A streaming series on Netflix retelling the nightmare that was the IC-814 hijacking of 1999 has nose-dived into controversy. The series director, Anubhav Sinha, stands accused by the Centre of “normalising a crime against the nation masterminded and facilitated by Pakistan’s ISI”.
According to self-styled patriots, who have an eye out for this sort of seditious sleight of hand on celluloid, the director has used Hindu aliases for the Islamist terrorists who were funded by Pakistan’s deep state.
So, the gun-toting bigot who should be called Akhtar is introduced throughout as Bhola and the jehadi Athar is called Shankar. In short, every obfuscation is used to ensure that the hijackers aren’t identified with their religion. For good measure, we’re told, the director has also portrayed these blood thirsty xenophobic thugs as being touchingly empathetic. There’s a scene of them playing “antakshari” with their hostages and so on.
All this, according to BJP national spokesperson Amit Malviya, is a “deliberate attempt” to make a whole generation of impressionable young minds think it was “Hindus who hijacked the IC-814.”
The concern for Gen-Z is not out of place. The generation barely reads. And when it does, it plugs into rubbish tips like Tik Tok and “whatsapp university”.
But on a serious note, setting aside the impact on Gen-Z, this kind of gratuitous disinformation from the ecosystem, Malviya adds, is part of the “Left’s agenda to whitewash the crimes of Pakistani terrorists, all Muslims.”
And here, Malviya may have a point.
The liberal ecosystem in India has long romanced the idea of Indians and Pakistanis living together in a sub-continental Shangri-la of shared culture and history.
Its “Aman ki Asha” (Hope for Peace) with Pakistan, while laudable, innures it to a sentimentalism that leaves no room for critical thinking and nuanced analysis.
Consider the 2019 Pulwama attack, where 40 Indian soldiers were killed by a Pakistan-backed terror group. The so-called liberal ecosystem’s immediate response was to caution against “war-mongering” and advocate for “restraint.”
Left to this ecosystem we would have turned the other cheek. Like, by all accounts, we did after the 26/11 Mumbai attack in 2008. The government of the day (UPA), according to a top military commander, ignored advice from military strategists to conduct punitive counter strikes on terrorist redoubts in Pakistan.
Pakistan sponsored human rights abuses in Pakistan occupied Kashmir – enforced disappearances, extra-judicial killings, are blind-sided, dismissed as “internal issues”. But the killing of Pak sponsored terrorists or the jailing of paid stone pelters in the Kashmir Valley is often put down to the Indian state’s excesses. This ecosystem selectivity emboldens Pakistan’s deep state to bleed India dry through its stated policy of “inflicting a thousand cuts”.
On other occasions, misty-eyed nostalgia for the days of “Hindu-Muslim regional brotherhood” have led to diplomatic blunders. The 2009 Sharm-el-Sheikh joint statement is a prime example. India’s then-Prime Minister Manmohan Singh delinked terrorism from the composite dialogue process, effectively giving Pakistan a free pass on its terror activities. The liberal ecosystem hailed this as a “breakthrough,” ignoring totally those who said that the concession would compromise India’s ability to apply the diplomatic screws on Pakistan.
Even Pakistani artists and intellectuals who criticise their own government’s actions are ostracised by the Indian liberal ecosystem. You’ll never see Mani Shankar Aiyar share a stage with the lines of Mohammed Hanif, a Pakistani author, who is a trenchant critic of Pakistan’s military establishment’s links with Islamist fundamentalists and other religious revanchists.
This whitewashing of Pakistan’s commissions and criminality by the Left establishment is at one with a much greater endeavour, which is the need to preserve the carefully crafted illusion of Muslim victimhood. At least in India, projecting Hindus as aggressors is known to yield a handsome harvest at the hustings.
Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect News18’s views.
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