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By:

Rajeev Puri

24 October 2024 at 5:11:37 am

Before Sholay, there was Mera Gaon Mera Desh

When the comedian and television host Kapil Sharma recently welcomed the veteran screenwriter Salim Khan onto his show, he made a striking claim. India, he joked, has a national bird and a national animal; it ought also to have a national film. That film, he suggested, would surely be Sholay. Few would quarrel with the sentiment. Released in 1975 and directed by Ramesh Sippy,  Sholay  has long been treated as the Everest of Hindi popular cinema -quoted endlessly, revisited by generations and...

Before Sholay, there was Mera Gaon Mera Desh

When the comedian and television host Kapil Sharma recently welcomed the veteran screenwriter Salim Khan onto his show, he made a striking claim. India, he joked, has a national bird and a national animal; it ought also to have a national film. That film, he suggested, would surely be Sholay. Few would quarrel with the sentiment. Released in 1975 and directed by Ramesh Sippy,  Sholay  has long been treated as the Everest of Hindi popular cinema -quoted endlessly, revisited by generations and dissected by critics. In 2025, the film marked its 50th anniversary, and the release of a digitally restored, uncut version introduced the classic to a new generation of viewers who discovered that its mixture of revenge drama, western pastiche and buddy comedy remains curiously durable. The film’s influences have been debated almost as much as its dialogues – from scenes taken by the Spaghetti westerns of Sergio Leone, particularly ‘Once Upon a Time in the West’ (1968) or to the narrative architecture of ‘Seven Samurai’ (1954) by Akira Kurosawa. Others note echoes of earlier Hindi films about bandits and frontier justice, such as ‘Khotey Sikke’ (1973) starring Feroz Khan. Yet, rewatching ‘Mera Gaon Mera Desh,’ directed by Raj Khosla, one cannot help noticing how many of the narrative bones of  Sholay  appear to have been assembled there first. Released in 1971,  Mera Gaon Mera Desh  was a major hit at the box office, notable for holding its own in a year dominated by the near-hysterical popularity of Rajesh Khanna. The thematic framework of the two films is strikingly similar. In  Sholay , the retired policeman Thakur Baldev Singh recruits two petty criminals - Jai and Veeru - to help him avenge the terror inflicted upon his village by the bandit Gabbar Singh. In  Mera Gaon Mera Desh , the set-up is not very different. A retired soldier, Jaswant Singh, seeks to protect his village from a ruthless dacoit and enlists the help of a small-time crook named Ajit. Even the villain’s name seems to echo across the two films. In Khosla’s drama, the marauding bandit played by Vinod Khanna is scene-stealing performance is called Jabbar Singh. In  Sholay , the outlaw who would become one of Indian cinema’s most memorable antagonists was Gabbar Singh. There is an additional irony in the casting. In  Mera Gaon Mera Desh , the retired soldier Jaswant Singh is played by Jayant - the real-life father of Amjad Khan, who would later immortalise Gabbar Singh in  Sholay . The connective tissue between the two films becomes even clearer in the presence of Dharmendra. In Khosla’s film he plays Ajit, a charming rogue who gradually redeems himself while defending the village. Four years later, Dharmendra returned in  Sholay  as Veeru, a similarly exuberant petty criminal whose courage and irrepressible humour make him one half of Hindi cinema’s most beloved buddy duo alongside Amitabh Bachchan as Jai. Certain visual motifs also appear to have travelled intact. In Khosla’s film, Ajit finds himself bound in ropes in the bandit’s den during a dramatic musical sequence. A similar image appears in  Sholay , where Veeru is tied up before Gabbar Singh while Basanti performs the now famous song ‘Jab Tak Hai Jaan.’ Other echoes are subtler but just as suggestive. Ajit’s pursuit of the village belle Anju, played by Asha Parekh, anticipates Veeru’s boisterous attempts to woo Basanti, portrayed by Hema Malini. Scenes in which Ajit teaches Anju to shoot recall the flirtatious gun-training sequence between Veeru and Basanti that became one of  Sholay ’s most cherished moments. Even the famous coin motif has a precedent. Ajit frequently tosses a coin to make decisions - a flourish that would later appear in  Sholay , where Jai’s coin toss becomes a running gag. Perhaps most intriguingly, the endings of the two films converge in their original form. In  Mera Gaon Mera Desh , the villain is ultimately killed by the hero. The uncut version of  Sholay  reportedly ended in a similar fashion, with Gabbar Singh meeting his death at the hands of Thakur Baldev Singh. However, censors altered the climax before the film’s 1975 release, requiring that Gabbar be handed over to the police instead. All this does not diminish  Sholay . Rather, it highlights the alchemy through which cinema evolves. The scriptwriting duo Salim–Javed took familiar ingredients and expanded them into a grander narrative populated by unforgettable characters and stylised action. On the 55 th  anniversary of  Mera Gaon Mera Desh , Raj Khosla’s rugged western deserves a renewed glance as the sturdy foundation on which a legend called  Sholay  was built. (The author is a political commentator and a global affairs observer. Views personal.)

Kangaroo Justice

Bangladesh’s unelected regime has converted the law into a blunt instrument to eliminate the pro-India Sheikh Hasina.

Bangladesh’s interim rulers have finally delivered the spectacle they seemed to crave: a death sentence for Sheikh Hasina, handed down by a tribunal whose credibility is as hollow as the government that convened it. The former Prime Minister, who is in India at present, was tried in absentia by the International Crimes Tribunal - an institution once created to prosecute the genocidal violence of 1971, now repurposed to brand as “international crimes” the actions of an elected leader confronting violent mobs on her own soil. The re-engineering of this court says less about Hasina’s conduct than about the ambitions of the unelected clique now running the country.


Bangladesh today does not have a legitimate government. It has an interim administration with no constitutional footing, led by Muhammad Yunus, a man parachuted into office with the blessing of foreign patrons, notably in Washington. This regime has now pushed through a trial designed to erase Hasina, her party and the political legacy of Bangladesh’s liberation.


The charges against her strain coherence. The violence in question which included street rioting, arson, and mob assaults in the final days before Hasina’s ouster was domestic. There were no external actors, no cross-border operations, no semblance of the international dimension for which the tribunal was conceived. The court’s original purpose was to prosecute the atrocities committed by the Pakistan army and its collaborators in 1971. To place Hasina’s actions in the same category is to trivialise the genocide that created Bangladesh.


The mobs that overran Dhaka in those chaotic weeks targeted more than Hasina. They burned symbols of the country’s founding, vandalised tributes to Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and assaulted courts, forcing judges to resign under threat. Against this backdrop, the tribunal’s composition and its sudden appetite for severity inspire little confidence. A bench formed in an atmosphere of intimidation cannot claim to represent impartial justice.


The larger aim appears to be to crush the Awami League before next year’s elections. The party, which commands deep social roots and historic legitimacy, is inconvenient for a junta trying to consolidate power without a popular mandate. De-legitimising Hasina through a capital sentence is an attempt to delegitimise the movement she leads. Any election held without the Awami League would disenfranchise millions.


This political purge coincides with Dhaka’s sharp turn away from India and towards Pakistan. Yunus and his circle have unfurled a foreign policy that flatters Islamabad and indulges Jamaat-e-Islami, the party that sided with the Pakistani army during the liberation struggle and has long nurtured hostility towards India. Jamaat’s sudden policy influence helps explain why anti-India sentiment has surged. Yunus, too, has played to this gallery.


If Hasina were truly the war criminal the tribunal now claims, it is hard to fathom why Bangladesh’s army chief would have personally flown her out of Dhaka to prevent mob violence against her. His actions would themselves demand scrutiny. Yet the interim leadership pretends not to notice this contradiction. Instead, Yunus boasts on global stages that the uprising against Hasina was “meticulously designed,” even introducing the supposed architect of the “student movement” that toppled her.


The government’s diplomatic posture is equally brazen. Knowing full well that India will not extradite a political rival facing a death sentence, Dhaka has sought to raise the temperature. Officials now claim that extradition is a “mandatory duty” under the bilateral treaty, threatening that India’s refusal to hand her over would constitute an “act of enmity” against Bangladesh.


The extradition treaty explicitly allows India to refuse requests of a political character, or those made in bad faith. Both conditions apply in abundance. Nor will Indian courts ignore that a death sentence makes extradition all but impossible. Economic offenders and terrorists from Western countries often evade deportation for years; Dhaka’s expectation that New Delhi will promptly surrender an ex-prime minister condemned by a tainted tribunal is wilfully unrealistic.


India’s response has been restrained thus far. India has avoided endorsing the verdict - not least because it reeks of political vengeance but its cautiously worded statement leaves room for firmer positions ahead.


Bangladesh’s interim rulers may believe they can stabilise the country by eliminating the Awami League. More likely, they have planted the seeds of a legitimacy crisis from which the country will struggle to recover.

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