Delhi Crime Season 3 asks a very important question: If girls are invisible or unwanted, do they really go missing?

Rahul (Anshumaan Pushkar), who is a member of a gang trafficking women, asks Vartika Chaturvedi (Shefali Shah) why he is being treated like a criminal instead of the family members who sell young girls into prostitution or forced marriages. When Khushi (Aditi Subedi), a young girl who abandons a severely inured child in a hospital, is asked about the child’s mother, she says that Noor’s mother abandoned her, adding with bitterness that killing or dumping girls in the garbage after they are born is not an uncommon thing. There is a heartbreaking scene when Khushi is sent to an NGO for young girls. She lies down on her bed, turning away from the judgmental looks of the other girls around her and removes the bindi from her forehead. It’s almost as if at that moment, she stops pretending to be an adult, a married woman, or a caregiver and allows herself to just be a child.

Girls like Khushi come from impoverished homes and remote parts of the country. But in an interesting creative choice, the makers draw parallels between the two seemingly different worlds of police officers like Vartika, Neeti Singh (Rasika Dugal) and Simran Masih (Yukti Thareja) with the women they are investigating. Neeti, who was unhappily married, meets a young woman who has been sold as a bride. The woman is trapped in an abusive relationship, but unlike Neeti, who had the agency to leave, she cannot. Similarly, in Season 2, when Neeti’s marital problems begin, we see a parallel between her and Lata Solanki/Karishma (Tillotama Shome), who has left her husband and child behind to pursue her dreams in Delhi. Karishma, like Neeti, felt trapped in an institution that expected her to conform and set aside her ambitions to appease her husband.

Meena (Huma Qureshi), the antagonist in Season 3, and Vartika are both in leadership roles at work, handling a team of men and women who follow their orders. However, both are ultimately answerable to men who control finances, permissions and promotions. Vartika misses an important meeting with her superiors, and we realise that she would have been the only woman in a room full of men. She has a difficult male boss at her new posting, whom she has to arm-twist into letting her follow her instinct, and a husband who is supportive but struggling to understand her. Meena is answerable to a powerful financier, a shady client (Kelly Dorji) and has to manage the egos of multiple other men who are crucial to her business.

Women grow up with the constant awareness that a man can attack them anytime, anywhere and cause them harm. Sometimes these men are related to them, at others it’s a random stranger who was raised to believe that he had the right to. Though they are police officers with training and authority, Neeti and Simran are just as vulnerable simply because they are women. When Neeti has to stay in a hotel room with a broken lock, she pushes an entire sofa against the door to keep herself safe. The man at the reception says they have never needed to get the lock repaired, implying that no female cop has ever stayed at the guest house and that a male cop would not have to worry about being sexually assaulted on the job, or have his privacy violated by a creep. Simran finds herself in grave danger while chasing a lead, and it is Neeti who forces her male colleagues to find her. Quite like the victims they are looking for, no one really cares when Simran is missing.

In one of the best scenes this season, Vartika’s daughter Chandni (Yashaswini Dayama) asks her mother about an old case involving a raid at a brothel. One can see the pain Vartika still feels when remembering the incident. This is one of many horrifying, gut-wrenching cases she has handled over the years, trying to find justice or saving innocent victims. Yet, inspite of decades of work and unrelenting effort, violent crimes continue to be committed under her watch because the fundamental attitude towards an entire gender has not changed. Delhi Crime Season 3 differentiates itself from the previous seasons by focusing on the why as much as the who and how. It asks that if a society would rather a girl be silent, invisible or non-existent, does it really matter if she goes missing or is killed? Can we ever stop horrifying cases like Nirbhaya or Baby Falak from recurring? “No one misses missing girls”, Vartika tells Chandni, and we know it’sbecause they were never fully seen, even before they vanished.

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