It’s a miracle, John Abraham is still acting in films 22 years after his debut in Jism (2003). This isn’t a snarky comment on his limited chops as an actor, as much as his risk appetite in an industry that is too busy holding on to fleeting good times and too happy to repeat its successes. Few actors have visibly lived the ‘one for them, one for me’ maxim (working with as varied a list like Anurag Kashyap, Deepa Mehta, Shoojit Sircar to Rohit Dhawan, Anees Bazmee and Milap Zaveri) with as much gusto as the 53-year-old star. Abraham has seen a few successes, but he’s endured gargantuan failures. In Abraham, there is an insecure star constantly probing the market for his commercial viability (he’s produced most recent films through his production house, JA Entertainment), but there’s also a curious actor constantly trying to prove his mettle. This dichotomy in Abraham also finds itself in his latest film, The Diplomat.

Hindi cinema’s pathological obsession with Pakistan is so consistent that I just take it as a given now. Sometimes a film so virulent and stupid comes along—Gadar 2 (2023), Fighter (2024)—that it breaks the surface, but mostly it’s a lot of forgettable posturing and flag-waving. On some rare occasions, a film will introduce notes of doubt, or grace. I’ve come to expect it from Yash Raj’s action films, which treat cross-border matters with a strange mixture of cartoon villainy, human feeling and grudging respect. Sometimes it happens unexpectedly, like the recent war film Sky Force, which starts off strident but deescalates as it goes along.

Filmmaker Shivam Nair’s The Diplomat tells the real story of an Indian lady Uzma Ahmed (Sadia Khateeb), a single mother. She falls in love with a Pakistani national Tahir (Jagjeet Sandhu) while working in Malaysia in 2017. He promises to marry her and help treat her daughter, who suffers from Thalassemia. However, after she lands in Pakistan, she sees the real face of Tahir. He takes Uzma to the deserted land of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa where she realizes that he is already married and also has a few kids. But that’s not all. Tahir repeatedly physically and sexually abuses Uzma before forcing her to marry him. Once by chance, Uzma gets to know that the only way to escape from there is by somehow reaching the Indian embassy in Islamabad and ask for help. She makes Tahir take her to the Indian embassy through some pretext and, when he and his friends are away, barges inside the embassy and begs for help. But JP (John Abraham), the Deputy High Commissioner at the embassy, doubts her intentions.

Based on a true story, The Diplomat is about an Indian woman lured into a false marriage with a Pakistani man, and how her life spirals into a nightmare. The backdrop of terrorism-and-espionage is, by now, very much a John Abraham zone, and here he plays JP Singh, the diplomat who moves from suspicion-to-support when the terrified Uzma Ahmed (Sadia Khateeb) seeks refuge within the Indian embassy in Islamabad.

The Diplomat begins with a disclaimer so lengthy, someone at the press show quipped ‘interval’ at the end. Among many, many, MANY things, it makes a point to mention that the movie, which is based on the true story of Indian citizen Uzma Ahmed, is neither a biopic nor a documentary, neither condones nor endorses the views put forward and so on and so forth. In 2017, Uzma became national news when she sought the Indian high commission’s help to get her out of Pakistan. The media documented her tears, trauma and thank you on television as she sat between then external affairs minister Sushma Swaraj and then deputy high commissioner in Islamabad J P Singh recounting her story. There’s significant cinematic value to her harrowing experiences and Writer Ritesh Shah and Director Shivam Nair dig into it to recreate the drama, if not the danger.

मई, 2017 की बात है। एक पाकिस्तानी जोड़ा भारत का वीज़ा लेने के लिए पाकिस्तान स्थित भारतीय दूतावास पहुंचा। काउंटर पर पहुंच कर उस लड़की उज़्मा अहमद ने कहा कि मैं भारतीय हूं और यहां फंस गई हूं, कृपया मेरी मदद कीजिए। भारतीय डिप्लोमेट जे.पी. सिंह ने मामले की नज़ाकत को समझते हुए उस लड़की को दूतावास में शरण दी। इसके बाद भारत ने पाकिस्तान की धरती पर एक पेचीदा कानूनी लड़ाई लड़ने और उसमें जीतने के बाद उस लड़की को वापस भारत लाने में कामयाबी पाई। इस लड़ाई में भारत की तत्कालीन विदेश मंत्री (स्वर्गीय) सुषमा स्वराज की महती भूमिका रही जिन्होंने न सिर्फ उस लड़की को बेफिक्र किया बल्कि राजनयिक जे.पी. सिंह की पीठ भी थपथपाई। यह फिल्म ‘द डिप्लोमेट’ (The Diplomat) उसी कहानी को दिखाती है, बहुत सारी विश्वसनीयता के साथ, थोड़े फिल्मीपने के साथ। किसी सच्ची घटना पर फिल्में अपने यहां हमेशा से बनती आई हैं। हाल के बरसों में यह रफ्तार थोड़ी तेज़ हुई है तो उसकी प्रमुख वजह यह है कि दर्शकों में ऐसी कहानियों को देखने व सराहने के प्रति जागरूकता बढ़ी है। ऐसे में यदि फिल्म वाले चुन-चुन कर ऐसी कहानियां सामने ला रहे हैं जो सच की कोख से निकली हैं और दर्शकों को छू पा रही हैं तो उनकी सराहना होनी चाहिए। खासतौर से तब, जब उन कहानियों को परोसा भी सलीके से गया हो। यह फिल्म यही करती है।

Clad in a full black burqa and looking like Kashmiri jihadi Ashiya Andrabi, a young woman desperately seeks asylum and help from the Indian High Commission in Islamabad. Is Uzma Ahmed (Sadia Khateeb) a plant, a suicide bomber or a genuine case for humanitarian aid from the Indian Embassy? Does her story ring true? She’s an educated Indian, job hunting in Malaysia, who fell in love with Pakistani taxi driver Tahir (Jagjeet Sandhu) and took off alone to his country to marry him. Her first impressions despite finding Tahir togged up differently from how he seemed in Malaysia and his insistence that she cover her head right from the airport: “Kudrat ki mehr samajh baithi.” Where did she go in Pakistan? To Buner, deep into Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. “A place even the average Pakistani would fear to go,” she’s dryly told by Deputy High Commissioner JP Singh (John Abraham) who’s vetting her case and gauging her authenticity.

In 2017, Uzma Ahmed made headlines when she was rescued from her abusive Pakistani husband by the Indian High Commission officials under the supervision of the then Minister of External Affairs, Sushma Swaraj. Director Shivam Nair joins forces with actor-producer John Abraham to recreate the diplomatic maneuver from the point of view of diplomat JP Singh, who led the rescue mission to bring the Delhi girl home. However, as it turns out, it is yet another addition to the trend where filmmakers flaunt the placard of ‘based on a true story’ but develop cold feet in digging the truth of the story. It thanks the top of the ministry for support, but it is hard to take a film on diplomacy seriously that can’t differentiate between an embassy and a high commission. It is difficult to root for a nationalist narrative when the makers don’t get the designation of a former foreign minister right.