Akshay Kumar and Katrina Kaif starrer Sooryavanshi was recently released in theatres around the country. Directed by Rohit Shetty, the movie scripted a comeback of Bollywood at the box-office after long Covid lockdowns, but it also managed to draw the ire of liberals, who have accused the movie of being Islamophobic.

Though the movie’s storyline is not entirely novel, it highlights the prevailing menace of Islamic terrorism tormenting the Indian society and how a conscientious policeman, played by Akshay Kumar, makes it the purpose of his life to stop the Islamic terrorists from fulfilling their nefarious designs and carrying out attacks in India. 

As the movie’s plot revolves around the scourge of Islamic terrorism, it was but obvious that the terrorists or villains depicted in the movie would be shown as puritanical Muslims who were brainwashed and radicalized to carry out terror attacks against innocent people. As various terror attacks in India have proved, this is not a fiction that Rohit Shetty weaved in his movie but a sordid reality. 

But the portrayal of threats that Islamic terrorism poses to society has ruffled quite a few feathers, causing the ‘liberals’ to brand the film as Islamophobic. The depiction of Muslims in negative roles has raised the hackles of the liberals, who are probably outraged because the movie attempts to draw attention towards the grim reality of Islamic radicalization and terrorism in India.

‘Liberals’ take offence over negative portrayal of Muslim characters in movies and series

Rana Ayyub, one of the leading luminaries of India’s left intelligentsia, and a habitual fake news peddler took offense at the portrayal of Muslims in the movie. She was visibly upset with the movie and made no bones about it on her Twitter account. 

Lambasting at the movie, Rana tweeted, “Muslims offer namaz before acts of terror, Muslims need to be taught patriotism, love jihad, terrorism wiped out after 370 revoked, Muslims ungrateful and the trope of good Muslim versus bad Muslim(decided by an upper-caste Hindu). This is the film Sooryavanshi in a nutshell.”

Well, this is not the first time that ‘liberals’ had taken offense to the portrayal of Islamic terrorism in India. Earlier this year, Manoj Bajpayee-starrer Family Man 2 was released on the OTT platform Amazon Prime. The second volume of the much-popular series showed how Islamic terrorists from Pakistan colluded with Sri Lankan terrorists to carry out an attack against India’s Prime Minister. 

The series also showed a Muslim boy posing as a Hindu to entrap Manoj Bajpayee’s daughter in a love relationship, only to hold her captive and gain leverage over her father, who worked as an intelligence officer responsible for thwarting terror attacks in India. It was a subtle depiction of how love jihad worked in the society, where unsuspecting Hindu girls are lured into relationships by Muslim men portraying themselves as Hindus and later forcibly converted into Islam. 

And on expected lines, liberals were offended with the series, accusing it of showing “deep-seated Islamophobia” and validating the prevalence of love jihad. Rana Ayyub had in June 2021 expressed her disapproval of the fictional series. Although she did not name the series, the references made to Bajpayee’s Family Man 2 in her tweet were unmistakable. 

Although Sooryavanshi deals with the pervasive issue of Islamic terrorism and radicalization existing in the country, it is after all a fictional movie. However, even then, liberals believe that Muslims should not be shown playing negative characters. They even want incidents such as love jihad, which has a clear religious connotation attached to it, to be swept under the rug as the lives of the victims are of lesser importance as compared to preserving the “secular” fabric of the country. 

Sooryavanshi pins the blame of India’s partition on Hindus, depicts Muslim terrorists as ‘victims’ of atrocities committed by Hindus

In addition to this, the movie ‘Sooryavanshi’ or for that matter the Amazon Prime series ‘Family Man 2’ cannot be categorized as creations that perpetuate Islamophobia, not by a long shot. Rather, the makers of these movies have deliberately tried to water down the menace of Islamic terrorism by gratuitously giving a ‘secular’ context to their depravity. 

For example, in the movie, Jackie Shroff, who plays the character of Lashkar terror chief rationalizes his decision of taking up terrorism by blaming Hindus for the country’s partition. He says his father was beheaded, his sister was raped in front of him when he was 5-years-old and that they were thrown out of their house in 1947. 

This is the opening scene of the movie During name casting. Following this sequence, a caption appears on the screen that reads: “An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind”. It is hard to miss that Hindus are painted as aggressors through this caption by depicting that the partition violence was caused by them and that Islamic terrorism was one of the fallouts of the bloody partition. The partition of India happened because an overwhelming number of Muslims wanted an Islamic nation, but that sad reality has been conveniently ignored.

“They beheaded my father, raped my sister in front me when I was 5 year old. Kicked us out of our own home & country in 1947”

– Lashkar Chief(@bindasbhidu) explains how he became terrorist#Sooryavanashi by @akshaykumar & Rohit Shetty blames H for partition & starting terrorism

— Gems of Bollywood (@GemsOfBollywood) November 9, 2021

The thousands of Hindus who were slaughtered in Bengal to fulfill Jinnah’s Direct Action Day command have been ignored too.

Through Jackie Shroff’s lament, the makers of Sooryanvashi try to insinuate that Hindus were responsible for the country’s partition and for pushing Shroff into terrorism while in reality, it was the Muslim League and their bigoted supporters who wreaked havoc and brought about the partition of the country into India and Muslim-majority Pakistan. The partition saw widespread violence that was touched off by provocateurs in chief of the Muslim League, most notably MA Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, and other Muslims who believed in the supremacy of Islam over other religions.

Liberals taking offence over a Hindu distinguishing between a good and a bad Muslim is nothing but a manifestation of two-nation theory

The supremacist belief was also reflected in Rana Ayyub’s tweet where she highlights that an upper-caste Hindu distinguishes between a good and a bad Muslim. Ayyub’s disapproval with this notion that Hindus have the agency to differentiate between who is a righteous Muslim and who has gone awry is starkly similar to the Muslim League’s belief that Hindu representatives cannot represent the interest of Muslims. Venkat Dhulipalla in his seminal work ‘Creating a New Medina‘ highlighted how Muslim League had demanded separate electorate for the Muslim population because they were deeply distrustful of Hindu representatives. 

Therefore, Ayyub and liberals’ objection to a Hindu police officer distinguishing between a good and bad Muslim is another manifestation of the two-nation theory, a hypothesis peddled by the Muslim League to argue that Muslims and Hindus are fundamentally irreconcilable and that the only way for the two to exist is the partition of the country in Hindu majority and Muslim majority nations. Of course, India rejected the notion and assimilated people from all walks of life while Pakistan treated Muslims as first among equals and discriminated against people belonging to the minorities. As has been evident by countless incidents in the past, the liberals have their affinity towards Pakistan while their obsession with preserving secularism is just a charade to whitewash Islamic terrorism. 

In another preposterous attempt to understate the menace of Islamic terrorism, the movie goes on to provide justifications for why a terrorist named Bilal Ahmed embraced terrorism. The movie shows Ahmed’s slide to terrorism took place after his family was burnt to death by a communally charged-up mob. Then the movie tries to draw a distinction between a good and a bad Muslim, showing how Allah helps an upright Muslim officer in nabbing the dreaded terrorist. 

Bilal Ahmed is notorious terrorist
But
1 He became terrorist ONLY because his family was burnt to death for communal reasons
2 He got tracked ONLY because Allah helped a sachcha Muslim police officer see Bilal while doing Ibadat!#sooryavanshi by @akshaykumar and Rohit Shetty

— Gems of Bollywood (@GemsOfBollywood) November 9, 2021

The pusillanimity of Indian film makers in showing how terrorists draw inspirations from Islamic religious texts

This is yet another perversion that not only tries to draw a veil over the menace of “Islamism” that drives its adherents to wage unspeakable atrocities against non-Muslims in the name of waging ‘jihad’, but it also tries to paint Hindus as the troublemakers who compelled the otherwise ‘righteous’ Muslims to walk down the path of extremism. Hardly any movie maker demonstrates the courage of showing the reality of Islamism as it is. They would dare not highlight how terrorists draw inspiration to attack non-Muslims through Islamic religious texts and Hadiths that endorse using violence as a tool to subjugate non-believers, especially idolators(idol-worshippers).

As against this reluctance to show the reality of Islamism, filmmakers show remarkable courage and liberty in citing obscure Hindu texts to assert that Hindus justify social inequities such as caste discrimination, untouchability, and others. In fact, the movie makers go on to defend vile distortions in their movies by hiding behind the veneer of “artistic freedom” to justify the warped turn of events and twisted facts depicted in their creations. Recently, a movie named Jai Bhim, which was touted to be based on a true incident, showed the villain from the Vanniyar community even though in reality the villain was a person named Anthony Sami. Similar distortions have been witnessed in various movies, where negative Muslim characters are glorified such as SRK’s Raees, or a Hindu character is depicted as Muslim to show India is Islamophobic as in the case of SRK’s Chak De India.

While Sooryavanshi shows Muslims turned to terrorism after atrocities meted out on them by Hindus, Indian Muslims in Kerala joining ISIS is a prime example of how Muslims do not have to be victims of atrocities or persecution to join the terror ranks. When ISIS was at its peak a few years ago, a large number of Indians from Kerala had travelled to Syria with the aim of joining the Islamic Caliphate and bringing the world under one Ummah. They were not persecuted or brutalized in India to have escaped to the Middle East and join ISIS. Rather, they were inspired by the supremacist ideology of radical Islam and brutal ways adopted by ISIS to establish their rule. It is the ideology of radical Islam that calls upon faithful Muslims to constantly wage a war against the non-believers(Kafirs) and apostates and bring them under the fold of Islamic rule. 

However, hardly any movie dares to venture into these troubled waters. Filmmakers consciously refrain from showcasing how it is the Islamic texts advocating the supremacy of Islam over other religions and Islamic edicts calling for the persecution of non-Muslims that contribute massively towards Muslims embracing the path of extremism and violence. Instead, Muslims are branded as victims of some atrocity to rationalize their decision of embracing violence and extremism. This is how movies are ‘secularised’ so that there is always a justifiable reason for Muslims to take up arms while Hindus are invariably vilified as a bigoted community, actions of which had pushed the Muslim antagonists to the abyss of Islamic terrorism. 

The evangelical zeal displayed by liberals in whitewashing Islamic terrorism

If even this grotesque perversion is labeled as Islamophobia, then it is quite clear that liberals are averse to the very idea of Muslim characters playing negative roles. They want filmmakers to not only gloss over the unvarnished reality of Islamic texts and scriptures encouraging Muslims to indulge in ‘jihad’ and carry out terror attacks against non-Muslims, but also to portray Muslim characters always in a positive light. Any movie that fails to comply with this liberal diktat is summarily rejected as Islamophobic and anti-Muslim. 

Scores of liberals then take to denouncing the movie or series as Islamophobic, just because it may have showcased some negative characters as Muslims and picturized real-life incidents like many Islamist attacks carried out in India or even harsh realities such as the prevalence of love jihad. They have made it their cri de cœur to oppose and resist any movie or artistic creation, even if they are rooted in fiction if they perceive them showing Muslims in a bad light. Apparently, the trope of “artistic freedom” exists only for Hindus who protest against unwarranted bastardization of facts to portray them as negative. When a film maker exercises his artistic freedom in so far as to just portray villains as Muslims, the liberal ecosystem springs into action, slamming the movie as “Islamophobic” and accusing the maker of harboring pathological hatred against Muslims.

As we have seen with Sooryavanshi, where Islamic terrorism was downplayed and to an extent justified as a consequence of perceived atrocities committed by Hindus, the liberals nevertheless are still rattled with the movie and have shown missionary zeal in denigrating it as Islamophobic. This is a perfect example of how whitewashing of Islamism is carried out—take offense on the most trivial facets of movies such as a Muslim character being the bad person and depiction of real-life events such as love jihad so that filmmakers are discouraged from calling attention towards more serious aspects such as maximalist doctrines and religious scriptures that form the cornerstone of Islamic terrorism or Islamism.