allow the villain to talk so much? It’s very frustrating to hear a woman who sells young girls to men preach about how everyone is pimping for something. It reminded me of Dharmendra’s dialogue from a terrible film of the early 90s (Tahalka) where he just shoots the bad guy mid lecture saying, “If you want to shoot, just shoot. Don’t talk!”

Villains who explain so much make the show tiresome, especially because we know that the end is near. On an unserious note, everyone must read the delightful “100 Things I would do if I were an Evil Overlord”

Speaking of villains, Hum Qureshi is wonderful even though she is sort of a cardboard cutout of a ‘bad woman’. There is a wonderful teeth gritting vengeance in her voice when she is telling how she arrived at her husband’s home as a very young girl and how she was ‘set right’ by Chaudhary at a memorial service for her husband. But that moment is gone too soon. As Badi Didi she is very very menacing indeed. The scene where the young captive girl keeps interrupting her by coughing and how Didi make it stop was bone chilling.

As is what one of the girls who was sold off to a family that treats her like a slave asks the two female cops, “Who do I complain about? My parents? They sold me off when I was a child. Or about the family who bought me from the trafficker? Everyone knows what is going on, but no one cares.”

With the Epstein scandal slowly unravelling across the pond, with news about men losing their title and reputation, this show does highlight the hopeless mess this trafficking of young girls is. There are too many girls missing, the cops and powerful me are complicit, and a handful of good people whether they are in uniform or not, cannot kill the problem because it is bound to crop up somewhere else in another form. The problem is endemic, and a Korean show called As You Stood By shows (on Netflix) us how domestic violence too gets similar treatment. The villagers in Rohtak aren’t very different from the family of the abuser in Seoul. The Rohtak mob calls it ‘our family matter’ and the Korean abuser ensures his wife’s bruises are covered in long sleeves and the cop advises the woman who finally makes an attempt to complain: It gets messier if you complain, so settle it among yourselves.

If Delhi Crime weighs too much on your mind, then move to a positive show on Netflix. It is a judge with a winning smile in a court in Tokyo. The show is called Ichikei’s Crow, and you will see a very different way of handling crime and justice. And yes, I do hope there is a season four of Delhi Crime and I hope they don’t take ‘the no make-up look’ as seriously as they did here!

(About Author: Manisha has been a writer for as long as she can remember. About movies, shows, travel, money lessons, and more. An advertising writer, she has used words to persuade people to buy everything from Maggi noodles to hotel stays, from buying Microsoft software (before they were bundled in your PC) to choosing banking products and even insurance. She is a published author and poet and has spent the last few years teaching communication theory and writing for cinema. And yes, she will experiment with food and look down on people who don’t know their pinot from riesling.)