What a viewIn Delhi Crime, Netflix confronts 2012 gang rape that shocked India – and the world

Should there be a reverse statute of limitations on television programmes, with the enjoyment, or even making, of certain shows prohibited until a given period has elapsed? Such restrictions might apply, for example, to programmes featuring horrifying events still fresh in the memories of those directly affected. Or should said events be depicted sooner rather than later, on the basis that those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it?

Should we cast a restrictive net over shows such as Delhi Crime, on Netflix, the police procedural based on the barbaric attack suffered by Jyoti Singh Pandey in December 2012? The 23-year-old student was gang-raped, then disembowelled with an iron rod, by six men on a bus in the Indian capital, the nauseating assault generating international outrage.

All of which causes a certain guilt to attach to appreciation of the seven-episode miniseries, even if we are unquestionably on the victim’s side and desperate for every infernal punishment to be visited upon the rapists.

It’s easy to be caught up in Delhi’s colourful chaos as this detective thriller proceeds, undercover officers running suspects to ground before they can disappear across northern India. But perhaps because the savage attack isn’t shown (mercifully), sympathies tend to settle not on the victim as she fights to stay alive, but on the poor, misunderstood, maligned, understaffed and underfunded police, who are doing their best despite the crippling dearth of resources.

Frequently, the series almost resembles a PR film for the Delhi Police and the Indian Police Service, both of which are acknowledged. The forces do have an empathetic face, however, plausibly presented by Shefali Shah as Vartika Chaturvedi, a deputy commissioner of police, whose teenaged daughter is traumatised by the atrocity but galvanised by the groundswell of outrage in her hometown.