Military conflicts with Pakistan have inspired many a Bollywood flick but India’s movie industry has had little to offer on diplomacy – unobtrusive but deft – that helped salvage situations where brute force was of little use.
An upcoming movie bucks that trend, bringing to life on the big screen one such story in which a diplomat in Islamabad helped extricate an Indian woman who was lured into Pakistan by a man she thought she had found love in, but who turned out to be a much-married thug.
The diplomat in the movie titled, well, Diplomat is J P Singh, who heads the Pakistan (also Afghanistan and Iran) division in the ministry of external affairs (MEA) and was chargé d’affaires in Islamabad when the woman in question, Uzma Ahmed, returned dramatically to India sparking wild celebrations.
With armed guards in tow, Singh personally escorted Uzma to the Wagah-Attari border, driving for the better part of a hot and sultry night in May, 2017, on the Islamabad-Lahore expressway. Singh has just been appointed India’s ambassador to Israel.
One of the promos of the John Abraham-starrer, which is expected to release early next month, has a file footage of external affairs minister S Jaishankar’s remark to a TV channel last year that Hanuman was an actual diplomat. Jaishankar was the foreign secretary in 2017.
His predecessor Sushma Swaraj had personally supervised efforts to bring Uzma back home, right from the moment she landed at the Indian high commission in Islamabad after tricking her ‘husband’ Tahir Ali into believing that she had a relative working in the Indian mission.
Tahir, whom she met in Malaysia, was apparently in need of money and Uzma promised to get some from her contact. Once inside the compound, she let rip about her tragic love affair that ended in forced marriage and manipulation.
According to sources, the movie is a well-researched and accurate account of events over almost a month, leading up to her return. Uzma spent that entire period on the Indian premises as the Indian government fought off a petition in a local court challenging Indian custody of the woman.
Even after the court ruled in her favour, working out the logistics of her return was a nightmare for Indian authorities as Tahir and his gun-toting aides were often spotted not far from the Indian high commission. Swaraj held a rare press conference to announce her return, calling her India’s daughter, and Uzma thanked her and Singh while describing Pakistan as a death trap.