Let’s
say, you’re a young Muslim man in India, not particularly educated, not rich,
not well connected in any way; someone just trying to make a living like
everyone else. Also, like everyone else, you’re grateful if the powers that be
just leave you alone to get on with your life.
Now, somebody sets off a bomb somewhere – a
bomb which has nothing to do with you, of which you knew nothing till it went
off. And the next thing you know, the police come and arrest you as a terrorist
who made the bomb or helped the people who made the bomb.
Why? Let’s say your name is similar to that
of a suspect...or that you might have one time lent him your laptop or
something like that. An entirely innocent activity, long since forgotten. But
now you’re in jail, with the media already having tried and condemned you, and
without money or connections or any hope of ever proving your innocence –
especially since the “tough anti-terrorist” law says the burden of proving
innocence is on the accused. In other words, you have to prove – while locked up, and without any means of doing
so – that you’re not a terrorist. And any confession the police can extract
from you by torture is admissible in court and can be used to convict you.
Now, perhaps you could still find a way out
if you had a good lawyer. But there are a couple of problems with that. First,
the top lawyers are incredibly expensive – far out of your financial means.
Second, your local lawyer’s association – stuffed with right-wing, politically
connected members – refuses to take up any case defending a “terrorist”.
You are, therefore, done for. Decades of
prison time, if not the death penalty, is what you’re looking at – even though you haven’t done anything at all.
This is actually a not uncommon fate of
many young men in this country; after each terrorist attack, even though it’s
not even known who’s responsible, the police arrest Muslim men with great
fanfare, parade them before the cameras, and then they disappear from public
view. Somehow these Muslims are all from the working or lower middle classes,
never from the affluent; the latter, after all, have both money power and
connections. A number of them are quietly released when it becomes obvious that
there’s not even the slightest, flimsiest, bit of evidence against them – but,
of course, they’re pretty much ruined for life branded as “terrorists” for
evermore. As for the rest, it’s like something out of Kafka’s The Trial. You probably know that play.
Now, this is the kind of thing that the
Great Indian Muddle Class doesn’t like thinking about. It’s, as I’ve said
before, reflexively anti-Muslim anyway. Besides, it has peculiarly convinced
itself that the political class and the police may be thoroughly corrupt and
lie as a default mode – yet, when it comes to Muslims/terrorism/Pakistan (all
of which are the same thing where the Muddle Class is concerned) they somehow always
tell the truth. So, if someone’s accused of being a terrorist and is a Muslim,
proof isn’t important – the fact that he’s a Muslim is proof enough.
So, it’s always a little surprising when there
are actually people in the popular media who dare tackle this kind of subject.
Even more is this true when Bollywood, which now exists solely to cater to the
Great Indian Muddle Class, actually dares to make a film about it – and a film
based on a real life story. I watched that film recently. It was called Shahid.
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Shahid Azmi was a teenager in a Bombay slum
who was caught up in, and badly traumatised by, one of the periodic anti-Muslim
pogroms which punctuated Indian history through the 1980s and early 90s (this
particular pogrom was in 1993). Filled with hate and anger, he ran away to join
a militant group in Kashmir. Sent off to a training camp in Pakistan, he only
lasted a short while before being filled with revulsion at the brutality of the
“freedom fighters”, who were quite as bad as the Hindunazi goons who burned
Muslims alive in the city slums.
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| This...is not actually how you handle an AK. Please. |
Disillusioned, doubly embittered, he escaped
from the camp and returned home to the slum to his mother and brothers. Perhaps,
he could have slipped back to his normal life, if it hadn’t been for the kind of thing I mentioned.
Arrested at random by the police – not because
of his time in the training camp, but because of his alleged role in planning
to murder Hindunazi leader Bal Thackeray and Kashmir Chief Minister Farooq
Abdullah – Shahid Azmi was stripped and tortured to force him to confess to his
“terror” links. When that didn’t work, he was dumped in Delhi’s Tihar Jail
(probably India’s most famous prison), where he spent seven years before the
charges were dropped and he was released
(in 2001) without ever facing trial. (Remember what I’d said about people being
released when no evidence could be found against them?) Perhaps he would then
have decided that the terrorists were right after all, and turned completely to
the (other) dark side. But Shahid Azmi, as it turned out, wasn’t quite that
kind of man.
Instead of turning to terror (in jail he
even met a certain infamous terrorist, Omar Sheikh, who would later go on to
organise the kidnapping and decapitation of Daniel Pearl), something that would
have done nothing except add to the list of innocent Muslims arrested and
victimised, Shahid Azmi decided to fight the system with its own weapons. He
became a lawyer, but not just any lawyer; he specialised in defending those innocent
Muslims in prison and without a future. Having experienced their plight for
himself, he fought for them as if he, himself, were on trial. And, perhaps, he
was.
In seven years as a lawyer, Shahid Azmi
managed to get seventeen people acquitted. That may not sound like much till
you consider what he was up against: the legal apparatus, the media, the police
(who shamelessly manipulated and forged evidence), and the law itself, which,
as you may recall, laid the onus on the accused to prove himself innocent. Getting
seventeen acquittals, under those circumstances, wasn’t much – it was amazing.
But of course it carried a price.
Elsewhere, I have repeatedly written about
the terrorist attacks of 26th November 2008; among the accused “facilitators”
were two Muslims who were later acquitted by the court. Those acquittals were
due to the work put in by the lawyer for the accused, one Shahid Azmi.
Unfortunately, he wasn’t alive to savour his victory.
Shortly before the court announced its
verdict, Shahid Azmi – then all of 33 years old – was “mysteriously” shot dead
by “unknown people” at his office. There’s not too much doubt who was
responsible; Azmi was a thorn in the flesh of the police and a hate object for
the Hindunazis. Even less surprisingly, the killing remains “unsolved” to this
day, though the police never seem to have trouble “solving” terrorist attacks
within hours to days of them taking place. [There was a similar incident
involving teacher SAR Geelani, who was accused of being involved in the 2001
terrorist attack on the Indian parliament. After finally being acquitted by the
court, he was “mysteriously” shot in the abdomen outside his lawyer’s house in
Delhi. Though critically injured, he fortunately survived. That case, too, of
course remains “unsolved”.]
As several reviewers noted, the word Shahid
has two meanings in Urdu, distinguished by pronunciation: shāhid, meaning “witness”, and shahīd,
“martyr”. Shahid Azmi was both.
In most nations, Shahid Azmi’s story would
be an automatic subject to attract filmmakers. But – as I said earlier – this is
the kind of “sensitive” topic Bollywood is allergic to, so it was a pleasant
surprise that it actually handled it. Even more so, it was a pleasant surprise
that Bollywood didn’t massacre the story as is its wont; it actually made a
sensitive, compelling film on the man without trying to turn him into a hero in
the mould of Perry Mason or one of John Grisham’s lawyers.
In other words, at least by Bollywood standards,
this film is great. I have no doubt
that it was dramatised somewhat, with several separate events merged into one,
but they weren’t meant to glamorise Azmi. At no point does he look superhuman;
if anything, he’s more “average” than you or me. Nor do the courtroom scenes –
Azmi’s chosen battlefield – look at all like the set-piece dramas of the
typical Hollywood, or Bollywood for that matter, film. They’re ill-lit, dingy,
and there are virtually no spectators except policemen and lawyers. Witnesses
lie openly, and seem far from embarrassed when caught out. Lawyers squabble,
yell at each other, and persist in their stance even against all logic and
propriety. It’s a dirty, squalid world, in which the “justice” is, clearly,
just as dirty and squalid, and the defendants’ only sin is that they have
Muslim names, not (as Azmi says, in one memorable scene) “Mathew, Donald,
Suresh or More”. And yet, Azmi manages to fight and win, over and over again.
The courtroom isn’t the sole focus of the
film; far from it. This isn’t by any stretch of the imagination a courtroom
drama. Most of the film is about what goes on outside, in Shahid’s personal life.
There’s a good deal about his relationship with his domineering, highly
traditional mother, and his brothers. And there’s a kind of love story too,
with Mariam, a client of Azmi’s who’s a divorcee with a son. Azmi marries her,
and makes a life with her; but she’s under no illusions (unlike him) of the
dangers he faces, and in the end she comes off as the most reality-facing
person in the film, on either side.
One of the cardinal virtues of this film is
that it doesn’t treat the viewer like a moron. The editing is choppy, deliberately
so, with the audience left to fill in the gaps. For instance, in one scene,
Shahid proposes to Mariam in a cafe; she looks shocked, gets up and leaves. The
very next scene, they’re together, obviously a couple. The viewer is allowed to
imagine what happened in between.
Among the interesting titbits about Shahid
is that most of the roles were actually played by non-Muslim actors. The
protagonist is a Hindu in real life; both his mother and Mariam are played by
Sikh actresses. It’s a tribute to their abilities that they manage to pull it
off so well that you’d never have guessed.
Once upon a time, Bollywood flicks were
three-and-a-half-hour long monsters crammed full of songs and side-plots, made
without a script and with “something for
everybody”; insufferable ‘comedy’ routines in the middle of what was meant to
be a drama, ludicrous ‘heroic’ speeches, and unintendedly hilarious deathbed
scenes. That terse, focused films like this one are even made go some way to
convincing me that Bollywood has come some way into the modern world, though of
course Shahid (the film) didn’t do
well. Given the tastes of the Great Indian Muddle Class, one couldn’t expect it
to.
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Just by
way of contrast, let me say a word about the...thing...that ruled the box
office the week after Shahid. It’s
called Krrish 3 (yes, you read that
right) and is a...mix, I suppose...between a superhero flick and a science
fiction film. Rather than try and describe it in detail, let me make a list of
sorts.
It has a flying superhero who jumps on a
jet plane in distress, which has its nose wheel jammed, and forces the wheel
down into place. Does this sound familiar?
It has a stunningly obvious “disguise”
which somehow nobody can see through. A telephone box isn’t included, though.
It has a man in a wheelchair, who controls
a group of “mutants” with powers including shape-shifting in one case, and another one who has a rhinoceros horn growing from his forehead. Rings a bell, does
it?
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| Yes, it really was that bad |
It has a “virus” (which looks
rather like a nematode parasite, actually) being deliberately spread in a
particular nation, with the antidote being in the possession of the Big Bad
Villain. Think you heard this before?
It has a humongous smash-up fight among superhero
and supervillain among high-rise buildings, with satisfyingly toppling tons of
masonry, iron and shattered glass, in which not a single civilian becomes
collateral damage. This...may not be altogether original.
I could actually go on and on about the
number of films this one’s ripped off, but I won’t. I’ll just say that probably
the only original material comprised several excruciating songs, one of which
actually went (in English translation): “God, Allah and (the Hindu Ultimate
Deity) Bhagwan/ Together made this One.”
God, Allah, Bhagwan and, for that matter,
Zeus and Quetzalcoatl wept.
