Shahid: Gutsy take on an incredible life

Filmmaker Hansal Mehta, back in harness after a four-year hiatus, has done the unthinkable. In a movie industry where playing safe is the only game most people know, he has gone a made a feature film about the incredible life of TADA detainee-turned-human rights lawyer Shahid Azmi.

 

The film, titled Shahid and jointly produced by Anurag Kashyap and Sunil Bohra, received its world premiere in the buzz-generating City to City programme of the 37th Toronto International Film Festival this week.

 

Mehta presents the details of Shahid Azmi’s life in a matter of fact but unambiguously empathetic manner just the way the activist-lawyer would probably have wanted it had he been allowed to continue to live and do his good work. The young man never sought to hide his past, which included a short-lived stint in a terrorist training camp in Pakistan Occupied Kashmir and many years of incarceration in Tihar Jail on charges of plotting against the state. The flimsy allegations were never proved and Shahid Azmid walked free and touched many lives in the remaining years of his life.

 

Having been at the receiving end of a grave miscarriage of justice, the amiable Azmi acquired a law degree and, in a brief but spectacular career, took up legal cudgels on behalf of many innocents accused of acts of terror. In the seven years that he practiced until he was gunned down in his office in February 2010 presumably because he was defending an accused in the 26/11 terrorist attack case, Azmi secured as many as 17 acquittals.

 

Mehta’s film, which focuses on only two of the many cases Azmi fought, is as impressively even-handed as it is utterly fearless. It takes forward the principal burden of Azmi’s defining argument against the law enforcement and judicial system’s callous tendency to brand every single accused as a terrorist but does so without taking recourse to any kind of emotional manipulation.

 

Anchored by a steady lead performance by Raj Kumar Yadav (who debuted in Dibakar Banerjee’s Love Sex Aur Dhoka and played character roles in Ragini MMS, Shaitan and Gangs of Wasseypur 2), Shahid is an important film that deserves to be protected from the vile attention of the rightwing forces that are ever willing to jump to cavalier conclusions and take the easy way out of complex situations.

 

Nearly a decade ago, Mehta’s Dil Pe Mat Le Yaar, a film about an upcountry man who relocates to Mumbai in search of green pastures, had provoked the ire of Shiv Sena goons, then led by a man who went on to earn much notoriety as the brain behind the MNS. So he wouldn’t have been unaware of the risks inherent in telling the world where Shahid Azmi came from and what exactly he was trying to achieve as a lawyer. That he chose to make this film nonetheless proves the sternness of the stuff that he is made of. 

 

Hansal Mehta deserves more than just a standing ovation. By daring to stick his neck out, he has earned the right to demand steadfast support from all like-minded people. Are we up for it?