Yuddhakaanda Chapter 2 ending explained: Will the murder charge against Niveditha hold up?

In the Ajai Rao-led courtroom drama, Yuddhakaanda Chapter 2 Archana Jois’ Niveditha shoots dead her daughter’s abuser in broad daylight

Archana Jois in Yuddhakaanda

In Kannada filmmaker Pavan Bhat’s sophomore movie, the courtroom drama Yuddhakaanda Chapter 2, there are two heinous crimes at play. First, a 7-year-old young child is subjected to inhuman abuse and left barely alive, and second, her mother, is charged under IPC section 302 for murdering her daughter’s abuser in cold blood. The focus, though, is on the second – Niveditha’s (Archana Jois) trial for turning judge, jury and executioner. As far as most of the legal community is concerned, it is an open-and-shut case, with no scope of successfully defending her.

And yet, rookie lawyer, Bharath (Ajai Rao) takes up the case and argues that she is not a murderer. Will that hold up in the court of law, though? During the course of the trial, Bharath realizes that something was amiss on the day that Niveditha walked up to a cop in the court premises and whipped out his gun to shoot dead the man accused of abusing her daughter. In the video footage, she is seen emptying the chamber into the perpetrator and continuing to shoot even after she ran out of rounds. Did she not realize this, he asks and it is then that the story’s turning point comes up.

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Not a case of IPC Sec 302; instead, it's Sec 84

Niveditha has no recollection of the events that occurred after she exited her car to make her way to the court and before she was seated in the police car having killed the guy. This, Bharath pieces together from a psychiatrist, is a result of Niveditha having suffered a psychotic break, owing to the her rapidly deteriorating mental health, while following up on her child’s case. The section that should, therefore, apply in the murder trial, he argues, is not 302, but 84.

This section states that, ‘Nothing is an offence which is done by a person who at the time of doing it, by reason of unsoundness of mind, is incapable of knowing the nature of Act or that he is doing what is either wrong or contrary to the law’. As sound as his argument seems, Bharath suffers a setback when the expert he called on, turns hostile at the behest of the opposing lawyer, Robert (Prakash Belawadi), who, in turn maintains that there’s no connection between the case of Niveditha’s child and her murder trial, given that there was a two-year gap between the two.

Also read: Yuddhakaanda Chapter 2 movie review: Ajai Rao-led courtroom drama is a mixed bag

And if that isn’t bad enough, it also comes to light that Niveditha is a trained shooter, making her crime seem premeditated and negating the psychotic break theory. To his luck, Bharath is made to understand that even while experiencing a traumatic psychotic break, Niveditha’s sub-conscious memory, as a medal-winning sharpshooter, was at play. And that is how he is eventually able to prove his Section 84 case and get her declared innocent, after all.

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