Bollywood courts controversy with Sri Lankan war film

MUMBAI, Maharashtra: Bollywood is foraying into controversial terrain with new spy thriller, “Madras Cafe,” whose depiction of rebels in the Sri Lankan civil war has raised concerns among India’s large Tamil population.
The movie, which opens in India this month, features John Abraham as an Indian secret agent shortly after peace-keeping troops sent by New Delhi to Sri Lanka were forced to withdraw in 1990 following a three-year battle with separatist Tamil rebels.
Director Shoojit Sircar describes “Madras Cafe,” shot in the southwestern Indian state of Kerala, as a “hardcore political film which examines conspiracies, espionage, how information is coded, decoded and passed through.”
India has a large and politically active Tamil population in its south and South Indian activists have already raised concerns over the movie’s depiction of the rebels in the bloody conflict.
But Sircar insists the movie, set in the early 1990s, “does not take sides.
“The bigger message is that in a civil war, civilians suffer the most,” he told AFP.
While the film’s main character is fictitious, Sircar said he had “used real references, portrayed rebel groups, revolutionary freedom fighters, Indian Peace Keeping Forces (and) shown how India got involved and the chaos.”
The conflict in Sri Lanka, which cost up to 100,000 lives, erupted in 1983 between government forces and the rebel Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), who were fighting for an independent state for ethnic Tamils. Both sides are accused of human rights atrocities.
In 1987, Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi sent a peace-keeping force in a bid to end the conflict but the intervention failed.
The move was met with criticism at home while straining relationships between the two neighbors, and when Gandhi was assassinated in 1991, the LTTE were the prime suspects.
Sircar remains tight-lipped over whether Gandhi’s killing is tackled directly in the movie, saying “how it ends and moves is the surprise of the film.”