Pacifism Has a Price and It Is Paid in Indian Blood

There is a familiar comfort in the argument that India's soul is best expressed through restraint and pacifism, that our truest cinema is the one that reaches across the border with a lamp rather than a rifle. It is a beautiful idea. It is also, when tested against the record of the last three decades, a dangerous one. The recent celebration of films built on reconciliation and the corresponding dismay at Dhurandhar and Uri rests on a premise that deserves scrutiny: that the impulse toward badla is a betrayal of the Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb, and that peace-loving India would do better to keep singing of shared poets and shared saints while the funerals continue.

The trouble is that reconciliation requires a partner. And the partner in question, Pakistan has, with a consistency that borders on the ideological, chosen otherwise.

Consider what the record actually shows. From the 1993 Bombay blasts to 26/11 to the Pahalgam killings of 2025, the pattern is not one of misunderstanding that a warmer film might have softened. It is one of deliberate, exported violence, planned and financed by state and non-state actors who do not share the sentimental vocabulary our filmmakers keep offering them. To answer that pattern with another meditation on brotherhood is not moral seriousness. It is a refusal to look.

We are often told this is merely a problem of Pakistan's generals, a military establishment that keeps hostility alive for its own institutional survival, while ordinary Pakistanis long for the same peace we do. It is a consoling story and there is a sliver of truth in it. But the evidence points to something deeper and harder to romanticize. A Pew Research Center survey released in August 2026 found that only about seven percent of Pakistanis hold a favourable view of India, while roughly nine in ten view it unfavourably and nearly three-quarters describe that view as very unfavourable, a sentiment spread broadly across every demographic group. That is not just a general's preference. That is a society's settled temperature. When hostility towards Hindus and India polls at that depth across the Pakistani population, the notion that a few well-meaning cultural gestures will melt it, begins to look less like optimism and more like denial.

None of this means the films of reconciliation are without value. Partition was a wound inflicted by the Muslim League and the 1946 provincial elections results are a testament to that fact. The art that mourns it honestly, that remembers the trains, the abandoned homes, the friendships severed by a line on a map earns its place. A nation that forgets the tragedy of 1947 becomes coarser for the forgetting. The objection is narrower and more specific: it is to the sleight of hand by which mourning the past is quietly converted into a prescription for the present. Grieving Partition is one thing. Suggesting that India's response to organized terror should be forbearance dressed as wisdom is quite another.

This is where Dhurandhar and Uri have been misread. They are not celebrations of bloodlust and treating them as such flattens what they actually express. They give voice to something that had gone unspoken for too long on Indian screens, the accumulated exhaustion of a country that extended its hand across the table again and again, through Lahore bus diplomacy and Agra summits and back-channel talks and drew back a stump each time. India did not arrive at badla casually. It arrived there after decades of the alternative and after burying the people who paid for that alternative's failure. To depict that weariness is not to abandon the tehzeeb. It is to be honest about who honoured it and who did not.

The deeper error in the pacifist critique is its quiet moral inversion. It asks the aggrieved to be gentle and treats the demand for justice as the coarser instinct. But there is nothing noble in a peace that exists only on one side of the border, purchased by pretending that the dead were an acceptable price for our self-image. A state's first obligation is to keep its citizens alive. The starting line of the Preamble of Indian constitution reads as ‘We, the people of India’ and the people of India matter. When cinema reflects a public that has finally said enough, it is not betraying India's better nature, it is finally taking that nature's most basic duty seriously.

Aman ki Asha was a lovely phrase. It failed not because Indians lacked goodwill but because goodwill was met, year after year, with planning meetings in Aabpara and Muridke and Bahawalpur and all those training camps beyond our reach. To keep prescribing the same medicine after the patient has repeatedly refused the cure is not compassion. It is negligence wearing compassion's clothes.

By all means, let us make films that mourn what we lost in 1947 and let us make them with tenderness. But let us stop pretending that tenderness toward a neighbour who has chosen enmity is the same thing as wisdom. Peace that ignores the price paid by the dead is not peace. It is only a more comfortable way of looking away.