Bollywood played main part to defame Muslims in and outside India

Islamabad: Muslims are looked as suspicious people in and outside India, and the phenomenon has increased manifold after the Hindutva government of Bharatiya Janata Party led by Narendra Modi came to power since 2014, said a recent study.

Indian film industry, Bollywood, played the main part in adding fuel to the fire by making a lot of movies on Muslims and presenting them “as terrorists and negative ones”, the report said.

In the past as well, researches were carried out to scientifically explore that how and to what extent Indian cinema is distorting and changing the Muslim image. One study used content analysis of 50 Indian movies which were taken out from 350 Muslim-characters based movies.

The questionnaire was about whether Indian movies present Muslims as favorable, unfavorable and neutral. The overall results of these slants show 4.4% favorable images, 65.2% unfavorable and 30.4% neutral images of Muslims portrayal by Indian cinema. The results indicate that Indian cinema is distorting the Muslim image and an anti-Muslim propaganda has been carried out not only in India but also at international level.

One study was conducted by Umar (2020), which explained the portrayal of Muslims in Bollywood by analyzing two important movies Kurbaan (2009) and My name is Khan (2010), which represented violent Muslims after 9/11. The movies were directed, produced and acted by Muslims, Hindus as well as Christians due to India’s diverse religion society and ethnic groups.

Kurbaan introduced Muslims as harsh, violent and involved in terrorism. My name is Khan (2010), on the other hand, which was released a year after Kurbaan, made an attempt to defend Muslims. Accordingly, Umar compared and contrasted both movies to represent the September 11 events as well as terrorism, which constitute a significant aspect of both movies.

Indian film industry took a benefit of the events and they started to present Muslims as terrorists in their films. Movies were made on the subject of terrorism and only Muslims were shown as terrorists who were fostering terrorism not only in India but in the whole world. Indian film industry has also been showing the Kashmir freedom fighters as militants and terrorists.