Ikkis and Bollywood’s Pakistan Fantasy Turns Into Moral Dilution
The film Ikkis presents itself as a tribute to the 1971 war and the sacrifice of Lt Arun Khetarpal, Param Vir Chakra. On the surface, it claims to honour courage, duty, and loss. But beneath that intention lies a familiar Bollywood instinct that has long distorted how India’s wars with Pakistan are remembered. The problem is not emotion. The problem is where that emotion is directed.
At the heart of Ikkis is a narrative choice that defines the film’s moral centre. The story highlights a post-war meeting between Lt Khetarpal’s father and a Pakistani officer involved in the Battle of Basantar. This encounter is framed as warm, respectful, and emotionally overwhelming. The audience is invited to see this moment as proof that humanity transcends conflict, and that even enemies can share honour and empathy once the guns fall silent.
What the film chooses not to foreground is far more important. The 1971 war was not a conventional clash between equal adversaries bound by similar conduct. It was preceded and accompanied by systematic violence carried out by the Pakistan Army in East Pakistan. Mass killings, widespread rape, targeted execution of intellectuals, and the destruction of entire villages were not accidental by-products of war. They were part of a deliberate campaign. Millions of refugees fled into India, creating a humanitarian crisis that directly shaped India’s decision to intervene.
In that context, isolating a single courteous exchange and elevating it to emotional climax is not harmless storytelling. Wars are not judged by anecdotes of decency. They are judged by patterns of conduct. An institution that commits large-scale atrocities does not become morally balanced because one of its officers behaved politely in a later interaction. When cinema pulls one civil moment out of a brutal conflict and treats it as representative, it distorts historical reality.
This distortion is not unique to Ikkis. It fits neatly into Bollywood’s long-standing Pakistan fantasy. Hindi cinema repeatedly returns to the comfort of moral symmetry. Brave men on both sides. Soldiers only following orders. War as tragedy without responsibility. This framing allows filmmakers to avoid naming aggression, ideology, and institutional guilt. It replaces accountability with sentiment, because sentiment is easier to sell and safer to defend.
There is a critical difference between moral neutrality and moral truth. Neutrality suggests that both sides were equally trapped by circumstance. Truth demands acknowledging that one side was committing systematic crimes while the other was responding to an unfolding humanitarian catastrophe. When cinema collapses this difference, it creates false equivalence. That equivalence does not promote peace. It weakens memory.
The cost of this dilution is real. Indian soldiers like Lt Arun Khetarpal are reduced to symbols of abstract bravery, detached from what they were actually fighting against. Their sacrifice is sanitised, stripped of the historical stakes that gave it meaning. At the same time, the victims of Pakistan Army brutality, particularly civilians, are erased from the narrative altogether. Their suffering becomes background noise, if it appears at all.
Cinema plays a powerful role in shaping collective memory. For many viewers, films become the primary source of understanding historical events. When popular cinema softens aggression and avoids naming crimes, it does not educate. It edits. Over time, this editing reshapes how a nation remembers its wars, turning acts of resistance into tales of mutual tragedy and moral misunderstanding.
Ikkis is not flawed because it acknowledges individual humanity. It is flawed because it builds its emotional spine around that humanity while sidelining historical truth. Peace narratives built on selective memory are not reconciliation. They are moral evasion. And when a film about 1971 chooses comfort over clarity, it does not honour history. It dilutes it.
