In JP Dutta’s 1997 film, Border, Second Lieutenant Dharamvir Singh Bhan, played by Akshaye Khanna, and Subedar Ratan Singh, played by Puneet Isaar, die a moving and dramatic death in the Battle of Longewala, fought in Rajasthan’s Thar Desert between 4 and 7 December 1971. Amid a musical crescendo, the scene is designed to raise patriotic fervour by highlighting the ultimate sacrifice made by these men. In reality, Bhan and Singh were not killed in Longewala. Singh died at the age of 92, in 2016, while Bhan died six years later. The movie shows the casualties to be in the hundreds, but only two Indian soldiers actually died—one on them on the battlefield. This tweak was ostensibly done to shore up the hero, played by Sunny Deol, who destroys the enemy in an angry rampage. This is only one among the many creative liberties Dutta takes in depicting the battle.
The film’s version of the battle is pitched against a column of Pakistani tanks, even though it had halted after encountering a cattle fence and mistaking it to be a minefield. The Indian company of 120 soldiers used their strong defensive position to hold off two brigades of the Pakistani infantry, who had artillery fire in support. The Indian Air Force’s fighter jets took care of the tanks, proving to be the decisive factor in winning the battle. Much of the fighting took place early in the morning, although the movie sets it at night. The terrain was neither hilly nor rocky but flat. According to most expert accounts, the Indian victory was, in large part, due to a series of Pakistani tactical errors. Jingoistic, nationalist and caricaturist, the film conveys a distinctly different impression.
Dutta defended his choices by arguing that his film was the “combination of real and commercial” and that he was “here to make a commercial film based on a true story.” His film, otherwise, would have been “more or less a documentary.” Border was a monstrous commercial success, but the publicity surrounding it created the impression that it was an authentic Indian war film. More annoyingly, it unleashed a series of cringeworthy—although largely commercially unsuccessful—films about the military. India’s first televised war, the Kargil conflict, was followed by a big shift in war visualisations. The images of film and news television merged, and the net effect was a dramatic increase of the valorisation of the soldier in the public imagination.
Post-Kargil films often became a convenient nationalist excuse for Pakistan-bashing and an opportunity to show the military in exalted ways. Kashmir is time and again invoked as a matter of national honour. “Doodh mangoge to kheer denge, Kashmir mangoge to cheer denge”—ask for milk and we’ll give you rice pudding, ask for Kashmir and we’ll tear you apart—is a malefic dialogue from the 2002 film Maa Tujhe Salaam. These films were an outcome of the first union government led by the Bharatiya Janata Party, which was trying to subtly leave its ideological imprint but was constrained by a coalition and the institutional checks of a fading but still effective Nehruvian state. The post-9/11 media environment, with its emphasis on the West’s global war on terror, facilitated a discourse that made these movies more acceptable.