Shahid

This is a well made film, but why make a martyr of the man whose life it’s about?

Civil rights lawyer Shahid Azmi was a shooting star, wresting 17 acquittals in 7 years, and was shot dead about three years ago. Shahid is a film on his life, and though it’s well made, it may be too early for hagiography.

The movie effectively shows how the State, faced with a spate of terror attacks in Mumbai in this case, has used draconian anti-terrorist laws to pick up suspects and detain them indefinitely without trial. It shows how Azmi (Raj Kumar Yadav) argued their cases by exposing the incompetence of police investigations and tearing apart the presentations of dim-witted State prosecutors. Without doubt, Azmi was an intelligent and brave lawyer. Yet, by the end of the movie, he is turned into a martyr for civil liberties.

Is Shahid celluloid journalism or is it a genuine biography?

Earlier in his life, Azmi had spent several years in prison himself as a terror suspect after he returned from a training camp in Pakistan Occupied Kashmir, but the film’s narrative gives short shrift to this period. No doubt he was an impressionable and highly charged young Muslim boy who was incensed by Mumbai’s post-Babri riots of 1992-93, but he did go to Kashmir and was arrested under TADA. This part of the film is opaque, seen through a glass darkly, and from a perspective that is entirely ‘victim/underdog’ oriented. The balance of the film is lost here.

Later, after Shahid Azmi has become a celebrated lawyer and the State prosecutor (Shalini Vatsa) refers to his past as a terror suspect, director Hansal Mehta presents this as an outrageous and obtuse query, an affront to a court of law. Is it really?

So though the film is well made—the courtroom scenes are particularly well designed, written and shot—the cinéma vérité style is deceptive.

The script turned Azmi into a hero even before Rak Kumar Yadav was cast to play him.

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Ajit Duara