Its the occasion on India’s 75th Independence day – a day which most observers in the 1940s would have probably bet against! A prediction of a badly divided India, an India degenrating into a hotbed of militant fundamentalism, a nation unable to fend for itself was the common reported opinion when India managed to rid itself of its yoke of British imperialism.
India has proved its doubters wrong in many aspects – it remains a vibrant democracy, rule of common law remains common (delayed perhaps!), it has made significant progress as a self-sustaining economy (atma nirbhar Bharat!) and for the first time in several decades – we have a leadership team deeply committed to ethical and inclusive development. sabka saath – sabka vishwas!
However on this occasion, I decided to publish an article I drafted a few months ago about a movie I saw. It impacted me so much that I took over 4 weeks to pen the initial draft and only now – as I take a flight from India to Sydney via Bangkok; I get around to completing it and publishing it on landing back in Sydney.
A long time back as a young man with long hair, I watched Spielberg’s Schindler’s List in one of the many movie theatres that dot central Calcutta. It affected me deeply. Like it did to many of us. The movie made me read about the holocaust and contemplate deeply about what makes human beings behave with such utter depravity.
I read The Gulag Archipelago, the seminal Alexander Solzhenitsyn three part volume over the course of a year while ‘studying’ for my final year engineering in Varanasi. Alexander’s original Russian prose translated into English was evocative and a young man about to start his career in this world; mesmerising in its intensity.
I read with increasing horror Madhusree Mukherjee’s Churchill’s Secret War over the course of 2 months through the Sydney lockdown – not because it was that thick a book but it took me time to digest what was written and to get over the horror the sheer evil Churchill and the English government perpetrated on a hapless Indian public. It was probably the toughest book I ever read (far tougher than ‘An Introduction to Chemical engineering’!). I think it needs to read by every right thinking person to understand the depths of human depravity, this well researched, no-holds barred book makes Gulag Archipelago feel like Enid Blyton. At least 3 million Indians were starved to death by the ‘policies’ of the British at a time when India provided the largest support to the Allied forces fighting the other equally evil Axis forces.
I watched Sardar last year, that incredible slow burner on the Jallianwalla Bagh massacre in 1919 and wrote a blog about it. My epistle gave way to some strong opinions but I stand by what I said – we need to learn from history otherwise we are condemned to repeat it. And repent when it is too late.
I watched Kashmir Files a few days back. And my first feeling was – we need to learn from ths no-holds barred depiction of recent history.
It took me a week to get over the initial shock the movie left me with. In my opinion: It is the most disturbing movie ever made, and I have watched a few. It is actually a true story – Vivek Agnihotri and team have made this after over 700 interviews of people impacted, a decade and more of meticulous research has gone into this and had the advantage of getting some of the best actors ever to grace Indian cinema star in the film – can we contemplate a finer all-round actor than Anupam Kher? From playing a 70 year old man at the age of 28 in Saaransh (1984) to playing the evil villain Dr Dang in Karma (1986) to the irreverently funny father in Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge (1995), this man has done it all. Kashmir Files is his finest role yet. He is quite simply unbelievable & the question needs to be asked – is this the finest performance by any actor in any movie in any era in any language?
My mind wandered to Alec Guinness playing Colonel Nicholson – which was in my opinion, the finest performance by anyone in a Hollywood film; and who suddenly felt far less real than when I had first watched Bridge on the River Kwai as a 15 year old in Navina cinema in Calcutta. Anupam in The Kashmir Files makes the intensity and steadfastness of Alec pale in comparison.
A bit of history – little known outside India and even in India tightly kept under wraps till a non-Congress government came to power in 2014: 700,000 Kashmiri Hindus are in exile for 3 decades. They are the Gandhi without guns. As Gurumurthy said, taking up guns is not in Hindu blood because it is not in Hindu philosophy. Only theologies & ideologies which covert the world take to arms. Hindus suffer from paradox of tolerance. It is Hindus who need protection from State because they rarely take to arms. Just imagine – in which other country can a million people be refugees in their own country – displaced out of their age-old homeland because one particular religion acolytes are now the majority in that region? It can only happy in India and can only happen to Hindus – sadly. It became a state where beheading swords and loud guns were constantly heard, grammar and epistles are no longer. A place where Muslims constantly taunted their Hindu neighbours, raped and vilified their daughters, sisters, mothers and daughters; besides their customs and beliefs.
This movie lays bare the unfiltered evil of Muslim Jihad and its inhumane approach to anything remotely deemed un-Muslim or as per the book they follow. I think we need to define evil here, evil is not merely something that is bad. Evil i think is a completely different creature. Evil believes bad is justified, its activity is essentially brutal violence divorced from humanity or conscience. The Jihad Ideology is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination.
This evil has been depicted in visceral realism and horror – all with a a pliant administration scuttling down any murmurs of protest from the hapless Hindus. it is more Proustian than Proust – the corruption of academia, the inability of the good to fight against evil, and the failure of appeasement politics, are all viscerally laid bare in the movie.
This movie needs watching, more importantly the story needs retelling; it needs soul searching – why does a religious entity need to indulge in such horror and brutality to satiate its teachings?
But I think these terrorists and the people (almost all the Kashmiri muslims unfortunately) aren’t the biggest problem. The biggest problem sits somewhere else. They sit in air conditioned offices to defend them. if only these (& this includes folks like yours’ truly) had used the appropriate means to protest government indifference, the scale of the tragedy would’ve been far less.
As our learning – can we at least stop defending such ideologies and people? And learn from History – appeasing a particular community or religion or cult will only make things worse for the next generation. Bullies cannot be appeased. They have to be pushed back. The issue for democratic, humanity based order in countries like India is that the enemy is not just beyond its walls. It is here, among us. Men and women, some of them highly placed, some of them obscure, but all believing genuinely in the Jihadi aims and the Islamic creed and desiring to substitute that sternly efficient inhuman creed for the muddled easy easygoing liberty of our democratic institutions. Just consider – for merely sharing a Facebook post ‘I stand with Nupur Sharma’, Kanhaiya Lal was arrested, made to apologise, given no security despite several calls to behead him by the Islamists. He was beheaded within days of getting bail. In the same country, Munawar Faruqui is telling his jokes making fun of Hindu culture and its Gods under state security.
Can we start with ensuring the safety of folks like Nupur Sharma whose only fault was to quote from the Koran? And from Salman Rushdie – himself of a fatwa for over 3 decades and now lying in a hospital ICU as a victim of this fatwa who writes – ‘A poem cannot stop a bullet. A novel can’t defuse a bomb….But we are not helpless, we can sing the truth and name the liars’.
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