Batla House 2019

Assistant Commissioner of Police Sanjay Kumar, John Abraham, is informed that his team has cornered five university students in L-18, Batla House, who might be involved in the 13 September 2008 Delhi bombings claimed by the terrorist organization Indian Mujahideen (IM). He is told to hold fire until he arrives, but the relentless Inspector Krishan Kumar “K.K.” Singh, Ravi Kishan, pushes ahead with a squad. When Sanjay arrives and the first rounds ring out, he chooses to engage. The building is cleared, and K.K. is found shot down. Inside, a tense exchange escalates, and two students, Adil Ameen, Kranti Prakash Jha and Sadiq Khan, are killed, while Tufail Khan, Alok Pandey, is arrested alive.

Dilshad Ahmed, Sahidur Rahaman, and Javed Ali, Faizan Khan, manage to escape, and Sanjay now faces mounting heat from the media and politicians, who insist the encounter was a fake. The nation seethes with condemnation toward the Delhi Police, and calls for justice for those killed in the operation. Amid the turmoil, Sanjay’s wife Nandita Kumar, Mrunal Thakur, a news anchor, refuses to concede defeat to the mounting accusations and chooses to stand by her husband. The mounting stress takes a toll on Sanjay, who soon begins showing signs of post-traumatic stress, including eerie hallucinations of being shot by the terrorists. Nandita stays by him, steadying him when his fears threaten to spiral into dangerous thoughts.

Determined, Sanjay resumes the pursuit, tracing Dilshad to Nizampur, Uttar Pradesh. He’s told by the police commissioner that he will be awarded for the encounter, a prospect that both thrills and unsettles him. In Nizampur, he tracks down Dilshad, and a tense pursuit ensues; despite efforts to deter him, the officers come close to arresting Dilshad, only for political pressure and public uproar to allow him to slip away.

After receiving the President Medal, Sanjay intensifies the hunt once more, this time leveraging Dilshad’s girlfriend Victoria, alias “Huma,” to lure him toward Nepal. He recruits his team again and arranges a van to seize Dilshad, but the suspect engineers a shift in the plan, sending a decoy to test the setup. Realizing the ruse, Sanjay scrambles to intervene as the van departs, and he stops a chase from turning into a catastrophe. He learns that Dilshad is not in the van, and the decoy van heads out as planned. In Nepal, the real Dilshad is eventually cornered, restrained, and arrested by Sanjay and his team.

The courtroom drama that follows pits the defense against Sanjay’s narrative. Shailesh Arya presents arguments that echo a counter-history of fake encounters, claiming that K.K. and his men abducted the students from L-18, tortured them, and prepared to kill them on orders—alternatingly painting K.K. as a casualty of a rogue operation. Sanjay, however, counters with evidence that his officers had monitored the students and identified them as IM members. The televised reenactment of the original shootout strengthens his case: K.K. and his squad engaged as the students fired, and K.K.’s death becomes a crucial pivot, underscoring the claim that no officer dies in a fake encounter. The court ultimately convicts the two terrorists to life imprisonment, while the third escapes the country.

Even as sections of the media cling to doubt, a 2016 video clip surfaces, featuring a confession from Javed—who had escaped the encounter and later joined ISIS—bolstering the credibility of the operation in the eyes of many. The case closes with a complex mix of triumph and controversy, leaving a nation with a nuanced memory of a controversial chapter in Delhi’s security history. Nora Fatehi, Nora Fatehi, makes a special appearance in the film’s energetic “O Saki Saki” sequence, adding a memorable cinematic moment to the converging threads of justice, fear, and public memory.