The Bengal Files: Yet Another Crude Propaganda Film Propagating Toxic Lies Promoting the Regime's Agenda!

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sukla.sen

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Aug 19, 2025, 10:54:05 PMAug 19

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The Bengal Files: Official Trailer

[So, this caricature of Jinnah -- i.e. his evil features considerably exaggerated and positive features blotted, is obviously the template, of course in the reverse mode, followed by this Agnihotri and his likes.

The renowned scholar Christophe Jaffrelot very perceptively called it the strategy of "stigmatise and emulate".

(Hindus are nice.

Muslims are evil. They're lustful. They rape! They murder!

So, Hindus must do likewise!)

The gross caricaturing of Jinnah here -- a (fancifully constructed) modern version of Alauddin Khilji -- is only meant to make Hindus trample the call for peace, amity and conviviality cutting across religious and other dividing lines by Gandhi -- Jinnah's bugbear -- under their feet.

The Muslims mock Gandhi -- a great Hindu!

So, we, the Hindus, must also do likewise!

The very gists of the three major contending visions of the Indian past and, way more importantly, the longed for future -- in the run-up to Independence:

I. Jinnah's infamous lines in 1940, in Lahore in Muslim League conclave:

<<It is extremely difficult to appreciate why our Hindu friends fail to understand the real nature of Islam and Hinduism. They are not religions in the strict sense of the word, but are, in fact, different and distinct social orders; and it is a dream that the Hindus and Muslims can ever evolve a common nationality; and this misconception of one Indian nation has gone far beyond the limits and is the cause of more of our troubles and will lead India to destruction if we fail to revise our notions in time. The Hindus and Muslims belong to two different religious philosophies, social customs, and literature[s]. They neither intermarry nor interdine together, and indeed they belong to two different civilisations which are based mainly on conflicting ideas and conceptions. Their aspects [=perspectives?] on life, and of life, are different. It is quite clear that Hindus and Mussalmans derive their inspiration from different sources of history. They have different epics, their heroes are different, and different episode[s]. Very often the hero of one is a foe of the other, and likewise their victories and defeats overlap. To yoke together two such nations under a single state, one as a numerical minority and the other as a majority, must lead to growing discontent, and final. destruction of any fabric that may be so built up for the government of such a state.>>

(Ref.: <http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00islamlinks/txt_jinnah_lahore_1940.htm>.)

II. Savarkar actually precedes Jinnah in 1937, in Ahmedabad in his presidential address to the Hindu Mahasabha:

<<As it is, there are two antagonistic nations living side by side in India. Several infantile politicians commit the serious mistake in supposing that India is already welded into a harmonious nation, or that it could be welded thus for the mere wish to do so... Let us bravely face unpleasant facts as they are. India cannot be assumed today to be a Unitarian[sic] and homogeneous nation, but on the contrary there are two nations in the main; the Hindus and the Moslems, in India.>>

(Ref.: <https://savarkar.org/en/pdfs/hindu-rashtra-darshan-en-v002.pdf>.)

III. Starkly contrasted with this is Abul Kalam Azad -- in 1940 in Ramgarh in his address as the newly elected President of the Indian National Congress:

<<Eleven hundred years of common history have enriched India with our common achievement. Our languages, our poetry, our literature, our culture, our art, our dress, our manners and customs, the innumerable happenings of our daily life, everything bears the stamp of our joint endeavour. There is indeed no aspect of our life which has escaped this stamp. Our languages were different, but we grew to use a common language; our manners and customs were dissimilar, but they acted and reacted on each other, and thus produced a new synthesis. Our old dress may be seen only in ancient pictures of bygone days; no one wears it today.

This joint wealth is the heritage of our common nationality, and we do not want to leave it and go back to the times when this joint life had not begun. If there are any Hindus amongst us who desire to bring back the Hindu life of a thousand years ago and more, they dream, and such dreams are vain fantasies. So also if there are any Muslims who wish to revive their past civilization and culture, which they brought a thousand years ago from Iran and Central Asia, they dream also, and the sooner they wake up the better. These are unnatural fancies which cannot take root in the soil of reality. I am one of those who believe that revival may be a necessity in a religion but in social matters it is a denial of progress.

This thousand years of our joint life has moulded us into a common nationality. This cannot be done artificially. Nature does her fashioning through her hidden processes in the course of centuries. The cast has now been moulded and destiny has set her seal upon it. Whether we like it or not, we have now become an Indian nation, united and indivisible. No fantasy or artificial scheming to separate and divide can break this unity. We must accept the logic of fact and history, and engage ourselves in the fashioning of our future destiny.>>

(Ref.: <https://franpritchett.com/00litlinks/txt_azad_congress_1940.html>.)

They speak for themselves. All too eloquently.

All the three, it must be noted, have, to considerably varying extents, mythified the past in order to rationalise their visions of the future -- but, in so very contrasting ways!

Quite visibly, those who had launched and led the epic Indian freedom struggle had a view of India's past and future very different from those who had scrupulously stayed away and even opposed.

Consequently, while the Islamic camp fought for and obtained the Partition of the country, the camp of "Hindutva", post-Independence, would deride its Constitution, flag and anthem.

That's how a "Hindu" fanatic -- a close associate of Savarkar, who had done nothing to dislodge the British colonial rule -- would assassinate the "Father of the [New Emerging] Nation", in his late seventies, virtually on the very morrow of the just gained independence.

The movie under discussion here is only the continuation of that assassination by some other means.