The Diplomat

There is a difference between ambition and delusion. Ambition often depends on one’s means; delusion, on the other hand, hinges on one’s capability. The Diplomat isn’t an ambitious film for barring the brawny John Abraham from lifting a finger. But it’s certainly delusional for thinking of itself as a desi answer to Argo. There is, however, a more unexpected comparison that the movie invites, without realising that it is guilty of committing the same mistakes that it is so confidently calling out. But more on that later. Directed by Shivam Nair, The Diplomat projects itself as a feminist film, but it is actually a tribute to male ego. A dramatically inert distillation of a multi-pronged story, The Diplomat takes a typically Bollywood approach to telling a story about a woman’s emancipation and empowerment. It frames its narrative from the perspective of Abraham’s character, India’s Deputy High Commissioner in Pakistan, JP Singh. But it is actually the story of Uzma Ahmed, an Indian woman played by Sadia Khateeb, who is conned into marrying a Pakistani man named Tahir. They met in Malaysia, where he was working as a taxi driver. A few months into their relationship, Tahir moved back home and invited her to join him there. But he had an ulterior motive.

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.