Under the shadow of the bomb

Jang aur Aman (War and Peace)
Directed by Anand Patwardhan
Screened at the 49th Sydney Film Festival

REVIEW BY EVA CHENG

Since it became formally independent 55 years ago, India has hardly known peace. The country has fought five wars since 1947, four with Pakistan which split away when decolonisation was won. It has engaged in military confrontations with Pakistan again in recent months, which threaten to escalate into a nuclear war.

Britain, the colonial master, had an interest in keeping post-independence India divided, thus it helped the Muslim capitalists and landlords carve out their own state. Hence the birth of Pakistan.

However, India's and Pakistan's new ruling classes were not satisfied with how the spoils were divided, especially in Kashmir, a "princely state" in India's north-west which was mainly populated by Muslims. Kashmir's Hindu feudal ruler in 1947 opted to join India rather than Pakistan, thus triggering Pakistan's 1948 war with India.

Since then, India's majority Hindus and Pakistan's Muslims have been indoctrinated by their rulers to hate one another. Pakistan's defeat in the 1948, 1965 and 1971 wars with India increased Islamabad's desperation to whip its hate-India campaign even harder. It turned feverish after 1974, when India tested its first atomic bomb. Islamabad and Delhi have been locked in a nuclear arms race ever since.

The Hindu-chauvinist wing of the Indian ruling class — led by Bharatiya Janata Party — has been conscious of using the bomb to enhance its divisive agenda, so much so that it ordered a nuclear test within days of winning power in 1996. That order was never carried out because the BJP lost power days later.

The BJP won power again in March 1998 and conducted five nuclear tests two months later. Pakistan answered those with six tests two weeks later.

India and Pakistan's nuclear arms race is the background against which Anand Patwardhan's Jang aur Aman is set. It doesn't devote much space to the important historical context and focuses mainly on recent developments.

The film presents both countries' rulers' chauvinist and nationalist arguments in favour of possessing the bomb, but it also contrasts them with the strong doubts held by ordinary people towards the politicians' true agenda.

It shows that while the peoples of both countries are not immune from the effects of ruling class propaganda, solidarity and harmony between Hindus and Muslims does exist. Many people can't understand why getting the bomb should be more important than tackling the grinding poverty and social injustice rife in their countries.

Jang aur Aman is implanted with quite a few progressive messages. It conveys, for example, the lower castes' repulsion at Hinduism's contention that a person's poverty and position at the bottom of the hierarchy of castes is a result of wrongdoing in a previous life. It even points out, in the words of a lower caste agitator, that Karl Marx's analysis of poverty was that it is rooted in class exploitation.

Jang aur Aman features the experiences of people living near India's nuclear test site, highlighting how Delhi is unconcerned about their abnormally high cancer rates.

Patwardhan touches on India's anti-nuclear movement but focuses only on a small march. He covers grassroots initiatives in India and Pakistan to establish people-to-people links between the two countries, a development very difficult to achieve because of government bans on contact.

While imperialist powers have been key in fuelling the arms race in the Indian subcontinent, Jang aur Aman skips this dimension.

This film is professionally shot, spiced with interesting music and is certainly worth seeing.

From Green Left Weekly, June 26, 2002.
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