When a police encounter turns a cop into a hero, what happens to justice? 

Abhinandan Sekhri sits down with filmmaker Meghna Gulzar for a freewheeling conversation about her new Hindi crime thriller Daayra, starring Kareena Kapoor Khan and Prithviraj Sukumaran, which released in theatres on September 18.

The film follows a police officer who becomes a hero in the eyes of the public after he leads a team that kills four men accused of raping and burning a young woman, until a determined female IPS officer begins uncovering inconsistencies in the official story.

Abhinandan asks Meghna where she stands on police encounters. She remarks, “Of course, I have a position on it [police encounters]. I am a citizen of a society that is... celebrating encounters, and a section of the society is also, in a subtle way, justifying them or institutionalising them. And it's frightening. That’s my position.”

On the question of justice, Abhinandan remarks, "I'm not sure the motivation of all cops or most cops is justice. For most cops, even if they do an encounter, I think the motivation is not necessarily justice. It’s either a political motivation… or it's optics, or it's theatre…” 

When Abhinandan asks if Meghna agrees with that analysis, she says, “Yes, I do. And that's precisely the reason why we don’t have one kind of cop in Daayra. We have the ones who believe that, ‘we need to do this extrajudicially, otherwise this will keep happening, and this is the only solution, because the meeting out of justice takes too long by the course of law.’ We have the kind of cops who don’t want to take the FIR only. So there are all kinds, right?”