Mumbai Mafia: Police vs the Underworld

It's a quick and cerebral look at the rise of D-company, police encounters, and how the city of Bombay (now Mumbai) evolved over the years. There was a time when encounter specialists deemed themselves judge, jury, and executioner - they'd ruthlessly remove gangsters from the dangerous streets of Mumbai by shooting them dead. The media also hailed them as saviours of the city, because it was easy to do so. Encounters would always make for front page news or shocking headlines, so it was natural for the officers to get a high out of it. When the world became more inquisitive about at least some of these questionable encounters, the saviours turned villains. The morality behind this is what the documentary leaves you to think about. At 87 minutes, it's an engaging affair.

Mumbai underworld has always been a fascinating topic in Indian films, novels and discussions. Now with the current trend in web series, the Bombay Mafia as it was known is showing its presence on OTT as well. Along with Hanslal Mehta's Scoop, Netflix has created an international crew documentary titled "Mumbai Mafia: Police vs The Underworld". This well-shot documentary has been made by British film-maker- Morgan Matthews. It covers the journey and important incidents of the underworld from 1991 to 2022! It covers interviews of major police officers, journalists and ex-D-company person and also shows the impact of shootouts, gang wars, and encounters and also opens old wounds of the Mumbai 1993 riots and the blasts. Although Bollywood has covered almost all of these issues in popular films like Shootout at Lokhandwala, Black Friday,Bombay,Ab tak Chappan etc ,still the documentary with a running time of app 1.5 hours is an interesting watch. A slickly made docu for people interested in real-life underworld and encounter specialists!!

This documentary is incredibly well done. The real footage from the 90s events mentioned is powerful, the reconstitutions have a real cinematic quality, and the interviews of the "encounter cops" are just fascinating. The whole story is wild and seems straight out of a movie.

The only criticism I have is that 3 our of the 4 journalists interviewed were very judgmental, in a way that came across as preachy and tone deaf. The female journalist literally says that the death of 1200 gangsters in encounters over the years was worse than the 1993 Bombay blasts... Obviously that's her opinion and it doesn't change how extremely well put together the documentary is, but it overall felt like the makers were trying to push the view that the encounter cops were as bad as the gangsters they killed, which I found to be a very manichean view.

But despite the caricatural opinions delivered by the interviewed journalists, the documentary is really worth a watch. The visuals, both old and new, are great and it's amazing to learn about the events through the very honest explanations of the famous encounter cops of the time.

People who would be watching a Netflix docu are mostly young people who either were too young during the encounter days or weren't even born yet. So for most of its viewers its a history lesson. A unbiased history lesson.

Mumbai was growing rapidly, law and order wasn't growing at the same pace, opportunity for crime was increasing day by day.

In 90s A few key incidents happened which shook people of Mumbai and made police desperate to maintain law and order

This desperation resulted into police becoming the law enforcement, the judge and the punisher, and if they found you guilty, then the punishment was DEATH.

Was it morally right? No, did it bring peace for Mumbai? Yes.

This docu shows how it started, how it happened and what was the aftermath.

For me the best part was real interviews of key people involved.

Definitely worth a watch for everyone regardless their opinion on the topic.

Engaging narrative of how the underworld activities in the 90s were successfully curbed using "encounter specialists", but at the same time the documentary grapples with the question whether these encounter specialists went too far and took the law in their own hands by staging so called "fake encounters".

These specialists argue that irrespective of whether the encounters were staged or genuine, the end result was a dead criminal who in a normal scenarios would get bail if jailed and will be out on the streets terrorising people.

On the flip side, human rights activists argue that the dead criminals missed an opportunity to reform and lead a positive life.

At the end of the day, politicians were happy for encounters to take place while the crime rate was being brought under control but once it was controlled they had to sacrifice some of these so called encounter specialists to pacify the western governments and human rights organisations.

Would Mumbai have ended up as a terror state had it not been for the encounter specialists? No doubt there was collateral damage, but was it worth it ? Only a person living in fear in Mumbai in the 90s would know, and probably agree.