‘Mumbai Mafia’ Trailer Reveals Police’s Violent War on Organized Crime

“The press was there, the TV, the human rights lot, courts… Nobody objected.” In conjunction with its release on January 6, Netflix debuted the trailer for Mumbai Mafia: Police vs The Underworld, a new documentary feature that will explore a volatile period during the 1990s when gangsters ran riot in the city of Mumbai. This lead to the formation of elite police squads that were essentially given shoot-on-sight orders to rid the city — India’s financial capital and the home of the Bollywood industry — of violence, using violence.

The trailer features loads of archive footage of significant events, like the bomb blasts of 1993, alongside talking heads of the cops at the center of the battle, and other experts. Among the most prominent figures of that era was the don Dawood Ibrahim, who remains at large to this day. Ibrahim was the head of the D-Company crime syndicate, and is the prime accused in the Mumbai blasts case. Such was the state of affairs, we are told in the trailer, that the authorities allowed the cops to shoot first and ask questions later. This practice came to be known as “encounters” — a staged murder of suspected criminals, conducted under false pretenses. This became such standard practice — and in many ways, remains prominent in India even today — that it made the cops local legends. Soon, the cops began to keep score of how many people they’d killed, almost as if it were a sport, with a leader board and everything.