Building a character

On Shaurya and the weakening secular fabric of India’s institutions

The story had been written by the film’s director, Samar Khan, a Muslim himself, who for reasons of indiscipline had been asked to leave the National Defence Academy (NDA) five days before he would have completed its three-year course. By his own admission his lifestyle and the one imposed by the NDA were mutually abrasive. What is most significant are the years Samar spent there – 1991 to 1994. Years that ‘bookend’ Ayodhya 1992, the anti-Muslim riots in Bombay and the subsequent bomb blasts by Muslim members of the underworld.

For a man who was 120 hours away from becoming a gentleman cadet at the Indian Military Academy (IMA), Samar holds no bitterness against the institution. On the contrary, he loves the army, its regimen, its code, its very raison d’être. But he believes civilian India with its growing prejudices silently infiltrates the best of institutions in the only way infiltration can – through a few individuals. Here he is emphatic the infiltration was neither devised nor was it excessively malevolent. "Post-Babri Masjid it was terribly difficult being a Muslim. These individuals expected you to hate Hindus or at the very least were fairly convinced you harboured feelings of resentment against them. Did they hate Muslims in turn? I don’t think so. Were they now a little guarded around their Muslim colleagues at the NDA? Possibly. Were they simply more aware of a classmate’s ‘Muslimhood’? Definitely."

Shaurya is about a Muslim army captain brought to trial for shooting his superior, Major Rathore, at point-blank range while on a night raid in Kashmir. An army lawyer defends this seemingly hopeless case only to find that the major was one of his commanding officer, Brigadier Pratap’s band of communal-minded protégés out to purge the country of all Muslims. The trial is successfully fought and the captain acquitted with honour.

Discussions on the film with a few senior members of the army at different points of time have elicited a fairly unanimous response. One, there is no way religious prejudice in an officer would go unnoticed till he achieved brigadier status. In all cases a communal mind-set is spotted and corrected at a more junior level. Two, there are definitely communal elements in the army but it is always the individual and never the institution. It is correlated to the rise of communalism in civilian India. Three, and most interestingly, the wives of the four officers of colonel rank who I was speaking to on one occasion unanimously agreed that the anti-Muslim sentiment in the army was far higher than their husbands claimed.

While all conclusions based on this random, minuscule sampling must be severely discounted, the unanimity on all three points is certainly interesting. On another occasion I raised the issue of being a Muslim jawan or junior officer in Kashmir with a major-general who had served in the region. He was absolutely sure a discriminatory attitude existed. Not sharing his cynicism, a host of his juniors strenuously countered his argument. Both sides sounded pretty convincing.

As interesting as the rise of the communal mind-set in civilian India and its repercussions on our institutions founded on the principles of secularism is, equally significant for me is how this mind-set is handled by the institutions concerned. Few civilians know that court martials in the army don’t necessarily have to be closed trials. The commanding officer on the case can decide to make it a public trial.

Looking beyond the army there is absolutely no doubt that our civil and administrative services are subtly yet definitely fractured along communal and/or political lines. Having experienced blatant non-cooperation from civil servants who are sympathetic to the cause of right-wing Hindutva, I asked a few members of the civil services how this could be countered and the startling answer was forget about countering, this trend was being further fostered by alumni of the services meeting new inductees in their colleges to subtly spread the communal doctrine. This was corroborated by a few Dalit trainees who claimed they suffered discrimination during training.

So what do our institutions do about this? The only thing they can. Reiterate the theory of secularism as laid down in the Constitution. A theory that today seems naïve in its assumptions. That people hear but don’t listen to. That seems utopian, pedantic and far removed from reality. Ironical, because the beauty of secularism is that it is so easy to fall in love with because practising it makes one feel open, free of fear, strong.

But perhaps the most important point to make is that in today’s India a vibrant secular movement has to start from civil society. Just as the doctrine of any religious fundamentalism, be it Christian, Islamic or Hindu, rises from civil society and spreads its tentacles into established institutions, so should the principles of secularism. I believe the country is too far gone down the communal river to think that the passive, ‘kind-uncle’ secularism of the past is going to be the bulwark against communalism. It’s time we developed an aggressive secular agenda. One that makes a convincing argument to establish why religious non-discrimination is an energising, even profitable proposition. One which convinces people to practise certain directives on a day-to-day basis. This is what our institutions will be happy, even relieved, to borrow, to effectively neutralise the spread of hatred.

Coming back to Shaurya. It is a matter of sadness to me that in the movie the argument for hatred seems as – if not more – attractive than the argument for peace and non-discrimination. (This is an entirely personal opinion, I might add.) I wonder if in making for an engrossing, entertaining climax Samar has not short-changed his emotional reason for writing this story. Did he too unwittingly succumb to the belief that hatred and violence are more riveting in cinema than peace and love?