Die a Hero or Live a Villain

Every time JCP Harshvardhan Shroff (Harman Baweja) utters a lie implicating the journalist he is supposed to be close to, he almost gags in Netflix’s new hit series, Scoop. Partly related to his illness, and partly due to his guilty conscience, he epitomises the worst of the Mumbai police, which made a scapegoat of Jigna Vora in the murder of fellow journalist Jyotirmoy Dey. In Kennedy, Anurag Kashyap’s new film that was screened at the Cannes Film Festival, a policeman is conveniently de­clared dead, even as he continues to kill people for his boss, who then becomes the Mumbai police commissioner. And in Aasmaan Bhardwaj’s Kuttey, released earlier this year, Tabu plays a former inspector who is close to the Commis­sioner of Police and “handles all his dealings in Navi Mumbai”. She is also the last resort of any corrupt policeman who wants a reprieve.

The protectors have become the hunters, the heroes have become the villains, and the officers of law have be­come those who exploit its loopholes best. Call it a sign of the times. One has to only look at the real life occurrenc­es in the Mumbai police recently to wonder whether truth is stranger than fiction—echoing Kashyap’s Kennedy, a senior police officer and one-time encounter specialist, Sachin Vaze, is accused of planting explosives outside the home of one the world’s richest men, while his boss and long-time associate Param Bir Singh goes missing after a string of extortion threats.

Nothing tells you more about a soci­ety than who it chooses to be its villains. Indeed, as Harvey Dent says in the Dark Knight trilogy, you either die a hero, or live long enough to become a villain. Yesterday’s lionised encounter officers are today’s rogue officers. Officers such as Vaze were once heroes on the silver screen, their lives celebrated in movies such as Shimit Amin’s Ab Tak Chhappan (2004), when the underworld was at its zenith in Mumbai. As Nana Patekar playing an encounter specialist in Ab Tak Chhappan says; “Ghar ka kachra saaf karne ke liye jamadar hai, society ka kachra saaf karne ke liye hum (A janitor keeps your home clean, we keep society clean).” And even more pointedly: “Doctor ilaj karta hai, engineer pul banata hai, neta bhashan deta hai, main apna kaam karta hoon (A doctor cures illnesses, an engineer makes bridges, politicians give speeches, I do my job).”

But that was almost 20 years ago, at the height of gang wars in Mumbai. Po­licemen who played fast and loose with the law were celebrated because it was felt that they were eliminating threats to society. With the Mumbai mafia largely tamed and the rise of activists who raised questions about such unlawful killings, the much-feted officers were quietly shunted out or arrested. But the cult of Dabanng (2010) and Singham (2011) continued, with police officers being projected like supermen in khaki, but with some flaws. Call them Zanjeer Lite, because the policemen were largely hon­est even though they knew the system was corrupt, that the men in their force were on the take, and that they usually tangoed with politicians.

For a long time, Bollywood’s Bombay police were by and large clean. Apart from odd exceptions like Apna Desh (1949) in which sub-inspector Bholanath (played by Chandrashekhar) accepts a bribe of an expensive wrist­watch from smuggler Mohini’s gang for allowing them to smuggle out goods from the harbour, we hardly saw any corrupt policemen in Hindi films till the late 1970s. Hawaldar Nekiram (Jagdeep) in Do Hawaldar (1979) was perhaps one of the earliest portrayals of a policeman accepting petty bribes.

In the early 1980s, corruption fanned out at all levels of Bombay’s police force with Andhaa Kaanoon (1983) being a good example, says Balaji Vittal, author of Pure Evil: The Bad Men of Bollywood. From the traffic constable who accepts a bribe from a traffic violator right up to the retired jailor Gupta (Madan Puri) who distorts the police record of a rape and murder case in exchange for a fat retirement plan from three murderers, the system was rotten.

And soon, the inevitable alliance be­tween the corrupt khaki and the corrupt khadi happened. Says Vittal, “For exam­ple, a popularly elected Member of the Legislative Assembly Gopal Chowdhary (Om Shivpuri) in Shatru (1986) publicly states that he found it incomprehensible that a policeman would not accept a bribe. And soon, the policemen went from corrupt to ridiculous with the arrival of the two venomous buffoons Inspector Giridhar and Hawaldar Arjun Singh in Hum (1991) who are on the payroll of the mafia don Bhaktawar. Even here they show no loyalty as they burn Bhaktawar’s family to death and scoot with his money.”

In time the police lost respect even for their uniforms. In Chameli (2003) we see a Mumbai Police officer asleep on duty with his legs on the table and the top buttons of his shirt unfastened, even as his superior officer strikes a deal with a rogue politician over the release of a pimp and a call girl. The nexus between the underworld, police and the politi­cian was now here to stay.

A few good policemen were helpless because the mafia had key politicians and police on their payroll. Picture this— how does the gambling den owner Sher Khan in Zanjeer (1973) have the audacity to amble into the police station when summoned by Inspector Vijay Khanna (Amitabh Bachchan)? Did he have the backing of some politician or someone higher up in the police itself?

In these movies, with the exception of the nameless city in Zanjeer, Mumbai is at the core of the changing colour of khaki. As the kinds of crime in Mumbai changed, so did the characterisation of the police, from fighting smuggler villains in the 1970s to taking on organised crime like extortion, money lending, human trafficking and eviction of tenants in the 1980s and 1990s.

And in new depictions, the Mumbai police have fallen to new depths, whether it is manipulating facts to frame an innocent journalist in Scoop or aligning with criminals to line their own pockets in Kuttey. Says Mrunmayee Lagoo, the writer and co-creator of Scoop, “I write what I like to see. I find corrupt cops boring to watch. Shades of grey are interesting. I think everyone is servicing their own philos­ophy. Their philosophy defines their ac­tions, making them good, bad, corrupt. No one can be one note and most of us are grey, leaning towards white or black.”

Since the rise of the underworld in Mumbai, the police force has evolved in a way quite different from other cities, says S Hussain Zaidi, former investigative journalist, author and the person on whom Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub’s character in Scoop is based. “Rules were bent, vigilance made lax and faces turned away as the police started behaving like contract killers. The city may now be more or less rid of the mafia but the spirit of vigilantism remains.’’ In the Jigna Vora case, he adds, “The force was particularly venal. It needed to close the case and Jigna was a convenient scapegoat. And the media behaved like vultures and sacrificed one of their own out of fear for their own lives. The Mumbai police plumbed new depths and the media wasn’t far behind.’’

The concerns of Zanjeer’s hero—who cannot bear to make a beautiful home in a world which is so ugly—are not for today’s police officers. As Ajay Devgn’s just-released prisoner tells Tabu’s SP in Bholaa: “Whether it is a man or a woman in uniform, everyone just wants to dis­play their power. There is no humanity.”

Yesterday’s police officer fighting Pakistani terror, like ACP Ajay Rathod in Sarfarosh (1999), is today’s special agent of RAW in the Tiger franchise, or mem­ber of the Joint Operation and Covert Research (pronounced JOKR) in Pathaan (2023). As criminals became smarter, the police struggled to keep pace. As Amitabh Bachchan tells Amrish Puri in Shahenshah (1988): “Tumhare jaise mujrim ko anjaam dene ke liye police ki vardi kaafi nahin, is liye Shahenshah ka libaas pahen­na pada (The police uniform was not enough for criminals like you, so I had to wear the Shahenshah disguise.)”

The new law officer’s field of operation is global, as are his enemies. It could be ISIS, it could be Pakistan, it could be Sri Lankan Tamils. So the local police officer has to be bolstered with special abilities of intellect or physique, and has to be aided by high technology, in a world where with growing power comes rising rivalries. One day he could be tackling an attack on the country’s financial security as Farzi (2023), another day it could be a nerve gas attack as in Season One of The Family Man (2019).

A growing distrust of the citizen towards the system is most evident in the Drishyam franchise, where the “fourth-class pass” hero is able to play on what everyone assumes is the natural incompetence of the police, and their victimising of innocent civilians. Here again, Tabu plays a policewoman, In­spector General of Police, who is looking for her missing son and is convinced he has been murdered by our hero, even as the latter is five steps ahead of him at every step.

She is a grieving mother and an instinctive policewoman, but pitted against the aam aadmi hero, it is she who seems to be the offender.

Amitabh Bachchancharacter depictioncinemamoviespoliceShashi Kapoorsocial valuesvillain