His stories do not make him sour; instead, they build in his empathy for similarly positioned sufferers. Lawyers are supposed to be emotionally detached from their cases. “Don’t identify with your clients”- that is the chant for ensuring professional performance, and extra importantly, one’s mental peace. But now, not all can function with such smartly divided booths of expert commitments and personal values. Shahid Azmi, the Mumbai-based legal professional who was shot dead in 2010 for defending cases of terror-accused Muslims, belonged to the latter class. The influence conveyed by using the countrywide award-winning biopic “Shahid,” launched in 2013.
In one scene within the movie, Shahid( Raj Kumar Rao) is seen disobeying the commands of his senior, a leading criminal attorney, to handle the case of a consumer. Because Shahid is convinced that it changed into an “open and closed case of crime,” which no longer needs to be defended, his old dubs him naive and asks him to analyze the approaches of the profession to make a living out of it.
Later, we see Shahid beginning his practice, handling cases of those from a particular spectrum- harmless people detained under draconian anti-terror legal guidelines, who he believes to have been targeted entirely based on their religious identification. He is emotionally invested in those cases. In the court scenes, we do not see him sober, clinical, or even sleek. Instead, he is impassioned, stressed, intense, and pushed through internal rage in opposition to the unjustness of the machine. So a great deal so that a judge once tells him that he must “learn to let go occasionally.” Even after the listening is adjourned, we see him persevering with the argument with the prosecutor who had opposed his bail plea. He is impatient and uneasy until he sees injustice rectified because of the concept of preventing a cause rather than the instances of a few individuals. There is a purpose why Shahid’s method took shape for that reason.
He was a sufferer of systemic oppression. The start of the movie offers a peek into the early years of his maturity. Deeply disturbed after witnessing the horrors of the 1992 Bombay riots, he was led off beam to join a jihadi training camp. Later, proper sense dawns on him, and he escapes the camp. But the folly of adolescence comes returned to hang out with him a lot later, while he gets implicated under TADA for a case in which he had no involvement at all. In prison, he meets the radical Omar Sheikh, who was later released by India after the hijacking of an Indian Airlines flight in 1999. Sheikh attempts to inject the idea in Shahid that Muslims will not get justice in India. Shahid additionally meets Ghulam Navi Waar, a ‘reformed radical,’ who offers him sanguine recommendation that “to alter the machine, you need to be part of the gadget.” Presented with two absolutely one-of-a-kind paths, he opts to discard the unconventional recommendation, defying the determinist theory that a person’s moves are predetermined by circumstances. One continually keeps the power to shape the future. Free will triumphs no matter the circumstances! Later, Shahid was acquitted with the aid of the Supreme Court of all terrorism fees after nearly eight years of detention without trial.
“Indian judiciary is sluggish; however, it works,” he sighs. His experiences do not make him bitter; instead, they construct his empathy for also placed sufferers. With the decision to combat injustice, he chooses to examine regulation. His pursuit of justice guided the subsequent motto of Roy Black: “By showing me injustice, he taught me to like justice. By coaching me on what ache and humiliation had been all about, he woke up my heart to mercy. Through those hardships, I discovered the strenuous training. Fight against prejudice, war the oppressors, support the underdog. Question authority, shake up the machine, never be discouraged by difficult times and complicated humans.
Embrace folks who are located finally. To whom even the lowest looks as if up. It took me some time to discover my assignment in existence – that of a crook protection lawyer. But that ‘faculty,’ and that Teacher, placed me on my actual course. I will never be discouraged. Even thorns and thistles can teach you something, and lead to achievement.” By the time he begins to practice, TADA gets repealed; however, it is most straightforward to get replaced via a similarly draconian POTA. The victims continue to be identical. “My consumer could not have been detained if his name had been Michael, John, or More”, he argues in the courtroom in the case of Zaheer Sheikh, who was arrested on the only floor of lending a computer to a childhood pal, who grew to become the terrorist bomber in the Ghatkopar case.
He punctures the concoctions of prosecution with common sense. When a planted witness tells the Court that he noticed the accused working for the employer of terrorists in Nepal, Shahid asks, “Tell me, what is the foreign money of Nepal?”. The witness receives without difficulty, but is discredited. When the prosecution says that the accused had passed over a map to the terrorist in the 26/attacks, Shahid points out that the map, which was claimed to have been recovered from the trousers of the slain terrorist, had no blood stains and was smartly creased.
When driven to the wall, the prosecutor retorts nastily, taunting Shahid with his past. This unsettles him, making him ask in Court, “Am I the only one on trial?”. Rajkumar Rao’s diminutive body and boyish charms lend a fitting ordinariness to Shahid, who went about his existence with no notions of heroic self-image. Director Hansal Mehta follows a restricted approach, with the economic system of shots, condensing Shahid’s life into much less than a hundred and twenty minutes.
The film is set in a somber tone, which befits Shahid’s latent angst. The grim political subtext of the movie is conveyed powerfully, with nuance and discretion. The courtroom scenes are nicely choreographed, even though the romantic tune and extended family scenes are regarded as contrived. In his quick seven years of practice, Shahid secured 17 acquittals, which blanketed those accused in the sensational Ghatkopar blast case, the July 2006 local train blasts case, and the 26/11 terror attack. Enemies poked a laugh at him with the moniker “jihadi on ka Gandhi.” The media termed him “reformed radical,” though he was never an extremist at any point in his life and was acquitted of all terrorism fees. On February 11, 2010, he was shot lifeless in his office. He changed into managing the case of Faheem Khan, an accused in the 26/11 attack case, then. Faheem Khanwase was later acquitted by the Court after Shahid’s demise.
