The hypocrisy of the on-screen Ajit Doval bashing the previous Congress-led administration would have been tragic if it were not comically illogical. This is the same Vajpayee-led administration that seemingly kept funding his undercover operation in order to demonstrate institutional maturity in national security matters.

In the film, the character of Ajay Sanyal is inspired by Doval. He is portrayed as the only bureaucrat in the sprawling military establishment who cares about the country and, at the same time, as an arbiter of others’ nationalism. He is the one who sends the film’s main character, Hamza Ali Mazari, into Pakistan as an undercover spy.

In one of the scenes, Mazari is seen riding a motorcycle while drunk. Behavior such as this would be a red flag for any spy handler, but not for the juvenile caricature of Doval. Given the embarrassing details that have emerged from the botched assassination plot against Sikh separatist leader Gurpatwat Singh Pannun on American soil by hired gun Nikhil Gupta, perhaps a drunk, bike-riding spy in Pakistan is a fitting tribute to the incompetence demonstrated by the Indian government. Logic, it seems, is the first casualty of pseudo-nationalism.

Similarly, making the fictionalized Doval claim that Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) is directly or indirectly responsible for all the terrorist attacks in the world has no comparison in any of the above-mentioned global hits. While monolithic in their portrayal of Western democracies as the good guys, the films don’t assume that their audiences are stupid or naïve regarding history.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

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