Shaurya

Let me quote Samar Khan, the director of Shaurya, on his magnum opus.

“The journey to make this film has been long and is still not over. I'd like to thank my writers, Jaydeep Sarkar and Aparna Malhotra who have lived Shaurya with me for 3 years now.”

What utter crap! What a brazen and shameless lie!  How bastardized are our filmfakers? They have no conscience, character, and scruples. These liars and thieves don’t really deserve the respect of civil society. They are such scum.  

In reality, Samar Khan’s journey to make this film began after his discovery of the DVD of ‘A Few Good Men’, a 1992 Hollywood film by Rob Reiner starring Tom Cruise, Jack Nicholson, and Demi Moore. The film has been telecast on various English movie channels in  the last few years.

Surprisingly, it took three years for his team of writers to write a script, that already existed, and develop a crappy and third rate Xerox of the original, which itself was based on a weak premise -- a US Army Colonel defends himself for authorizing the use of Code Red, a kind of informal system of punishment for those who defied the orders of their superiors in the army, that resulted in the death of a junior officer and subsequent trial of those who subjected him to it. The redeeming feature of the film was Jack Nicholson, who added substance to a wispy plot with his charismatic screen presence and extraordinary performance.

Shaurya is about a bright Muslim officer who kills his Hindu superior during a cordon and search operation in Kashmir valley and his subsequent court-martial and how the hero of the film Rahul Bose defends him successfully. Finally, it is discovered that the officer shot his superior because he (the superior) was going to kill an innocent Muslim girl during the operation without following the due procedure. Since the dead officer was a favorite of Colonel Pratap, the area commandant who plays golf at the LOC and drinks premium scotch, he is brought in as a witness in the trial towards the fag end of the film. The defense lawyer uses a personal family tragedy of Pratap to instigate and inveigle him into speaking his mind out. Pratap's entire family was killed by his Muslim servant during some riot in 1993. Pratap rails against the Muslim quam and explains how ‘gaddari’ is mixed in their blood and why they should be wiped out. He also uses words like bloody democracy, which allows the defense lawyer Rahul Bose to deliver his few punch lines. Pratap is arrested and charged of imparting his diabolic vision to his junior. The Muslim officer is reinstated since he had done the right thing by preventing his superior from killing an innocent child.

The messages in the film are loud and clear. Follow the procedure, otherwise your junior  may shoot you down at point blank range. Don’t ever fulminate against Muslims, whatever be the provocation. If you do, you will be screwed. Only those Muslims who attend the Republic Day parade in Delhi since their childhood will be certified as loyal to the nation.

It is a sloppily written, directed, and enacted film and an abject cinematic failure. What makes it worth a khullamkhulla comment are the content of the speeches in the climax scene and the fact that the film has tried to cast aspersions on the integrity of Hindu officers of our army involved in anti-insurgency operations. It uses them as the chief villains of the story as gun-crazy bigots who nurse intense hatred towards Muslims. Nothing can be farther from the truth.



This is intentional in my view and thus requires an effective rebuttal. Samar Khan tries to camouflage his partisan and Islamist motives by quoting newspaper reports about men in our armed forces who have been punished for their criminal behavior. He fails to point out that the religion of the innocent victims had nothing to do with the criminal acts of a few uniformed men. He has trivialized the complexities and sensitivity of anti-insurgency operations by bringing in his propagandist ‘discrimination against Muslims’ agenda that is pursued strategically and with great consistency by some of our Muslim intellectuals, celebrities, filmmakers, and sham secularists. These elements have been trying to reinforce the sense of hurt among Indian Muslims in their own subtle ways, with definite political objectives, and mischievous intent. They also provide propaganda fodder to the anti-India gripe and gristmill.

Samar Khan should have quoted Muslim army officers to validate his film’s premise. He should have let us know the number of Muslim officers and Jawans who have quit the Indian army because of religious discrimination. He does not do it because he is not serious about the malaise even if it exists. He uses a readily accessible Hollywood story to do a sloganeering job for anti-India Jihadis. He knew he would get away with it. You can always get away with calumnious tirade and motivated propaganda against Hindus and their icons in India. You utter a word against the Islamists, and you will be booed, browbeaten, and banished by the jihadis, media, the secularists, and the government. You may even be arrested and deported. Look at what happened to Tasleema Nasareen?  

Had Samar Khan been honest, he would have pointed out in his film that the cordon and search operations in Kashmir valley are carried out on specific intelligence and the allegation of atrocities is the standard ploy of the ISI to discredit the Indian army to create disaffection among the masses. The Indian army is extra sensitive to these issues and tends to act promptly if a complaint is found valid. Religion has nothing to do with this. It was Sikh officers who contained militancy in Punjab. And a majority of those who are fighting terrorists in Jammu & Kashmir are Muslims.

Samar Khan’s blind cynicism and extreme contempt for those involved in anti-insurgency operations in Kashmir and elsewhere are amply evident in the film. There is a scene where we see an army officer’s wife talking about her husband as if he were a butcher, and a trigger-happy monster who stank of blood and how his touch made her cringe with disgust. The filmmaker even uses the officer’s son to ridicule, mock, and malign him. This acerbic diatribe seems to have been taken straight out of the propaganda material distributed by sundry militant and separatist outfits operating in insurgency hit areas. In another sequence, the film’s protagonist, played by Rahul Bose, asks questions like ‘Why only terrorists get killed and not army men?’ Samar Khan should know how many of our army officers, Jawans, and hapless civilians have been killed by insurgents supported by our known and sworn enemies. The number is much more than the total number of casualties suffered by the Indian army since 1947 in various wars. Yet he dares to purvey such blatant lies in the film.

‘It is all right. We need not take a film so seriously. Filmmakers and actors are idiots. What do they know?’ I don’t agree. This trend must be resisted and the lies should be exposed before the thoughtless Indian media and the ISI turn them into facts by constant repetition. Our people must also be alerted of the hidden agenda, design, and conspiracies of  filmfakers like Samar Khan who use their freedom of expression to serve a devious Islamist cause. And they know what they are doing as much as they know the source of their film ideas. They fabricate falsehoods and hoodwink us by presenting their fiction as reality.

Samar Khan also takes cheap shots at Hindu nationalism. He refers to Godse and Gandhi’s assassination in the last speech of Colonel Pratap. He uses Pratap as a symbol of Hindu nationalism of the Godse variety since the highly decorated officer considers all Muslims traitors worth being eliminated. The fact is that the most virulent of Hindu leaders and activists, including Godse, did not propound such an idea. They were dead opposed to the division of India on communal lines. They always spoke of ‘Akhand Bharat’ which is anathema to many Muslim intellectuals.

Even Savarkar, who is accused of supporting Jinnah’s ‘two nation theory’, was against the division of India. He described a ‘Hindu’ as an inhabitant of India, irrespective of his/her religious persuasion, who loved this land as his/her motherland. Godse killed Gandhi because he held him responsible for the division of India and for sucking up to the cause of the separatist elements and not using his power of ‘fast’ to provide succor and solace to millions of Hindu refugees. How could Godse’s ‘Akhand Bharat’ be a reality without Muslims or Christians?

We must also know that the poor, the uneducated, and the ‘pannch waqt ke namaazi’ Muslims did not write the master script of India’s dismemberment. They too were the victims of partition. The elitist, rich, liberal, and anglicized Muslim intellectuals invented and articulated arguments to carve a separate Muslim state out of India and succeeded in enlisting the support of almost the entire Muslim population of this country for their obdurate stance by raising the banner of Islamic nationalism. Thus Pakistan, the land of purity, came into existence. If that was not enough, the present Muslim intelligentsia in India, media savvy and smart, is busy fuelling the fire of disaffection among Indian Muslims by inventing bizarre and bunkum stories of oppression and atrocities. There are many among them who find it difficult to digest the fact that they are ruled by grass-eating kafirs who were their ghulaam for more than seven hundred years. They let out these sentiments from time to time in their haughty utterances during academic debates and discussions.  

Indian history is witness to the fact that Hindu warriors and kings had always shown kindness and generosity towards their unworthy and wily opponents. All of them, including Chandrgupt, Ashok, Prithviraj Chauhan, Maharana Pratap, and Chatrapati Shivaji, retained their civility and humility even in their victory and acted benevolently towards the vanquished. They respected the diversity of religious ideas and treated all their citizens as equals irrespective of their religious background.

On the other hand, lecherous and greedy Muslim invaders and rulers like Gaznavi, Gori, Khilji, Babar, Akbar, and Aurangzeb, massacred millions of Hindu men, raped and dishonored Hindu women, destroyed temples and places of learning, and treated and humiliated non-Muslims as lowly second-rate citizens.They used genocides as a political weapon to terrorize Hindu masses into political submission.  

The ilk of terror-monger Jihadis and crusaders survives even today and they look at India as a soft state. They unrelentingly use insurgency, militancy, proselytization, terrorism, and other separatist activities to undermine us as a nation. It is a multi-pronged attack with political and strategic aims and objectives. It will be stupid of Hindus if they refuse to see through these dangerous and cunning stratagems and are lulled into complacency just because they are in a majority. They must never forget that they have suffered one thousand years of oppressive, discriminatory, and unjust minority rule and if they are not vigilant, it may happen again.

In fact it is happening already in a regime that treats minorities as its preferred customers and crucial vote bank and is ready to do anything to appease them even if it compromises our national security and the high ideals enshrined in our constitution.

RKS