DEV In his third police film, Nihalani (centre) fulfils his dream of working with Bachchan (left) and casts him opposite the peerless Om Puri

The days Santoshi spent as chief assistant director to Govind Nihalani, tramping through the city's police stations to recreate the filthy rooms and the rough policespeak in the classic Ardh Satya, have stood him in good stead. The star-spangled Khakee, he promises, will be Bollywood's closest look at the men in the force. Amitabh Bachchan is the honest IPS officer, Devgan the bad guy, Akshay is crooked and comic, and Tusshar Kapoor is the rookie.

Trouble is there are a dozen films waiting in the wings, each promising to do just that. Not all of them have Khakee's stellar line-up, but they collectively have more than Rs 100 crore riding on their back and a range of actors-from the Union shipping minister to a superbrat-in dust brown fabric packing a pistol. From Sunny Deol who grew a beard to play a rustic Sikh constable dispatched to New York in Jo Bole So Nihal to Nana Patekar playing a hardened encounter specialist in the Ram Gopal Varma factory's Ab Tak Chappan.

The call of duty has attracted even bad boy Salman Khan who, sample this for sheer irony, marched straight to the sets in starched uniform after being jailed for nearly a fortnight for allegedly mowing down a pavement dweller. Producer Sunil Mehta hasn't decided what to call the Rs 25 crore film-Satyameva Jayate or Garv-but swears it is "Salman's best performance till date".

Actors, evidently, are in short supply for such heavy duty acting. Shool's steely officer Manoj Bajpai reprises the role in two films-Pankuj Parashar's Inteqam and Mehul Kumar's Jaago, based on the true story of a rape in a Mumbai local train. Three Khakee stars are doing double-shifts as law enforcers in other films-Devgan has just played Gangaajal's upright officer while Bachchan hops sets to play policeman in Dev, Santoshi's one-time mentor Govind Nihalani's film.

GANGAAJAL In Prakash Jha's film, Devgan dons the uniform and plays an honest officer who takes on the baddies

Akshay Kumar, who plays a conscientious officer in the Madhur Bhandarkar-directed Aan, sits in crisp uniform amid Khakee's chaos and confesses with the frankness of a child in a candy store, "I read both scripts at around the same time, both were exciting.'' The film's other hero, Union Minister for Shipping Shatrughan Sinha, had to seek prime ministerial approval, no less, to don greasepaint and khaki. But producer Firoz A. Nadiadwala believes his Weapon of Mass Distraction will be Paresh Rawal who sparked off laugh riots in Hera Pheri. His barbs as the bribe-taking constable are specially penned by Neeraj Vora.

Bollywood, used to herd-mentality, is dumbfounded by the khaki deluge. "This hasn't happened in the industry before, but it is no trend," says trade analyst Amod Mehra. "Santoshi, Varma and Nihalani are serious film-makers, not proposal makers.'' Varma wanted to make a film on the encounter specialists in the Mumbai Police. "They get a strange sense of achievement in numbers,'' he says, explaining his film's title, Ab Tak Chappan. "But each statistic represents a dead criminal. It is macabre."

After the superlative Ardh Satya and Drohkaal comes Dev where Nihalani realises his "ambition to work with Bachchan". He won't call it the last of his police trilogy but a "story of two friends who happen to be policemen". As an afterthought, he says it may be "the Ardh Satya for the new millennium".

Anurag Kashyap, scriptwriter of Shool and Satya, who is to direct Black Friday, a police procedural film on the 1993 Bombay blasts, and Allwyn Kalicharan on a corrupt policeman, Anil Kapoor, in a dystopic Delhi of 2015, explains the police obsession: "It is a fascination for the cop- and crime-genre and people who have the power to do the unthinkable and change lives." Mumbai policemen are a richly mined vein-encounter specialist subinspector Daya Nayak inspires characters in Aan, Ab Tak Chappan and Kagaar while Kay Kay plays Additional Commissioner Rakesh Maria in Black Friday.

SATYAMEVA JAYATE Or maybe Garv. The Khan brothers-Salman (right) and Arbaaz-team up as policemen.

In these all-male films, women are adornments-recruited for oomph, as Lara Dutta is in Aan, or to play a suffering wife like Gracy Singh in Gangaajal. Unless, of course, it is a policewoman played by Sushmita Sen in Samay, a serial-killer flick. "She is the woman in control,'' says director Robby Grewal.

The khaki wave even promises to do the unthinkable-be authentic. Former police commissioner M.N. Singh, who had a hitlist of films that showed his department in poor light, had to eat his words when he mistook Akshay Kumar-sporting a close crop and in a uniform stitched by the Mumbai Police's official tailor-for one of his men at the mahurat of Aan.

Designer Anna Singh saw her home deluged with bales of brown fabric when she agreed to design uniforms, over a 1,000 of them, for Santoshi's film. "He is a perfectionist and wanted all the policemen dressed in the same shade of khaki," says Singh. Bachchan's ips uniform had to be aged by 10 years by washing it every day for two months. Onscreen, however, khaki is the newest hue.