Waar-ing us softly

One would agree with those who argue that it is completely irrelevant whether the ISPR funded the recent box-office hit, Waar, or not. Because the fact is, the film is clearly meant to serve as new-age propaganda through its spectacularly expensive screenplay.
Waar’s ideological underpinning, clichéd political messages and singular, linear thought-process resonates with Pakistani majoritarian nationalism, also espoused and promoted by the military. Our religion is superior to all others; Pakistanis have ‘potential’ that has never been realised not because of domestic flaws and failure but because of permanent external interference; terrorism is purely an Indian-sponsored phenomena; there is no genuine internal conflict or dissent and; there is pure good and evil in this world– no guesses which side we belong to.
This explains the one-dimensional characters in the film too. The libidinous femme fatale who seduces Pakistani men is a RAW operative. There is redemption, not Hudood punishment for the flawed Muslim, patriotic Pakistani man if he sacrifices his errant ways and returns to his plain-Jane, duppata-on-head, domesticated, child-producing wife. Terrorists are agency-less, empty vessel mercenaries and, despite proud ownership of an arsenal of state-of-the art military equipment, for some inexplicable reason we can’t muster resources to build the dam that will save the nation.
The young and adventurous makers of Waar (who cannot resist multiple selfies in the movie) are clearly themselves a product of the new-age dictatorship of Gen Musharraf. The hangover from Musharraf’s Enlightened Moderation attempt to promote cultural activity as the antidote to religious terrorism motivates this production. What is interesting is that it is possible to produce such a technically sophisticated, expensive and transparent project such as Waar and yet be completely counter-effective in the ultimate analysis. A bit like piling up our nuclear arsenal, which also kills us softly.
‘Agitprop’ is the term derived from the Soviet Union’s Department for Agitation and Propaganda, which operated under the Communist Party in Russia. However, because of its association with socialist ideological promotion, and its abuse by the Soviet bureaucracy, propaganda has gotten a bad rap. Yet, there are many beneficial aspects of propaganda if the intention is towards such ends. Under the communists, literacy levels were raised to enable the effectiveness of propaganda and information on agriculture and productivity spread through state communications. Later on, politicised leftist theatre such as that produced by Brecht, originated from the concept of agitprop.
If we are honest and a bit generous, the producers of Waar had a tough job. Pakistan is no stranger to religio-nationalist propaganda. It has been an effective and resourceful tool that has spilled over from popular culture and found an aggressive inculcation in mainstream textbooks, madressah syllabi, mosque sermons, and even in erudite court judgements.
Today, the propaganda machinery of the Pakistan Army has clearly graduated to a realisation that it now has to rid itself of a lot of baggage and reinvent itself simultaneously in the face of legal and media challenges. That operation needs a lot of band aids. A populist mass media onslaught is not a bad place to start but agitprop has to do both – agitate emotions and negotiate a political tight-walk which is at least a little accurate in order to be convincing.
Those apologists who defend Waar on the grounds that there was a need for a similar ‘narrative’ along the lines of ‘Shining India’ are simply offering the most defeatist benchmark for mediocrity that one could hope for from a younger generation. As if Pakistan’s own son preference, Baloch insurgency and Ahmadi-culling weren’t enough comparatives to India’s not-so-shining interior -- to deny the fact that, independent of all that, Waar offers the most flattened analysis of terrorism is to be delusional.
The film actively erases any reference to the historical sourcing of US/Saudi-funding to ‘somewhere in northern Pakistan’. Instead, the celebrated new ‘narrative’ of Waar reconstructs the pop-out-of-nowhere terrorists as creations of Indian sponsorship and is a completely new (re)invention in the narrative of the WoT. So is the impression that it is only black hawks and not the controversial drones that are used in counterterrorism operations. The problem of Waar is that it goes painfully out of its way to be non-controversial and, therefore, ends up flat-lining.
That is why Waar is not just a missed opportunity but also a counter-intuitive backlash against the kind of civilian narrative that attempts to gain momentum in Pakistan towards frenemy India. While our activists and economists encourage us to introspect our social, political and institutional failures, such deflection of responsibility as suggested in Waar is unfortunate at best and irresponsible according to harsher critics.
Waar’s biggest problem is not the source of its commission but the crime of omission. When Lenin commissioned the People’s Commissariat of Enlightenment to spearhead the campaign for literacy in the countryside, it led to a cultural revolution. Regardless of the flaws that followed, the spin-off of this propaganda was that it was an effective galvanising of the people of the Soviet Union towards an imaginary of equal citizenry and state services.
Even if we unburden Waar of the expectation that it had both the budget and the intellectual resources to offer an alternative narrative rather than submit to the one it propounds, to suggest that we should celebrate the shallow, misleading and conventional one it offers is to invite us to become passive nationalists who believe that we simply need more anti-India patriotism to end our domestic conflicts.
The writer is a sociologist based in Karachi. Email: afiyazia@yahoo.com