Prime video dropped a series Raakh with main lead Ali Fazal, claiming it’s inspired by the 1978 Ranga-Billa case where 2 siblings, Geeta(16) & Sanjay Chopra (14) , were kidnapped, tortured, raped and murdered in Delhi.
In actual documentation, the investigation was led by SHO V.P. Gupta, his assistant Ram Chander and Police Commissioner J.N. Chaturvedi. No personal caste battles were the headlines of the case but in this series, they rewrote the entire investigation team into a neat identity politics story. Ali Fazal plays SI JP Jatav, a struggling Dalit cop… the underdog hero. His retired hawaldar father constantly bows his head coz of past caste discrimination and still cooks mutton for his upper-caste bosses to stay in their good books. JP keeps talking about Ambedkar and keeps photos of Phule, Ambedkar in his house and quietly battles caste discrimination in the police force. His main assistant is a good guy who’s Muslim, the lazy & useless hawaldar is a Brahmin, the honest journalist helping the case is a Muslim woman. Even one of the criminals playing Ranga-Billa is shown as a villager from Haryana.
They took a real horrific crime that needed no extra seasoning and turned it into an oppression pyramid:- Dalit hero Muslim allies = honest & hardworking, Brahmin = lazy deadweight. Why do they need to inject caste-communal-area propaganda to tell a tragedy based on real events that’s already terrifying to the guts ?