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Journalism of Courage
They are out to catch a criminal. And the kinds are boundless. It could be a petty thief, a dangerous murderer or a smart swindler. If a man is on the “most wanted” list of the police, he is the man they are after. The team behind India’s Most Wanted (Zee TV, Tuesday, 10 p.m.) claim to be on a mission — “to nab criminals who are a threat to the lives of the people”.
They measure the success of their programme by the fact that at the end of 16 episodes, two criminals have been caught by the police. “It is a simple feedback system with the viewers,” explains producer-director Suhaib A. Ilyasi. “When we tell the story of a gang of robbers, we give the viewer maximum details about their modus operandi and the locality they are suspected to be in. We warn the viewer.”
In return, they expect television buffs to call in with any information about the `most wanted’ people. “The response is very good. In fact, there have been times when we have got faxes and phonecalls just after fifteen minutes of an episode,” Ilyasi says.
One such fax from Ulhas Nagar in Delhi, 20 minutes through the episode on murderer Anoop Kumar Roy, finally led to his arrest by the Delhi police. Roy allegedly killed Seema in the Prasad Nagar area of Delhi and the police expected him to find another victim. Even as they stepped up their investigations, India’s Most Wanted (IMW) episode 14 talked about Roy. The fax arrived saying that Roy worked in a restaurant, police teams raided the place and Roy was caught. Similarly, Sushila, who posed as a doctor and swindled childless couples was caught after her modus operandi was exposed on IMW.
To crack these cases, Ilyasi had to spend a lot of time with the police convincing them that the programme would only help them. The team apparently had to convince the police that it would make their jobs easier since it would also be a link between different police stations. Maybe that is also why the police come out of the serial looking so good. “The first reaction was that the programme would mean media interference in police matters. Now, we work in close coordination with the police and in fact they have constituted a team that keeps in touch with us,” Ilyasi says. He is quick to add that the programme will not hesitate to expose cases the police goofed up. “Because we work with them does not mean we do just the cases they want us to.”
In other cases, the programme provided the vital breakthrough in an ongoing investigation. Aziz-Ul-Gani’s wife and daughter were brutally murdered in Delhi about a year back. The main accused involved in the case was a man called Shamim. “My wife was a very kind person and we had two servants at home,” Aziz-Ul-Gani says. “Then Shamim came, hungry and with no place to go. My wife gave him shelter. But when he hit my child one day, she threw him out. Shamim came back into our lives and killed my 13-year-old daughter and my wife.” Shamim is still at large, though the police is in hot pursuit. All thanks to a couple of telephone calls from people who claimed they had seen Shamim in two localities in Delhi. They haven’t yet caught him, but Aziz-Ul-Gani feels that with India’s Most Wanted flashing the man’s face every few weeks, he will be caught.
There are 350 freelance journalists providing Ilyasi’s team with cases and clues. A round-the-clock team traces cases, follows clues and attempts to make a breakthrough.
The serial is loud and the dramatisation not always felicitous, but it seems to be working. The fact that so many victims or their relatives are willing to appear in person on the show, suggests that this isn’t simply voyeurism: people actually believe that the show will nail the criminals.
