Ground Zero: Hatemongering comes so naturally to Bollywood that it can't make an antiwar movie even when it tries; Emraan Hashmi's film is proof

“There is no such thing as an antiwar film,” the French New Wave icon Francois Truffaut famously declared once upon a time. It was almost as if he'd secretly been yanked into the future and made to attend a ‘special screening’ of Uri: The Surgical Strike at PVR Juhu. It is, indeed, irresponsible for any movie to glorify war, and Truffaut was of the opinion that this isn’t a supposition, but an inevitability. He wasn't entirely correct, of course. There have been several great antiwar films over the years, and we'll discuss some of them here. But what about Indian movies? The recent film Ground Zero, which was released on Prime Video following a theatrical run that was unfortunately affected by the Pahalgam terror attack, appears to be aware of these concerns. But it chooses to ignore them when it matters the most.Starring Emraan Hashmi in the lead role, Ground Zero follows a BSF officer called Narendra Dubey on a determined quest to hunt down the notorious militant leader Ghazi Baba after the 2001 Parliament attacks. Ghazi Baba was a close aide to Masood Azhar, who was released by Indian authorities during the IC 814 hijacking. Instead of making him the manifestation of Kashmir and its people, Ground Zero treads the middle path; it doesn’t view every Kashmiri Muslim as a traitor, but it certainly views most of them as victims. And where victims exist, there must be a saviour. That man is Dubey, who appears to be aware of the alienation that military presence has created in the hearts and minds of the locals.

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Directed by Tejas Prabha Vijay Deoskar, Ground Zero doesn't go so far as to show military brutality or the ‘forced disappearances’ that reflect the reality of the local population. Nor does it spare a moment for the ‘half-widows’ who roam the land like tortured spirits. But such are the times we live in, when even a moderately responsible Hindi movie comes across as a grand beacon of empathy. One could argue that Shershaah would've been the ideal candidate to comment on the ultimate meaninglessness of war, but because the movie valorises Captain Vikram Batra’s ultimate sacrifice and frames it against an Indian victory, it ends up endorsing the idea of violent combat.