New Delhi: Ram Gopal Varma is all set to direct Police Company. Harshvardhan Rane’s character is inspired by Daya Nayak, whose police squad encountered nearly 300 gangsters between 1977 and 2004 amid the Dawood and Choota Rajan rift. And the film is produced by T-series.
Produced by T-series, the film’s tagline is, “It’s more dangerous than D Company.”
“The police is an institution, and an underworld company is a money-making organisation. But when an institution is given extra powers, it will soon become a company,” Varma wrote in an X post.
He also explained the film’s plot, which is set after gangster Dawood Ibrahim had brutally defeated his rivals. Dawood grew his gang into a company before fleeing to Dubai, leaving his protégé Chhota Rajan to head the operations of D Company.
But soon there was a rift between Dawood and Rajan, which caused a vacuum in the Mumbai underworld; as a result, the city witnessed an outburst of criminal activities, with several small-time gangsters trying to capture power.
“The system was completely failing to halt the gang activities, which in turn was attracting a lot of young men from places like UP, MP, Bihar, etc. to join the underworld companies,” Varma posted.
That is where Nayak comes in. He joined the Mumbai Police in 1995 as a sub-inspector and carried out several operations to stop gang violence and organised crime in the city. He was popularly known as an ‘encounter specialist.’
However, this is not the first time that the filmmaker has explored the world of police and crime. Varma first touched upon the subject with Shiva in 1989, then produced Ab Tak Chhappan in 2004, which focused on Mumbai’s encounter squad and in which Nana Patekar’s character Sadhu Agashe was also inspired by Daya Nayak. He then made Department in 2012, The Attacks of 26/11 in 2013 and Officer in 2018.
Ab Tak Chhappan was remade as the Telugu film Siddham in 2009, directed by JD Chakravarthy, followed by Golimaar in 2010. The franchise later returned with Ab Tak Chhappan 2 in 2015, with Patekar reprising his role, although Varma was not associated with the project.
(Edited by Insha Jalil Waziri)