Will the real Dirty Harry please stand up?
A US court has brought charges against Harshkumar Ramanlal Patel, aka Dirty Harry, for transportation of “illegal aliens”. Here’s where the moniker comes from
If the real Dirty Harry stood up and took a long look at Harshkumar Ramanlal Patel, chances are that he would reach into his holster for his Smith & Wesson Model 29 revolver, aim it at the 28-year-old Gujarati and say, “You’ve got to ask yourself one question: ‘Do I feel lucky?’ Well, do you, punk?” The hard-nosed American police officer, immortalised on screen by Hollywood actor Clint Eastwood, would have beaten the living daylights out of Patel, who ran a migrant smuggling operation between the United States and Canada, before he was arrested last week.
On Wednesday, March 6, he will appear in court on multiple smuggling charges, notably that of his alleged former clients, Jagdish and Vaishaliben Patel and their children, 11-year-old Vihangi and 3-year-old Dharmik; all four froze to death near the Canadian-American border in Manitoba in January 2022.
That would be the first reason for the thrashing, the second would be Patel’s audacity — using the moniker “Dirty Harry.” It’s bad enough that he is a criminal, but did he have to be so uninformed as well? Because the first rule of being Dirty Harry is this: you’re not the bad guy.
You’re not the good guy either. But can you be the right guy for the job?
Over 50 years ago, when husband-and-wife team Harry and Rita Fink started writing the first drafts of what would become the Dirty Harry blockbuster series of action films (Dirty Harry (1971), Magnum Force (1973), The Enforcer (1976), Sudden Impact (1983), and The Dead Pool (1988)), they engaged with the question of morality — whose burden is it? It certainly isn’t the criminals’, so how long can one expect an over-extended police force to keep their hands and their conscience clean? You can’t create an anti-hero cop who takes bribes, but you can prop up a man who will give it as good as he gets, thumb his nose at authority to bend the rules, break a few legs, have a roving eye, be a nuisance but do everything to nab the bad guys.
If all that matters at the end of the day is justice, then Harry Callahan will see it done — all you have to do is look the other way.
In 1970s America, Dirty Harry was an idea whose time had come. The Vietnam War was still on, and the Hippie movement brought in long hair, long pants, and cries for peace; life in the big cities was exciting, modern, dangerous and lonely. As a cop, Harry Callahan isn’t dirty because he’s crooked, he’s dirty because it’s a hell of a job to walk the streets of San Francisco, a city teeming with all sorts of people, and maintain the peace.
Closer home, in 1973, Salim Khan and Javed Akhtar wrote the “Angry Young Man” into being: Zanjeer, released two years after Dirty Harry and thought by many to be inspired by it, spawned its own class of anti-heroes. Both Zanjeer, and later, Don, captured a zeitgeist where ahimsa or non-violence could no longer be the solution in a country that was hurtling towards modernity, where the divide between the rich and poor was growing by the day, and where it didn’t pay to do the right thing.
In Mumbai, the renegade cop jumped out of the screen and into real life. In the 1990s, citizens of the city that never sleeps would wake up to news that gangsters had been killed in police encounters, some in the cover of darkness, and some in the cold light of day. Police officers like Pradeep Sharma and Daya Nayak became Mumbai’s Dirty Harrys, and the term “encounter specialist” entered our collective lexicon via films that either explore the subject of extra-judicial killings from the viewpoint of either the police, the department rookie, the specialist, the criminal and his gang — pick your side and your flavour of popcorn because all is fair in Encounterland. While the cinematic representation of the Dirty Harry breed of police officers continues, albeit with a few changes in the narrative voice, things have quietened a little in the real world.
But only slightly: in December 2019, Hyderabad Police was accused of killing four men accused of raping, murdering and burning the body of a female veterinarian. The news was greeted with public cheering, distribution of sweets, lighting firecrackers, and TV debates about the kind of catharsis it had generated in the people. In 2021, it was Hyderabad Police again who were under the scanner for the suspicious death of a man suspected of rape. In 2022, the report by the Justice VS Sirpurkar Commission, set up by the Supreme Court to probe 2019 December killings, stated that it believed the police deliberately fired on the accused “with an intent to cause their death”; recommending action against 10 police officers and personnel under various charges, including murder.
Even the makers of Dirty Harry knew that the character couldn’t be allowed to go rogue beyond a point. The first film in 1971 was followed by Magnum Force (1973), where Callahan (played by Eastwood again) was on the lookout for one of his own, a trigger-happy vigilante cop gunning down crooks and pimps, before discovering that it was a posse of policemen who had taken the law into their own hands. Dirty Harry was now up against a dirtier lot who served him an ultimatum: join us or die. Callahan loses some before he can win, and as is the case with every Dirty Harry movie, he throws us a nugget of wisdom on his way out — “A man’s got to know his limitations.”
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