By Ali M. Latifi
ALMOST immediately after the 22 April attack that killed 26 people in Indian-administered Kashmir, India pointed its finger at regional rival Pakistan, alleging that the deadliest attack in the valley since 2019 had “cross-border linkages”.
In the ensuing weeks, New Delhi has repeatedly used that accusation to target Pakistan with military strikes – dubbed Operation Sindoor – despite providing no clear evidence to support it.
It hasn’t just been rockets that have been lobbed, though. A war of increasingly hostile words and threats is underway. For weeks now, the Indian media, both traditional and online, has exploded with vitriolic anti-Pakistani, anti-Muslim, and anti-Kashmiri rhetoric. People seem to think it’s ok to take to social media to say things like India “should start carpet bombing” Pakistan, while news stations feverishly throw around terms like “radical Islamist terror” in their reports.
And, it seems, India’s famed film industry is also getting in on the act.
A film adaptation of India’s “swift and strategic response” to the Pahalgam attack was recently announced, but that movie – which is months, if not years off – seems like an unnecessary indulgence. An exercise in propaganda and war porn.
Bollywood has already released a film – starring one of the most famous men in the world – that offers important lessons and insights for the country, particularly the supporters of Operation Sindoor.
It came out 18 years ago.
As a fan said on X, “In 2007, Bollywood made a movie that highlighted how Muslims are always forced to prove their alliance to the country, even if they dedicate their entire life to representing the country and making it proud. A lot of you watched it, and learnt absolutely nothing.”
She was of course referring to Chak De! India (Let’s Go! India), in which Shah Rukh Khan stars as a disgraced former captain of India’s national hockey team. His character, Kabir Khan, hopes his willingness to put together a proper women’s national hockey team will help him regain the support of a public that was quick to brand him a “traitor” for losing a World Cup match against Pakistan.
At the time of its release and in subsequent retrospectives, the trailer and promo materials chose to focus on the film as the story of a group of female athletes banding together to become a unified team and rise above sexist dismissals of their abilities.
It’s a shame that the film is remembered more as Bollywood’s take on a fairly standard sports movie trope and less for Khan’s character. Kabir Khan deserved to be one of SRK’s signature roles for what it said about anti-Muslim bigotry and hostility towards Pakistan, phenomena that are still rampant in Indian society.
In the opening minutes of the film, we see a montage of sensationalist television clips, interviews, and newspaper headlines that bear a striking resemblance to the Indian media’s coverage of the Pahalgam attack and Operation Sindoor.
Tabloid journalists follow Khan after he exits the stadium, fresh from the losing match. They try to bait him, “Do you really think Pakistan played better?”
His simple response of, “possibly,” only leads to further prying. Another journalist salaciously tries to spread a rumour that the Pakistan players are Khan’s “good friends”, simply because he dared to engage in good sportsmanship by hugging and shaking hands with the Pakistani captain following the loss.
The situation goes from bad to worse as pundits question, “whether Kabir Khan has played dirty with the country” – an implication that he purposely blew the game. As the rumours and character assassinations continue to spiral, a now-disgraced Khan and his mother are forced to go into seclusion.
For a character once seen as a national hero (much in the way the real Shah Rukh Khan has been for decades), the biggest blow comes when a little boy turns to his father and says: “I want to see what a traitor looks like.”
Even in its opening 10 minutes, a film from 18 years ago manages to touch on the very issues that have been dominating Indian media since the Pahalgam attack last month, including criticisms that Shah Rukh and his fellow Khans – Salman and Aamir – have not done enough to condemn the Pahalgam attack and insult Pakistan.
Aamir has even come under attack for meeting with Turkish First Lady Emine Erdogan, something which is being labelled as an example of him taking sides with “countries that go against national interests”.
Just like today, it shows how even the slightest hint of sympathy or connection to Pakistan could get even a megastar immediately branded a traitor in India.
Throughout the film’s two-and-a-half hour runtime, the media – and even some of the girls Khan is training – accuse him of throwing the infamous match in favour of Pakistan. What is inferred but never stated outright is an underlying accusation that he did so because he is a Muslim.
The closest we come to that is a commentator saying: “These kinds of people should have moved to Pakistan during the partition.”
Never in the film do they come right out and say that “these kinds of people” means Muslims, but they don’t have to. To anyone who knows anything about the history and politics of the region, especially since Modi’s rise to the prime ministership in 2014, mentioning the partition while talking about an athlete with the last name Khan says more than enough.
While campaigning for his record third term as prime minister last year, Modi employed terminology about India’s 200 million Muslims that has an eerie resemblance to the way Khan’s character was spoken about in the film.
Modi referred to Muslims as “infiltrators” and said he was up against a “vote jihad” campaign by Congress Party rivals. Again, Modi never outright said Muslims. Again, he didn’t have to. And again again, it’s a dangerous implication in an India where lynching of Muslims is on the rise and the police are often accused of having an anti-Muslim bias.
“Why kill everyone?”
One needn’t look far to see proof that the subtext of Chak De! still holds true.
In the weeks following the Pahalgam attack, two clips featuring two Indian boys – one Muslim, the other Hindu – have gone viral for what they say about the media, the military, and the roles they have played in the aftermath of the killings.
One features an adolescent boy from Bihar being hounded by an unseen interviewer who keeps trying to goad him into making defamatory or violent comments against Pakistan.
He is asked if he is “even a little ashamed” that he is an Indian who agrees with the statement “Pakistan Zindabad!” (Long live Pakistan!) and for saying Pakistan “shouldn’t be” destroyed. The boy refuses to give in to the pressure from behind the camera.
Eventually, after the interviewer refuses to accept just Kaif, he is forced to divulge his full name: Muhammad Kaif. That insistence on asking his full name (most Muslim men whose name starts with Muhammad usually refer to themselves as just the second part of their name in conversation) was called out for being a clear indication that the interviewer was looking to target and brand the boy. Especially after hearing he is from the state where Modi announced the perpetrators of the Pahalgam attack would be punished “beyond their imagination” only two days after the killings.
He goes on to say: “There are people over there [in Pakistan] too, here too. Hindus there too, Hindus here too. Everyone is human. Then why kill everyone.” He is then asked – in yet another accusatory tone – if someone taught him to think this way.
To most people, the teenager’s words would seem like an effort at common decency, especially for two neighbours with such longstanding historical, cultural, linguistic, and religious ties – something Shah Rukh himself has referred to in the past.
But to the interviewer, it is seen as going directly against the prevailing rhetoric – the narratives being espoused on Indian television where presenters flat out say families were “massacred by Pakistan-supported terrorists” in primetime.
This sort of inflammatory language is an example of what Ravish Kumar, the former senior executive editor of NDTV has called, “the weaponisation of Indian media” – one whereby presenters, anchors, and even noted academics are “day in and day out branding people, ‘You are a traitor,’ ‘You are pro-Pakistani,’ ‘You are anti-national,’ ‘You are anti-Hindu.’”
As a result, India is now ranked as the country most at risk of disinformation and misinformation campaigns.
All of this is in service of the Indian military’s campaign. An effort to make the shellings and drone strikes of Operation Sindoor seem like an unmitigated success, rather than address what the people of Kashmir said was a major security failure in one of the most militarised regions on Earth.
This fact was also pointed out by a little boy from Gujarat whose father was killed in the attack. “There was an Army base there, and they still had no idea,” the boy tells the swarm of reporters harassing him, asking him if he would vacation there again.
These two clips alone – there are many more like them – show how the Indian media has gone much further today than the caricature from the 2007 film to rile up decades-old tensions.
“Fact-based reportage has really taken a back seat. Opinion and debate shows are the norm”, documentarian Vinay Shukla pointed out during an interview last year.
One need only look at the uproar over Salman Khan’s now-deleted X post about the 10 May ceasefire for proof of Shukla’s point. Simply posting, “Thank God for ceasefire”, led to a man whose filmography has brought in more than $650 million at the box office being labelled – just like Shah Rukh’s fictitious superstar athlete – a traitor.
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