This time, there is no excuse. They knew that people have caught on to their soft propaganda, and are not going to take things lying down. Yet, the Bollywood aka Urduwood elites have churned out yet another sub-par potboiler Pathaan which softens the image of Pakistan and, staggeringly, even Pakistan’s notorious spy agency ISI.

Pathaans (aka Pathan/Pasthun/Pakhtun) and madrasa teachers of Afghanistan are also shown as kind humanitarians, despite the Taliban – a Deobandi madrasa-trained Pathaan-dominated terror group – and other Afghan Islamists systematically cleansing that country of Hindu, Sikh and Shia Hazara minorities.

The film review that follows is based on inputs from someone who watched the movie (by paying the least possible amount) just to see what Yash Raj Films was going to dish out. What he saw left him sick to the stomach.

The movie starts with a Pakistani General in Lahore finding out he has cancer and just 3 years to live. Right at that moment, he and his doctor hear news on the TV about Article 370 abrogation. The doctor is outraged and the General calls it a ‘declaration of war’. He immediately gets on the phone with his superiors and says “time for diplomacy is over…if we keep depending on the UN Resolution, India’s next target will be our Azad Kashmi (PoJK)”.

Yes, you heard that right – we are asked to believe that Pakistan has been ‘pursuing diplomacy’ all this while: 1948 invasion of J&K via raping & pillaging Pathaan tribal marauders, 1971 genocide by Punjabi-Pathaan led Pak Army, Kargil war, cross-border terrorism launched by Pakistan Army-ISI since late 1980s as part of their death-by-a-1000-cuts strategy, 26/11 attack on Mumbai – all of this was part of ‘diplomacy’.

Then the General says, “jo jawab dena hai, woh koi khuda ka banda nahin kar sakta…shaitan se dosti karne ka waqt aa gaya hai” (no man of God/Allah can carry out our response, the time has come to befriend the devil).

So, now we are asked to believe that the countless number of blood-thirsty jihadis Pakistan has produced – men like LeT boss Hafiz Saeed, JeM boss Maulana Masood Azhar,  Maulana Ilyas Kashmiri (this barbarian beheaded veer hutatma jawan Bhausaheb Maruti Talekar and carried his head back to Pakistan. Jihadis played football with the head, then presented it to Pak President Musharaff who rewarded Kashmiri for his ‘bravery’), or the Pakistani soliders who inflicted the kind of torture on Capt. Saurabh Kalia and his men which would make even Nazis squirm; or the likes of Bharchundi dargah cleric Mian Mithoo who doesn’t blink an eye before abducting, raping and converting minor Hindu girls; or Pakistani cricketers like Shoaib Akhtar who dreams of Ghazwa-e-Hind and the ‘macho Pathaan’ Shahid Afridi who once smashed a TV in his home because his daughters mimicked doing an aarti after watching Hindus worshipping in a TV serial – these are all ‘khuda ke bande’.

So who is this devil with whom the Pakistani general is forced to shake hands, due to provocation by Bharat? None other than an ex-RAW agent ‘Jim’ played by John Abraham, a highly-decorated Bharatiya soldier gone rogue because the Govt. of India refused to pay Rs. 10 crores to Somalian pirates, leading to his pregnant wife’s murder.

“Did the govt. lack funds…what if a minister’s family had been taken hostage,” our hero ‘Pathaan’, played by Shah Rukh Khan, later asks with disgust when told Jim’s story, not so subtly pushing the blame on Bharat’s netas for Jim’s mass-murdering turn.

Jim now leads a terror groups called ‘Outfit X’ which works on contract basis, not for any ideological reasons. We are told that terror strikes claimed by Islamic terror outfits Daesh (another name for Islamic State aka ISIS) and Boko Haram were actually outsourced to Jim’s ‘private terrorist group’!

This is the thought being planted in impressionable minds – the greatest threat in the world today is not Islamic terror outfits like Al Qaeda, IS, Taliban, Pak Army-ISI, JeM, LeT, HuJI etc. working to establish Islamic caliphates or carry out Ghazwa-e-Hind….but terrorist outfits have become ‘corporates’, available to the highest bidder.

On to the film’s heroine, Dr. Rubina ‘Rubai’ Mohsin played by Deepika Padukone, a Pakistani doctor turned ISI agent, who has been sent by the Pakistani General to join Jim’s terrorist organization. Her father was tortured by the police in a Middle Eastern country for asking too many questions, and she and mother returned to Pakistan where she joined medical college. “Phir insaniyat ki khidmat ke liye tumne ISI join kar li” (then to serve humanity, you joined ISI), our hero says to her with a straight face, leaving the viewer unsure if he is serious or mocking.

Note: this is the same ISI which planned and executed the 26/11 Mumbai terror attack, directing terrorists over satellite phone on how exactly to torture and murder non-Muslim hostages.

“Are you actually a Pathaan…are you Muslim?”, our heroine asks the hero. Then we are told his backstory – he doesn’t know his parents, just that they abandoned him in a movie theatre. He lived in an orphanage, later a juvenile centre and then remand home (correctional facility for juvenile offenders). “My country raised me,” he says, motivating him to join the Indian Army to serve his nation like a good son.

“So how did you turn from Lawaaris (orphan) into Khuda Gawah” our heroine asks, making a play on the names of two old Bollywood films. The Urdu phrase Khuda Gawah meaning ‘God/Allah be my witness’ is often used by devout Muslims.

“In 2002, we were on a joint mission with the US Army in Afghanistan. My first mission. US had fired a missile after locking on to the GPS phone signal of a Talibani leader. But they had mistakenly targeted a maulana by the same name teaching in a madrasa with 30 kids,” our hero says.

With the missile about to strike, our hero snatches the maulana’s phone and throws it away, saving the kids, but injuring himself. He is nursed back to health from a coma by the Pathaan residents of that village, and a kind Pathaan lady ties a tabeez (Islamic amulet/charm) on his arm and calls him ‘Our Pathaan’. Every year since, our hero looks to celebrate Eid with his Pathaan family in Afghanistan.

Let’s agree to suspend our disbelief about things like how a man with no name joined the Indian Army, or technical questions about GPS-enabled mobile phones and missile tracking systems. There is a far more serious issue with what Pathaan has shown.

Showing Indian Army troops fighting in Afghanistan, alongside USA, when we have categorically resisted Western demands to do exactly this, is such a serious breach of national security, that it is staggering that our censor board, govt. and Army allowed this movie to pass. It reaffirms the widely held view in certain quarters that we are still a non-serious nation, sunk in meaningless Gandhian virtue signaling.

This film could potentially be taken at face value by a jihadi sitting in the Af-Pak region, to invent another reason to wage jihad against ‘infidel India’. So not just is Pathaan softening the image of ISI and the Islamist state of Pakistan, it is actually endangering Bharat by creating a false narrative about our military involvement in the US war in Afghanistan.

Moving on – after our hero is seemingly back-stabbed by the heroine, they have another meeting on streets of Europe. Rubina points a gun at an Indian agent named Raza, uttering the Arabic greeting Salaam–Alaikum (peace be upon you), but our hero comes up behind her and doesn’t just say the standard response walaikum assalam (and upon you be peace) but a long version walaikum assalam rahmatullahi barakatuh (may the peace, mercy, and blessings of Allah be with you too) which even some subcontinental Muslims would struggle to fathom.

Rubina then tells our hero about Jim’s evil bio-terrorism plot, and how he was hired by an extremist fringe in Pakistan angered over Article 370 abrogation by Bharat.

“It is not our government, but one General Qadir who joined hands with ISI extremists (sic) after Hindustan abrogated Article 370…I had no idea that my own people could resort to such madness. I am a solider like you Pathaan, who can do anything for her country, but killing thousands of innocents is not my (idea of) war,” she says.

However, after the two join forces against Jim, he still manages to escape with the mutated virus. At one point, Jim and Rubina come face to face and when he tells her she is betraying her own people, she says, “General Qadir is not ‘my people’. When my people hear what he’s done, they’ll bloody hang him.”

The way Pakistan and its people are portrayed in a positive light by Bollywood beggars belief. This is the same country which regards the ‘Butcher of Bangladesh’ General Tikka Khan – who oversaw the 1971 genocide of 3 million Bengalis, 2.4 million of which were Hindus, and sanctioned the mass rape of 200-400K girls & women to create a breed of ‘pure Muslims’ – as a national hero and promoted him to Chief of Army Staff in 1972 after he had orhcestrated one of the worst genocides the world has ever witnessed. Khan died of natural causes at age 87 in 2002, and was buried with “full military honors” at the Pakistani Army graveyard in Rawalpindi, near Islamabad.

Moving on with our movie. Rubina is taken into custody for interrogation by RAW, overriding Pathaan’s protest, as she is an ISI agent. Pathaan tells her that he won’t let anything happen to her, adding “Yeh ek Pathan ka wada hai” (this is a Pathan’s promise) for good effect. Creating this myth of Pathaan’s as a brave, honorable people has been a pet project of Bollywood nee Urduwood for long.

We see Rubina being tortured through waterboarding by Indian agents, when Pathaan comes and rescues her, saying “I am sorry Rubai, fear makes people blind.” He then assaults his own agents, and runs off with Rubina for the final showdown with Jim that takes place in Afghanistan, where Jim has positioned missiles containing the bioweapon.

One of the highlights of the film is when Avinash ‘Tiger’ Rathore (Salman Khan) makes an entry to rescue his fellow RAW agent Pathaan. Tiger’s trademark clothing is the keffiyeh – the black-and-white checkered scarf mostly worn by Arabs – his character was the hero in two previous films created by producer YRF as part of its Spy Universe – Ek Tha Tiger (2012) and Tiger Zinda Hai (2017).

Interestingly, in those earlier films, Tiger also falls in love with an ISI agent named Zoya Humaimi – they marry and live in hiding to get away from their respective agencies, and in one movie the couple even get the RAW and ISI to work together to save Indian & Pakistani nurses stuck in Iraq. The third movie in this franchise, War (2019) has another RAW agent gone rogue, ‘Kabir’ (Hrithik Roshan), as the apparent antagonist, while he is pursued by his own protégé Captain Khalid (Tiger Shroff).

Moral of the YRF Spy Universe franchise: RAW and ISI are somewhat similar entities, equally capable of good or bad. Moreover, RAW agents have a penchant for going rogue and turning into mass murderers. Both countries should ‘kiss and make up’, so that neither RAW nor ISI is needed anymore. Also, the best RAW agents are named – Tiger, Kabir, Khalid, Pathaan.

You can read this article about Bollywood’s long history of glorification of the highly-radicalized Pathaan community, if you still have doubts on why this movie is an abomination which no healthy society would have produced.

Conclusion

There is no easy way of saying this – anyone associated with the making of the movie Pathaan needs to be ashamed. One can still excuse those who went to see the movie – after all, awareness of true history is still abysmal in our country due to decades of conditioning by the Marxist-secularist-liberal cabal. Add to that, the glitz and glamour of the Bollywood PR machinery.

However, our Army and PMO (to whom RAW reports) need to take a stand, if the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) under Ministry of Information and Broadcasting lacks the guts to take on the Bollywood cabal. Movies like Pathaan and others from the YRF Spy Universe stable are not just degrading the image of the Indian Army and RAW by equating them to the Pakistani Army and ISI, Pathaan is directly endangering our soldiers by falsely portraying our military involvement in a controversial war waged on foreign soil. Bollywood cannot be allowed to toy with national interests while pursuing their deranged fantasies. Army and RAW/IB need to vet all scripts portraying them, and if needed, get a spot on the censor board.

Clearly, the additional scrutiny of Pathaan by CBFC and Delhi High Court due to protests by Hindu groups over the distasteful Besharam Rang song, failed to catch these rudimentary flaws in the movie.

But most of all, the makers of this movie – producer Aditya Chopra of Yash Raj Films (YRF), director Siddharth Anand, writers Shridhar Raghavan & Abbas Tyrewala; its star actors like Shah Rukh Khan, Deepika Padukone, John Abraham, Dimple Kapadia etc. – and the media outlets and reviewers who shilled for it, they all should be held accountable for creating a piece of propaganda that airbrushes the crimes of one of the most evil and religio-fascist nations the world has ever seen.

Below are some images that these elites should be forced to see – who knows, some of them may still have a conscience left to feel something for Hindus and fellow humans!

But expecting a change of heart from Bollywood elites, just like Lutyens’ intelligentsia, is futile. They are drunk on their power and live in an echo chamber which is disconnected from reality.

It is time to call a spade a spade, and stand unequivocally on the side of Dharma. I no longer share a sense of nationhood with such people, or those who support them. Their utter contempt for Hindu lives and for this ancient civilization of Bharat, must invite reciprocal action in the form of a social & civic backlash.