The popular ‘get in, take out militants’ sentiment has existed long before it got actualised for the general public with the 2016 and 2019 surgical strikes. Before that, the shroud of mystery around cross-border ops was a vacuum gladly filled by Bollywood, with several films — successfully or not — fulfilling popular fantasy
Abhimanyu Mathur (BOMBAY TIMES; March 1, 2019)

When 12 Mirage 2000 jets of the Indian Air Force flew across the LoC in the early hours of February 26 to target terror outfit Jaish-e-Mohammad’s training camps in Balakot, Chakothi, and Muzaffarabad, it marked a seminal moment for India. Not only was it the first time in over four decades that Indian fighter jets crossed the LoC, it was also the first time ever that the Indian forces were going for a terror mastermind beyond the Indian boundaries. Senior Jaish leader Maulana Yousuf Azhar was one of the targets at the Balakot camp. While in reality, it may have been the first-of-its-kind operation, on screen, India has time and again carried out successful operations behind enemy lines, bringing to justice terror masterminds (based on characters) like Hafiz Saeed, Maulana Masood Azhar, and Dawood Ibrahim.


WHEN BOLLYWOOD TURNED CROSS-BORDER AVENGER

The first film to tackle this was Zameen in 2003. Based on the IC-814 hijacking, the movie saw an army officer (Ajay Devgn) and a cop (Abhishek Bachchan) rescue hostages from a hijacked plane in Pak-occupied-Kashmir and nab the mastermind Baba Zaheer (based on Masood Azhar). Indian cinema did not attempt another covert terror mastermind extraction for another decade till Nikhil Advani had the intelligence forces bring back a Dawood Ibrahim clone in the 2013 film, D-Day. The director tells us, “The idea of D-Day germinated when the US went to get Osama Bin Laden on May 2, 2011. So, when I was driving from my house to my office, my driver asked me that if USA can do this, why can’t India do it, why can’t we bring Dawood Ibrahim? When I reached office, all my assistants were on social media and the only question doing the rounds was, why couldn’t India do it? So, what occurred to me was whether it was someone like my chauffeur, who was completely uneducated, or my assistants, who were graduates from FTII, Jamia, the conversation was the same. The question, the thought, resonated across social and class structures. There was this whole notion of why does India tend to not retaliate or not do what is possible.”

If the US had 9/11, India had its own tragedy to draw inspiration from. While the terrorists who executed the 26/11 attacks in Mumbai were either killed or captured and executed later, there has been a feeling that their handlers and the masterminds have remained unpunished. Hussain Zaidi’s book Mumbai Avengers chronicled a fictitious operation of Indian forces bringing back the 26/11 mastermind Hafiz Saeed (Haaris Saeed in the book) back to India to face trial. The book inspired the 2015 film, Phantom. Speaking to us prior to the film’s release, director Kabir Khan had said, “This is a film that is in some way living out the fantasy of a lot of people in this country. Having said that, it is in no way saying that this is what India should do, as there are many other reasons and that counterpoint is also present in the film as to why India, in reality, does not do it. We have never believed in vigilante justice. We have never gone into this cowboy kind of adventure that America does.” The same year saw the release of Baby. The Neeraj Pandey film saw an Indian task force capture and bring back Pak-based terror mastermind Maulana (Masood Azhar anyone?) from UAE to India. “Equal measures of fiction and research was bound together in the script of Baby. It is my ode to those unknown heroes, who give a damn and put the country before self to keep us safe in our homes,” Neeraj Pandey had said while talking about what prompted him to make the film.

The common thread in all these films is that they were covert operations. A small team, mostly led by intelligence operatives, crosses enemy lines and brings back the mastermind without much pomp and show. In contrast, when the US went to capture and kill Laden, they had two choppers and dozens of Navy SEALs on the ground in Pakistani territory. Kabir Khan had expressed his desire to see India launch such an operation, but cautiously added why he feels it would remain on the screen only. “I sometimes do feel I wish I could see such a scenario being played out, but I also understand the larger ramifications. So, I also understand that this kind of adventure can only be carried out in cinema and not in real life,” the director had told us in 2015.

The IAF operation has been closer to the American approach in that regard. The government’s stance that this is a ‘new India that strikes back’ is reflected in that approach. Filmmakers, however, say that the situation might have changed, but their films won’t. Even if they made them today, they would still make them much the same way. D-Day director Nikhil Advani tells us, “I don’t think a film like D-Day would be written any differently today. D-Day is about bringing Dawood Ibrahim back. It will be the same thing today. We can’t go into Karachi. There are apparently satellite photographs as evidence that Dawood stays at Clifton, Karachi, but Pakistan won’t agree to it. Bringing Dawood the way we have shown in the film is still dramatic, but there are various missions that have been tabled, but couldn’t get through.”

— With inputs from Divya Kaushik


CROSS-BORDER OPERATIONS ON SCREEN

ZAMEEN (2003)
Starring: Ajay Devgn, Abhishek Bachchan, Bipasha Basu
Directed by: Rohit Shetty
Plot: After a terrorist who masterminded an attack on the Indian Parliament (Baba Zaheer, based on Maulana Masood Azhar) is captured by the Indian Army, his organisation hijacks a plane and takes it to PoK, demanding their leader’s release. The Indian Army, assisted by an ACP from the Anti-Terrorist Squad, undertakes a daring rescue operation, freeing all the hostages, recapturing the freed Baba Zaheer, and throwing him out of a helicopter. The entire rescue operation was inspired by the Israel Defence Forces’ famous rescue of their hostages from a hijacked plane at the Entebbe Airport in 1976.

D-DAY (2013)
Starring: Irrfan, Rishi Kapoor, Arjun Rampal
Directed by: Nikhil Advani
Plot: An undercover RAW operative in Pakistan (Irrfan) is tasked with finding ways to assassinate a D-company leader, identified in the film by his codename Goldman (Rishi Kapoor). Goldman’s appearance and the fact that his son is to marry a Pakistani cricketer’s daughter are obvious reference to Dawood Ibrahim. In the end, a small team of Indian Army and intelligence operatives capture Goldman from his son’s wedding and bring him to Indian territory, before shooting him. Coincidentally, the film’s tagline was ‘India Strikes Back’, one of the trending hashtags after the IAF mission this week.


BABY (2015)
Starring: Akshay Kumar, Anupam Kher, Taapsee Pannu, Rana Daggubati.
Directed by: Neeraj Pandey
Plot: The film follows the journey of a task force codenamed Baby that was formed after the 26/11 attacks. They find and eliminate terror threats to India from beyond Indian borders and during one such mission, encounter the 26/11 mastermind (identified as Maulana Mohammad Saeed Rahman) in Dubai. The team captures and brings Maulana back to India and hands him over to the army in secret.

PHANTOM (2015)
Starring: Saif Ali Khan, Katrina Kaif. Directed by: Kabir Khan
Plot: A team of RAW and army operatives get together to bring the perpetrators and planners of the 26/11 attacks to justice. The film used real names like David Headley, while slightly tweaking the name of the alleged mastermind and Lashkar-e-Taiba founder, Hafiz Saeed to Haaris Saeed. The film saw the heroes find and kill all major planners of the attack, one after the other. The plot was inspired by Israeli intelligence Mossad’s assassination of all the Palestinian attackers involved in the 1972 Munich attack.