Daayra : Crime & Punishment

 Daayra — When Justice and Law Stand on Opposite Sides.

When Justice Becomes Instant: What Daayra Makes Us Ask About Crime, Courts and Encounters in India?

I watched Daayra, Meghna Gulzar’s latest film starring Kareena Kapoor Khan and Prithviraj Sukumaran, and found myself thinking about something larger than the film itself.

At its heart, Daayra asks an uncomfortable question:

What happens when the system of justice is slow, and people begin to believe that taking the law into their own hands is the only way to deliver justice?

The film brings together two police officers—DCP Ajooni Kohli, played by Kareena, and DCP Raman Kumar, played by Prithviraj. Both are officers of the law. Yet they stand on opposite sides of a delicate line.

Ajooni believes in the boundaries of the law.

Raman believes that when the system repeatedly fails, someone has to act.

Neither character is presented as simply black or white.

And that is very much what Meghna Gulzar seems to have intended.

In her note about the film, she writes about how, as a student of Sociology, she learnt that society is not binary. There is a spectrum of grey. She says Daayra explores that grey—and, interestingly, attempts to dismantle it as well.

She describes Kareena's Ajooni as “fiercely righteous” and Prithviraj's Raman as “righteously fierce.”

That perhaps captures the film beautifully.

The two are, in Meghna's words, the “Ying and Yang of Daayra.” Their journeys keep moving between law and morality, conviction and doubt, procedure and emotion.

And then come the statistics at the end of the film.

A rape is reported approximately every 20 minutes.

A police encounter is reported approximately every day.

And only around 23% of rape cases result in conviction, according to the statistic cited by the film. Recent reporting also puts India's rape-case conviction rate at about 23% in 2024, while court pendency remains very high.

These numbers are difficult to absorb.

But there is an important distinction here: a 23% conviction rate does not mean that the remaining 77% of accused were necessarily proved innocent. Conviction rates relate to cases disposed of by courts, while a large number of cases remain pending.

And that is perhaps where Daayra becomes more than a crime thriller.

It asks us to look at the space between crime and justice, law and morality, anger and restraint.

When a young woman becomes a victim of a horrific crime, the instinctive human response is to demand immediate punishment. But when punishment happens outside the legal process, another question emerges:

Can something be called justice if it bypasses the law?

At the same time, if the law takes years to deliver justice, what happens to people's faith in the system?

Daayra doesn't seem interested in giving us a comfortable answer.

And perhaps that is its strength.

The film is not really asking us to choose between Ajooni and Raman. It is asking us to understand why both positions exist.

For me, the most interesting thought from Meghna Gulzar's note is this:

“Life and our society is not binary.”

Perhaps neither is justice.

And perhaps the uncomfortable grey space between what the law says, what society demands, and what an individual believes is right is exactly where the real conversation begins.

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Crime, Punishment, Justice and deliverance of justice. Meghna Gulzar’s own intention behind the film. In particular, her idea that life and society are not simply black and white, but exist in a spectrum of grey—and that Daayra explores, and even tries to dismantle, that grey.

“Sach Ka Daayra captures the emotional core of the film. Gulzar sahab’s words, Amit’s composition and B Praak’s voice come together with an intensity that stays with you.”

https://youtu.be/Kv63oAhdY4E?si=4K-j12zaUUNYSouy

“Sach Ka Daayra makes you pause and think. The depth of the writing and the mood created by the music make it feel like another voice within the story,”

The film is particularly interesting because it is not simply a rape-revenge or police thriller. Its central question is much more uncomfortable: what happens when people begin to see an immediate act of punishment as justice?

What the film is about

 Daayra — the idea of a boundary or sphere within which one is supposed to operate.

The statistics at the end are quite striking

The film reportedly ends with three statistics:

A rape is reported approximately every 20 minutes.

A police encounter is reported approximately every day.

Only about 23% of rape cases result in conviction.

The third figure is particularly important, but it needs a little context.

Recent reporting based on crime and court data says that the conviction rate for rape cases fell from about 27% in 2013 to about 23% in 2024, while the proportion of rape cases pending in courts rose from about 83% to 89%.

So the film's 23% figure is not simply saying that 77% of rape accusations are proved false. That's an important distinction.

A conviction rate is calculated from cases disposed of by the courts; it is not the same thing as saying that 77% of all people accused of rape were found innocent. And court pendency is a huge part of the picture.

There is another interesting complication: reported crime is not necessarily the same as actual incidence of crime. An increase in registered cases can sometimes reflect greater reporting, improved registration, or greater awareness, rather than only an increase in crimes committed. For example, recent analysis of India's rape data notes that reporting increased substantially after the 2013 legal changes.

And this is where I think the film becomes relevant

It is the relationship between justice and public anger that is the core theme.

There are three layers:

1. The Crime
2. Quantity of punishment &
3. Deliverance of Justice

Society is fluid, so these needs to be dynamic and cannot be text book prescribed. 

After a horrific crime, people understandably want immediate punishment. When the legal process takes years, an encounter can begin to look like instant justice. The film asks whether that feeling should be allowed to determine how the law operates.

Meghna puts it rather well when discussing the film's central idea: the law can be followed, interpreted, manipulated or exploited while still remaining technically within its boundaries.

That is a much richer question than "Are encounters right or wrong?"

It is:

If the system is slow, does that give an individual the right to become the system?

And perhaps the film's most uncomfortable question is the one that follows:

If justice is delivered outside the law, can we still call it justice?