Diksha Sundriyal
Netflix’s ‘Black Warrant’ takes the audience inside the country’s biggest prison complex to show the challenges in keeping it running as one problem after another surfaces. The protagonist is a young man named Sunil Kumar Gupta, who becomes a prison officer for two reasons. The first reason is his family. They are struggling financially, which means Sunil needs to have a job that can provide for them. Working as a prison official is the only place where he sees the least competition and the most chances of success. Moreover, it is a government job, which means it will solve his financial problems to an extent.
The other reason is Sunil’s wish to do something for the country. He wishes to work with the system to change the system. Due to his unintimidating build, others underestimate him. They don’t believe he has what it takes to run a prison. However, he proves them otherwise by bringing one radical change after another. However, the execution of all those changes takes time, during which Sunil has to learn all the dynamics and politics of the place and familiarise himself with the best and worst things about the system that he has become a part of.
One of the major challenges for prison officials is to keep the peace between three major gangs: the Tyagi gang, the Haddi gang, and the Sardar gang. As the political and social climate of the country becomes volatile in the aftermath of the PM’s assassination, the same chaos is reflected in Tihar as well. To reinstate the peace, Sunil and his team came up with an unprecedented solution. Even then, there are other unpredictable elements, like Charles Sobhraj, which proves that there is still a long way to go in terms of improving the prison system. SPOILERS AHEAD
Why are all the Officers Sleeping? Who are the Sweets and the Postcard From?
Due to the continuous warring between the three gangs, almost all the attention is on them. Sunil and other prison officials are always focused on keeping the peace and preventing bloodshed and other worse things from happening. In the midst of all this, one prisoner gets by with whatever he wants. Charles Sobhraj is the first prisoner of Tihar that Sunil comes face to face with, and right in that first meeting, Sunil discovers the extent of influence and manipulation the criminal can exert. Despite his best efforts to stay away from him, Sunil somehow ends up finding himself in Charles’ orbit, which shows that the criminal’s gears are always in motion.
To curb the violence in the prison, DSP Rajesh Tomar imposes a lockdown where all the prisoners are forced to stay inside their cells at all times. This means that everyone lives in an extremely unhygienic space because the C-class prisoners who did the cleaning are not coming out to work. The B-class prisoners suffer the brunt of this, including Charles Sobhraj, who starts writing letters and petitions to the authorities. When Sunil finds out about it, he is frustrated with Charles. He tries to get his point across, stating that the lockdown is a temporary thing and has been put in place to maintain the peace in the prison. But when Charles refuses to take back his letters, Sunil offers him a deal.
In exchange for not complaining about the prison’s situation, Charles can get what he wants. Interestingly, he says that he wants to celebrate his birthday and give sweets to everyone in the prison, including the officers. At the time, it doesn’t seem like too much of a thing, so Sunil agrees. He has more important things on his mind and he doesn’t give any thought to Charles’ demand, which is eventually met. His birthday is celebrated, and each and every person in the prison gets sweets. The next day, when Sunil arrives at work, he finds every single guard and officer unconscious and all the gates of the prison unlocked.
It turns out that the reason Charles wanted this celebration was to execute his escape plan, which had been in motion for a while. In an earlier episode, he mentioned a man named David Hall, with whom he was not allowed a meeting. It seems to have been for a good cause because the same man helps Charles spike the sweets and renders everyone unconscious so he can easily break out of jail. Even though Sunil is not there at the time, Charles doesn’t forget about him. He leaves a goodbye postcard, which features the disappearing act from a famous magician, referring to his own daring escape from Tihar.
What Happens to the Tyagi Gang? How does the War Between the Gangs Stop?
When Sunil arrives in Tihar, he is familiarised with a system where the officers have to work with the prisoners rather than against them. Tomar tells him that despite the different gangs and all the problems inside the prison, things would be tougher to manage if they didn’t have the support of the inmates. So, he advises Sunil and his colleagues to stay in line with this system and maintain the peace. Eventually, as expected by Sunil, the delicate system breaks down, which leads to chaos not even Tomar could have anticipated. He thought he had found the balance by bringing the Tyagi and Haddi gang together, who were now united against the Sardar gang, which came in handy because following the PM’s assassination, the whole nation seemed to have turned against them.
Things get worse when the feud between the Tyagi and Haddi gang is reignited. Moreover, when Dahiya decides to end things by making some strict decisions, the members of the Tyagi gang target him. He is beaten to the extent that he has to be hospitalized, and Sunil, too, faces the brunt of this poorly executed action. Meanwhile, Tomar also realizes that his reputation doesn’t hold anymore, as the Tyagi gang doesn’t seem to be scared of him at all. When he tries to get the Haddi gang to help him, the Tyagi gang threatens him and his daughter outside the prison to show their influence and the extent to which they are ready to inflict damage on them.
In the end, Sunil comes to the rescue with a plan that aims to rearrange the entire board rather than focusing on one player. First, Mangat is brought into the fold to get the Sardar gang on the officials’ side. The only thing they have to do is not intervene with the Haddi gang while the prison officials take care of the Tyagi gang. The next thing is to get some important members of the Tyagi gang out of Tihar and have them placed in different prisons. This act divides their power, which means they can neither take action in Tihar nor any other prison they are transferred to.
Once the major players of the Tyagi gang are out of the picture, the others are bought off by the money supplied by B-class inmates, who require peace in the C-class to get their day-to-day jobs done. Their money bribes some members of the Tyagi gang to reveal the location of their weapons. It turns out that they were hidden in the vegetable patch that Tomar tended to so dedicatedly. He is angered by it, but at the end of the day, the plan has worked, and the Tyagi gang’s scheme to create an all-out war is crushed. With the Tyagi gang gone, the only thing left to do is make sure that no other gang takes their place. If someone else came out of the woodwork to fill the vacuum, the whole plan would have been for naught, which is why it is essential to disperse the rest of the gangs as well.
For this, the prison comes up with a system of housing the prisons alphabetically rather than allowing them to be in the same cells as their gangs. This separates members of all the remaining gangs, including the Haddi and Sardar gangs, and ensures peace in the prison. At least for a little while. Meanwhile, things get better on a personal note for the staff. Dahiya welcomes a child, Mangat sobers up and reconnects with his family. Sunil tries to apologize to Priya and mend things, but she asks for some time to figure out whether or not she can deal with him working in the toxic environs of the prison and pouring all of that stress and negativity out on her. A dark cloud hangs on their relationship, but on the professional front, Sunil is in a much better place.
What Does the Peacock Mean?
When Sunil gets a job at Tihar, his family isn’t as happy about it as he imagined they would be. It turns out that working at a prison is seen in the same space as being a prisoner there. His mother refuses to accept that her son has chosen this job and tells him not to tell others about it. Sure enough, when he owns up to his job, his brother’s engagement is canceled. As he spends more time on the job, he also begins to understand why people see prison officers with bad taste. When he tries to change things in Tihar, he faces pushback from his seniors who aren’t simply comfortable with the current system but also profit off of it. After a point, Sunil starts to see the prisoners in a better light than his superiors, and that makes him very pessimistic.
However, where there are corrupt officers, there are also people like Mr. Saini who truly care about their job. Sunil bonds with him over their shared desire to do better. It is Saini who tells Sunil that there are peacocks in Tihar, even though they never really appear in front of anyone. What Saini meant is that despite all the bad things in the prison, there are also beautiful things that are hidden and have to be worked upon to make them more prominent. As things get direr, Sunil loses his patience with the place and starts to think that things can never change there. But by the end, he succeeds in bringing about some of the changes he had set out to make, and that’s when he sees a peacock, the beauty that Saini had talked about in their early encounters.
The peacock signifies a wave of change in Tihar, which is set to happen now that all the gangs have been dealt with. To make things better, it is decided to split the prison into three parts, with each section receiving its own SP and a cast of officials so the units can function separately and hence, more efficiently. At the same time, Sunil’s plan to set up legal help for prisoners is also put into motion, even though it happens after Saini’s tragic suicide. Despite the darkness surrounding these changes, there is finally hope for Tihar and its prisoners, and that is what the protagonist focuses on. The optimism caused by the success of his endeavors holds even greater meaning for Sunil, who is told by an astrologer that he will spend many more years there, comparing it to a life sentence. To his family, it seems like a bad thing, but for Sunil, this means that he can focus entirely on his job and continue working on Tihar to make it a better place.
