The Arrangement and Its Weakness
The plan belongs to Inspector D'Silva. Don, the most wanted man in an international drug-smuggling network, has been under surveillance for years without a conviction — the organisation is too compartmentalised, and Don too careful, for a direct arrest to reach anyone above him. When Don dies during a chase, D'Silva recognises that the network does not yet know their boss is gone. The gap is a window, and D'Silva moves fast to exploit it.
The instrument is Vijay, a street performer D'Silva has encountered by chance and who bears a startling physical resemblance to Don. Vijay is poor, good-natured, and without criminal connections — the opposite of the man he is recruited to replace. D'Silva's proposal is simple in outline: Vijay will be groomed, briefed on Don's mannerisms and known associates, and then reinserted into the network as Don himself. Moving freely inside the organisation, he will identify the people at the top and generate the evidence needed to break the operation apart. Until that evidence is secure, only D'Silva knows who Vijay really is.
That secrecy is the plan's entire architecture — and its single point of failure. If D'Silva is removed from the picture, the institutional knowledge dies with him. No file, no colleague, no standing order protects Vijay. He becomes an unregistered operative inside a criminal organisation, indistinguishable on paper from the man he is pretending to be. The 1978 film makes this consequence literal: D'Silva is killed, the police turn their attention to "Don" as a suspect, and Vijay finds himself hunted by both sides simultaneously — the network suspicious of him, the law treating him as the actual Don.
The plan also depends on Vijay sustaining a performance under pressure, with no backup and no extraction mechanism anyone in authority knows about. D'Silva has essentially created a deep-cover operative without any of the institutional safeguards deep cover requires. The moral weight of this falls almost entirely on Vijay, who did not sign up for the risk that materialises once his handler is gone.
The 2006 remake inherits the same structure but complicates the ending by revealing that the figure the audience has watched navigate this impossible position may not be the innocent Vijay at all. That reversal reframes the police plan retrospectively: if the impostor is not who he claims, the arrangement D'Silva designed has been compromised from a different direction than anyone in the story anticipated.