When I first saw the trailer of Hansal Mehta’s Omerta , I was mind-blown. Racy and chilling, it held out the promise of a peek into a criminal mind linked to an unbelievable number of major terror incidents over the last three decades. But, as reviews have pointed out, the mind of the terrorist is pretty much missing from the screenplay (though the brilliant Rajkummar Rao does convey a smidgeon of motivation solely through his performance).
For searching minds, the process by which evil takes shape in the subterranean recesses of a criminal’s mind is indubitably more fascinating than the evil itself. In Omar Shaikh’s case, his background—liberal family, and an upbringing and education at the finest institutions in London—makes it even more compelling. But Mehta is not only more interested in the chronology of the evil than its compulsions, his screenplay simplifies and fictionalises the tangled skeins of Omar’s life to facilitate a chosen slant and arc.
Making of a terrorist
This slant is the “model-schoolboy-turned-terrorist” one, initially peddled by the global media: how a wealthy UK-bred moderate Muslim boy descended into militancy after seeing the injustices perpetrated on his community. In the film, we thus first see Omar as an anguished citizen at a protest against the genocide of Muslims in Bosnia, who wants to join a mercy convoy but is instead persuaded to become a militant. On his first assignment, the kidnapping of four western tourists in India, he is still not a fiend, repeatedly telling his victims that they have nothing to fear and will not be killed. But from this point to the murder of American journalist Daniel Pearl eight years later, it’s a full pendulum swing to sickening brutality: in the gruesome crescendo of the film, Omar slits Pearl’s throat and saws away at his head till he finally detaches it and holds it aloft to cries of Allahu Akbar.
The fact that the terrorist’s actual degeneracy didn’t quite conform to this arc (he was a deviant even in school, suspended for repeated violence, and was, by his own account, radicalised as a teen in Karachi way before Bosnia) is fine by way of cinematic licence and also given the general ambiguity surrounding his life (he was even believed to be a triple agent). What is slightly questionable is Mehta’s take on the Daniel Pearl episode. For, Omar’s role in the murder, dwelt on in such ghastly detail in the film, has been in doubt for a decade; he owned up only to the kidnapping, a stance that was corroborated years later when fellow Al Qaeda operative, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, proudly claimed credit for the beheading in a military tribunal. Mohammed’s statement, which matched the documented admissions of Pearl’s guards, was later verified by the FBI’s forensic department and the Pearl Project, an independent investigation headed by Daniel’s friend and fellow journalist Asra Nomani. Even Pearl’s widow, Marianne, wrote in her book A Mighty Heart : “While Omar may have been our original target, in truth he's just one in a massively complicated chain... ultimately, he is a tool.”
A Mighty Heart , published a year after Omar was sentenced to death by a Pakistani court, was adapted for the screen in 2007. Mohammed’s admission of beheading Pearl came just four months before the film’s release but the director made sure it was incorporated in a text epilogue. It’s curious then that Mehta not only ignores this development in a film made 11 years later but even refers to Omar’s death sentence in the epilogue, omitting to mention that it was commuted to life imprisonment.
Problematic narrative
Is this just shoddy research or a wilful ignoring of facts to make for a more sensational climax? Mehta, in a recent newspaper interview, described the killing sequence as his “interpretation of a villain’s journey, a physicalisation of the violence within him and his own sense of inhuman justice”. In a film that’s a more or less faithful docudrama otherwise, this is frankly dubious. Also, a look at Omar’s criminal career shows that his skills lay in intelligence, strategic warfare, masterminding kidnappings and confidence trickery without soiling his own hands with blood; in a sense, he was the ace chess player who graduated from moves on a chequered board to plots on a larger, real-life canvas. Daniel’s Pearl murder was the only descent into direct barbarity that was ever pinned on him; and though its being brought into doubt by later events would have hampered the film’s dramatic climax, it ought to have been dealt with, if only in a footnote.
Despite these lacunae, Omerta is a gripping one-time watch. But a little more character shading and circumstance analysis (growing global religious extremism and ‘Londonistan’ of the 1990s for instance) would have made for a more nuanced film on a man who was undeniably in a different league from the average jihadi.
