Omerta, a mediocre cinematic account

A week, which started with the news of an ISIS terror attack resulting in the death of ten journalists in Kabul, sets a grim backdrop to watch a biopic of an Islamist militant Omar Saeed Sheikh. He was the key conspirator in the abduction and gruesome beheading of American journalist Daniel Pearl in 2002.

There is little else that Hansal Mehta’s 96-minute biopic Omerta can claim as reason for revisiting the sinister life of a man who can now be seen as a mere footnote to the dark chapters of Islamist terror in last three decades.

Perhaps it’s this pointlessness that stops the film from rising to anything substantive or from leaving any impact as a slice of recent terror history in the subcontinent. A biopic which somehow is an assortment of terror plots executed by its subject can only hope to be a cinematic account of what Hannah Arendt would have called “banality of evil”.

Fragmented into episodic telling of Omar’s terror designs, Mehta struggles to provide a cohesive frame to the narrative — a failure as much of the engagement with diabolic impulses of a hardened militant as much of the craft of tracing strands in terror history.

The film opens in 1994 with Omar (played by Rajkummar Rao) taking charge as the ringleader of planning and executing the abduction of three British tourists and an American national in New Delhi — an act for which he was arrested by Delhi Police and jailed. Omar’s journey to Islamist militancy is conveyed through a series of flashbacks. In the wake of Bosnian War (1992-95), he is lured to the extremist cause by Islamist radicals in the campus as well as the cleric of a local mosque. His transformation from a London School of Economics (LSE) student to a terror apprentice in Pakistan is visually documented with scenes of training camps.

In a film which requires him to be there in almost every scene, Rao fails to carry the burden. Among other signs of an indifferent performance, there is an apparent unease in the constant switching of accents – from British English to subcontinental ways of speaking the language, as well as their native tongue. Earlier one could spot Mehta’s unease in recreating Delhi of the 90s. Besides a few anachronistic giveaways, he gets the masthead of The Times of India wrong (a Gothic font is obviously out of sync with the 90s and the paper’s masthead in the 90s and noughties.)

Omar finds himself at the intersection of Pakistani state apparatus and Islamist terror groups. ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence) handlers of his training module ensure that jihadi militants operating in Kashmir draw him towards the polemics of Islamist cause in Kashmir. His utility for ISI and terror infrastructure in Pakistan became evident by the fact that he was one among the three Harkat-ul-Mujahideen terrorists whose release was successfully sought by hijackers of IC-814 flight in Kandahar.

It could have been an important part of the film as a dilemma that Indian diplomacy and public memory have still not gotten over, waiting for hindsight to weigh in its repercussions. Instead, Mehta confines it to media footage, including that of the then Prime Minister AB Vajpayee and National Security Adviser Brajesh Mishra briefing journalists about the developments.

The systemic support for an extremist project of political Islam in Pakistan can be seen in how the country’s designs and Omar’s plans complement each other.

The Pakistani state-sponsored rehabilitation of Omar is shown through his marriage in Pakistan that is attended by top Pakistani Army and ISI officials. He flaunts his rise before his father and wife and proudly claims to be a part of Pakistani “establishment”. In fact, it was Daniel Pearl’s journalistic exposé on the close links between Islamist militant groups and Pakistani state which led to his kidnapping and brutal murder. The film shows ISI official persuading a reluctant Omar to target Pearl (played admirably by Timothy Ryan Hickernell in the film).

It eventually turned out to be a crime for which Omar was convicted and sentenced to death by an anti-terrorism court in Karachi. Given its earlier support to him, did Omar run out of utility for Pakistani establishment or became a liability as international pressure followed Pearl’s murder? The film skips such questions. Similarly, besides fleeting mention, Omerta doesn’t delve into allegations of his possible backend links with 9/11 terror strikes in New York.

The claims made about the “secret agent’” past of Omar in former Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf’s memoir In the Line of Fire are also missing. More recently, the reports about his attempted suicide in 2014 could have been an interesting addition to accessing the psychic alleys of his criminal mind.

Torn between the failed ambition of a docu-drama and shoddy treatment of a biopic feature film, Omerta settles for a mediocre cinematic account of one of the most horrific figures of Islamist terror in recent decades. The end product is thin material in times when terror files of Islamist militancy call for more comprehensive cinematic chronicling.

Note: The sentence “Gothic font is obviously out of sync with the 90s and the paper’s noughties masthead” has been updated to “Gothic font is obviously out of sync with the 90s and the paper’s masthead in the 90s and noughties”.