WHEN Uri: The Surgical Strike was released in 2019 it became a huge blockbuster success. In terms of budget versus return, the fictional account of India’s retaliation to Pakistan militants launching a deadly attack in 2016, became one of the highest profit-making movies of all time.
Almost five years later, the award-winning hit seems to have cursed the three key people connected to it. The film’s writer-director Aditya Dhar started working on his high profile follow up The Immortal Ashwatthama, but the mythological superhero adventure headlined by Uri: The Surgical Strike lead star Vicky Kaushal soon collapsed.
Budgets spiralling out of control led to The Immortal Ashwatthama being shelved before it commenced shooting, which means that despite winning multiple awards for his directorial debut, Dhar is still waiting for a second film. It is now turning into one of the biggest gaps between an acclaimed debut and a follow up. This is one of many projects that have prevented Kaushal from progressing to leading man material.
His movies released as a leading man since then like Bhoot – Part One: The Haunted Ship, Govinda Naam Mera and The Great Indian Family have been major failures. His film Sardar Udham won awards but was largely overrated and dumped straight onto a streaming site.
Sam Bahadur
Perhaps, the most cursed has been the movie’s producer Ronnie Screwvala because he has been on a dramatic downward spiral. The clueless producer tried to replicate the anti-Pakistan rhetoric of Uri: The Surgical Strike, but that has backfired multiple times.
His decidedly average period war films Mission Majnu and Pippa dealt with India battling the old enemy, but both were dumped straight onto a streaming site because the appetite just wasn’t there for a cinema release. The average movies generated very little interest. There have been rumours that the recent release Pippa was sold at a huge financial loss to Amazon Prime.
Screwvala’s other anti-Pakistan film Tejas became a spectacular failure when it was released in October. When all the calculations are done, the Kangana Ranaut air force drama will be one of this year’s biggest film failures. After these three terrible cross-border war movies, the producer is hoping to turn things around with soon to be released film Sam Bahadur, which is due in cinemas on December 1. But that looks like more of the same – it is another cross border war movie and it has Kaushal portraying a real life Indian super soldier. The trailer received an average response, despite being directed by acclaimed filmmaker Meghna Gulzar.
Ronnie Screwvala
If by some miracle the army movie does turn out to be good, it has shot itself in the foot by releasing on the same day as hotly anticipated blockbuster Animal.
It is an astonishingly bad decision considering Animal has a top drawer director and has a red-hot cast led up by massively popular Bollywood star Ranbir Kapoor. It is also a full-throttled action movie, which is the hottest genre in Hindi cinema right now after the big success of Pathaan and Jawaan.
If, as expected, Sam Bahadur fails at the box office, it will be four army movies in a row produced by Screwvala that have failed to replicate the success of Uri: The Surgical Strike, which still seems to be cursing key people associated with it.
PRIME MINISTER Keir Starmer has been more sure-footed on the world stage than at home in his first year in office, but is sensitive to the wrong-headed charge that he spends too much time abroad.
So, this will be a week when world leaders come to him, with fleeting visits from both Indian prime minister Narendra Modi and US president Donald Trump, touring his golf courses in Scotland before his formal state visit in September. The main purpose of Modi’s two-day stopover is to sign the India-UK trade deal, agreed in May, but overshadowed then by the escalation of conflict between India and Pakistan.
This is Modi’s fourth visit to the UK since taking office – with a change of Monarch and a new prime minister or three since he was last here. Beyond a trip to the Palace, this working visit may lack the razzmatazz of his earlier visits, with no public engagements on anything like the scale of his addressing a Wembley stadium full of the British Indian diaspora alongside David Cameron a decade ago.
It would seem a missed opportunity if the prime ministerial schedules do not allow them to make it to the India versus England Test match at Old Trafford in Manchester. Modi did once take Anthony Albanese, the rather Starmeresque Australian prime minister – to see Australia play India in Ahmedabad, at the Narendra Modi Stadium, no less. Keir Starmer could hardly match that. A trip to watch the cricket would be an instrumental chance to communicate the trade deal. It would exemplify the unique depth of cultural connections and people-to-people links central to today’s post-imperial relationship. And it would be a chance to find out what happens next in a brilliant sporting contest.
This series does not have what we might intuitively think is the key ingredient of a sporting classic: the best teams in the world competing at their peak. These England and India sides are teams in transition – yet their competing talents and flaws are evenly matched enough to produce an epic drama, filled with compelling swings of the pendulum. So, India head to Old Trafford for the fourth Test bemused to somehow find themselves twoone behind, having been the better team on most days, but not in the decisive moments. If India could level the series before the final Oval Test, this could have a good claim to be the most memorable series that England and India have ever played.
Yet Old Trafford has not been a happy hunting ground for India – with four defeats and five draws in the past nine Tests. Yet young Indian Shubman Gill has already given the first ever win at Edgbaston in his first season as captain, between the narrow defeats at Headingley and Lords, so is unlikely to be daunted by the shadow of history.
Yet Old Trafford was also the scene of one of the greatest ever Indian performances – fully 129 summers ago, long before India had a Test team, as the swashbuckling prince Ranjitsinhji scored 154 not out for England in the Ashes test. Ranji had been left out at Lords, regarded as a ‘mere bird of passage’ by MCC selector but the Old Trafford selectors responded to the press and public clamour for Ranji’s selection, and his swashbuckling innings becoming the stuff of Victorian cricketing legend. Ranji’s history of 1896 makes it even more remarkable that Wisden Cricket monthly was to disgrace itself a century later with an article headlined “Is it all in the blood?” by Robert Henderson, which called for ‘a rigorously racially and culturally determined selection policy’. The explicit argument was that those without ancestral ethnic connections could never feel ‘a deep, unquestioning commitment to England’ but would risk instead gaining a conscious or subconscious satisfaction in seeing England humiliated. Wisden settled legal claims from Devon Malcolm and Phil Defraitas out of court for describing them as not ‘unequivocal Englishmen’ who should be excluded on these grounds.
The Wisden Affair exemplifies that there was a strong common sense consensus that ethnic minorities could be English at least 30 years ago. England’s black footballers had clearly settled this question by the early 1990s too. In doing so, they made the black English rather more culturally familiar than the Asian English.
Cricket did more to complicate questions of national identity and sporting allegiance. Most fans saw the Tebbit test as outside the spirit of cricket – it does not apply to Australians here, or the English down under. British Asians are only likely to play for England, not India or Pakistan, but still more likely to support the Asian teams at cricket while cheering for England at football. Norman Tebbit died the week before the Lord’s Test, where Shoaib Bashir took the final Indian wicket for England. It may have been a sign from above that the argument has moved on.
Sunder Katwala is the director of thinktank British Future and the author of the book How to Be a Patriot: The must-read book on British national identity and immigration.
By clicking the 'Subscribe’, you agree to receive our newsletter, marketing communications and industry
partners/sponsors sharing promotional product information via email and print communication from Garavi Gujarat
Publications Ltd and subsidiaries. You have the right to withdraw your consent at any time by clicking the
unsubscribe link in our emails. We will use your email address to personalize our communications and send you
relevant offers. Your data will be stored up to 30 days after unsubscribing.
Contact us at data@amg.biz to see how we manage and store your data.
Investigators at the site of the Air India crash in Ahmedabad on June 13
SOME western papers have been too quick to suggest pilot error or sabotage in the Air India crash in Ahmedabad last month.
This is based on a couple of lines in the preliminary report on the crash: “In the cockpit voice recording, one of the pilots is heard asking the other why did he cutoff. The other pilot responded that he did not do so.”
It seems the crash was caused by fuel supply to the engines being cut off.
The exact quotes are not given and neither are the pilots identified.
The senior pilot was Sumeet Sabharwal, 56, who had clocked 8,200 flying hours. The co-pilot, Clive Kunder, 32, had 1,100 hours.
India’s civil aviation minister, Kinjarapu Ram Mohan Naidu, urged people not to jump to conclusions, but wait for the full report: “I believe we have the most wonderful workforce of pilots and crew in the whole world. I have to appreciate all the efforts the pilots and crew of the country are putting, they are the backbone of civil aviation. They are the primary resource of civil aviation. We care for the welfare and well-being of the pilots also. So let us not jump into any conclusions at this stage and wait for the final report.”
What many commentators have missed is that once the fault was detected, there was an attempt to restore the fuel supply. One engine restarted, but the other did not.
Perhaps Eastern Eye readers can make up their own minds by reading the preliminary report in full as I have done: https://static01.
Take off speed was normal with fuel supply to both engines, but “immediately thereafter, the Engine 1 and Engine 2 fuel cutoff switches transitioned from RUN to CUTOFF position one after another with a time gap of 01 sec. The Engine N1 and N2 began to decrease from their take-off values as the fuel supply to the engines was cut off.”
Next followed the exchange between the two pilots.
Then it seems action was taken quickly to restore fuel supply. The language is technical, but one gets a sense the pilots were trying desperately to reverse the downwards path of the aircraft.
The report states: “As per the EAFR (Enhanced Airborne Flight Recorder) the Engine 1 fuel cutoff switch transitioned from CUTOFF to RUN at about 08:08:52 UTC (Coordinated Universal Time). The APU Inlet Door began opening at about 08:08:54 UTC, consistent with the APU Auto Start logic. Thereafter at 08:08:56 UTC the Engine 2 fuel cutoff switch also transitions from CUTOFF to RUN. When fuel control switches are moved from CUTOFF to RUN while the aircraft is inflight, each engines full authority dual engine control (FADEC) automatically manages a relight and thrust recovery sequence of ignition and fuel introduction. The EGT (exhaust gas temperature) was observed to be rising for both engines indicating relight. Engine 1’s core deceleration stopped, reversed and started to progress to recovery. Engine 2 was able to relight but could not arrest core speed deceleration and re-introduced fuel repeatedly to increase core speed acceleration and recovery. The EAFR recording stopped at 08:09:11 UTC. At about 08:09:05 UTC, one of the pilots transmitted ‘MAYDAY MAYDAY MAYDAY’.”
Is it possible there was a technical fault after normal take off that caused the fuel supply switch to flip from RUN to CUTOFF without pilot intervention?
Maybe this is one of those mysteries that sometimes happens with air crashes that will never be solved. But to me a technical malfunction appears to be a more credible explanation than deliberate sabotage and suicide by one of the pilots.
Keep ReadingShow less
FILE PHOTO: Riot police hold back protesters near a burning police vehicle in Southport, England
Could this long, hot summer see violence like last year’s riots erupt again? It surely could. That may depend on some trigger event – though the way in which the tragic murders of Southport were used to mobilise inchoate rage, targeting asylum seekers and Muslims, showed how tenuous such a link can be. There has already been unrest again in Ballymena this summer. Northern Ireland saw more sustained violence, yet fewer prosecutions than anywhere in England last summer.
"We must not wait for more riots to happen" says Kelly Fowler, director of Belong, who co-publish a new report, ‘The State of Us’, this week with British Future. The new research provides a sober and authoritative guide to the condition of cohesion in Britain. A cocktail of economic pessimism, declining trust in institutions and the febrile tinderbox of social media present major challenges. Trust in political institutions has rarely been lower – yet there is public frustration too with an angry politics which amplifies division.
The political arguments this autumn will not take place only at the traditional party conferences. Both the supporters of Tommy Robinson and his opponents in anti-racism groups will try to mobilise marches and street movements in September, just days before US president Donald Trump’s state visit provides a focal point for political protest that could stake a claim to unite, rather than polarise, British public opinion.
Amid a febrile political atmosphere, the State of Us report does find reasons for grounded hope too. There is pride in place just about everywhere. In the long run, Britain’s story is of increasing tolerance and liberalism across generations, despite cities and towns having contrasting experiences of economic change. Talk of a ‘lost decade’ of growth after the 2008 crash had turned into 17 years, Southport MP Patrick Hurley told the recent Belong summit, fuelling a nostalgic sense of decline and loss in many towns. That event spotlighted useful work on cohesion happening around the UK, though Fowler notes that this can be patchy. The 35 areas where unrest briefly flared up did get one-off community recovery grants of £650,000 each to spend in six months. There were no conditions to prevent councils just shoring up general finances, but most tried to do something constructive. Sunderland and Tamworth held community conversations that could found longer-term strategies. Some councils hoped to myth-bust misinformation or contest racist narratives, but they can struggle to know how to engage low-trust sections of the public effectively.
What should be done - and by whom? Because the State of Us report is a foundational input for an Independent Commission on Community and Cohesion, being co-chaired by Sajid Javid and Jon Cruddas, the report sets out the key challenges, but deliberately stops short of recommending an action plan. The government should act faster on the flashpoint risks. The very incitement for which users were imprisoned last August remains online today, illustrating how slow platforms and regulators have been to act on this ongoing national security threat.
Immigration and asylum divide opinion. Governments have spoken loudly about stopping boats crossing the Channel, but failed to do so. Perhaps the new UK-French pilot deal unveiled last week will scale up into an orderly asylum process that could reduce dangerous crossings. The UK government does already have more control over local impacts. The incentives to concentrate asylum seekers wherever housing is cheapest, with minimal communication with local authorities nor contact with local communities, exacerbate local cohesion tensions.
Faith minister Lord Khan rightly notes that addressing the root causes of division and discontent will take time. Making a start requires a clear analysis of both the drivers and the useful responses. This government can sometimes see cohesion as an issue for deprived and diverse areas, rather than as a challenge for everywhere.
Even in withdrawing his contentious “island of strangers” comments, prime minister Sir Keir Starmer again fell into sending parallel messages to different audiences, “deeply regretting” the language in the Observer before reassuring Sun readers that he “stood by” the underlying sentiments. The acknowledged lack of pre-delivery scrutiny over the speech was a symptom of the government not yet finding the bandwidth to work out its philosophical framework, public narrative or policy strategy. This government has had no public position, for example, on whether it is an advocate or critic of multiculturalism, or seeks to offer its own distinct framework for what integration should mean in this changing society.
The anniversary of the riots offers the prime minister another opportunity to voice a more coherent public narrative of what it means to respect our differences and work on what we can share in common. That could underpin a sustained, practical strategy on cohesion. Even in polarising times, one core test of a shared society is how far we can develop a shared story about who we are, how we got here, and where we want to go together.
Sunder Katwala is the director of thinktank British Future and the author of the book How to Be a Patriot: The must-read book on British national identity and immigration.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that voters are dissatisfied with the political choices on offer - so must they be in want of new parties too? A proliferation of start-ups showed how tricky political match-making can be. Zarah Sultana took Jeremy Corbyn by surprise by announcing they will co-lead a new left party. Two of Nigel Farage’s exes announced separate political initiatives to challenge Reform from its right, with the leader of London’s Conservatives lending her voice to Rupert Lowe’s revival of the politics of repatriation.
Corbyn and Sultana are from different generations. He had been an MP for a decade by the time she was born. For Sultana’s allies, this intergenerational element is a core case for the joint leadership. But the communications clash suggests friction ahead. After his allies could not persuade Sultana to retract her announcement, Corbyn welcomed her decision to leave Labour, saying ‘negotiations continue’ over the structure and leadership of a new party. It will seek to link MPs elected as pro-Gaza independents with other strands of the left outside Labour.
Nigel Farage
Would the new party cooperate or compete with the Green Party? Zack Polanski’s leadership campaign promotes a “left populism” with much overlap with the Corbynista agenda. He is challenging MPs Adrian Ramsey and Ellie Chowns, who offer continuity with the quieter strategy which saw Green gains in their Herefordshire and Norfolk seats while winning in Bristol and Brighton.
On the right, Ben Habib, sacked as a Reform deputy leader by Farage, launched a new ‘Advance Party’ - but could not get Great Yarmouth MP Lowe to join it. Lowe launched a Restore Britain campaigning movement instead.
Habib has yet to make his new party official, claiming it must recruit 30,000 members to be eligible for registration. The Electoral Commission has no such threshold: there are over 300 registered parties. This false claim may just be a recruitment tactic or a device to delay revealing its donors.
A congratulatory tweet from US billionaire businessman Elon Musk reinforced Habib’s hope that the world’s richest man may help to fund his new party. But Musk’s own focus is on launching a new “America Party” as his feud with US president Donald Trump escalates. Musk self-identifies as a centrist, oblivious to his own self-radicalisation after curating an entire social media platform in his own image. Reform had hoped for a multi-million pound donation from Musk too, before he attacked Farage’s refusal to embrace former EDL leader Tommy Robinson. Yet this simply reinforced Musk’s toxic reputation with the British public.
How much political space is there further right of Farage? About a quarter of the Reform vote - about three per cent of the electorate - find Farage too moderate on race and immigration. But these are mostly the same group who supported last summer’s violent riots. Farage believes a boundary rejecting the BNP (British National Party) and Robinson is imperative to be a mainstream party. Farage faces start-up challenges too. Farage wants to bring 300 first-time MPs to parliament - and would have to give top Cabinet jobs to many unknown quantities. Thurrock MP James McMurdock resigned the Reform whip over the weekend after credible allegations of business fraud during the pandemic.
Rupert LoweGetty Images
Habib can appeal only to those within the segment to Farage’s right who find ethnic minority leadership acceptable. He may be offering too niche a product to find a viable market. Lowe’s agenda is to go much further than Farage on immigration and race. Since Farage’s slogan is to cut net migration to zero, Restore Britain is campaigning for “negative net migration” - pledging to remove ‘millions’ of legal migrants so that “outflows considerably outstrip inflows’. The Migration Advisory Committee projects that the UK population would begin to shrink if net migration was below 110,000. Lowe argues that rising ethnic diversity can be reversed, not just be slowed down. His slogan, ‘stop importing, start deporting’, consciously revives the ‘send them back’ politics of Enoch Powell and the 1970s National Front. Lowe is celebrated by overtly racist bloggers for these efforts to popularise the idea of ‘remigration’. Several London Conservatives are dismayed that Susan Hall has joined this Restore Britain campaign, since the former Tory mayoral candidate leads the party’s Greater London Assembly group. But that criticism remains muted in public. Lowe himself has not ruled out joining the Conservatives before the next election.
The rise of new parties is an expression of democratic politics, but can reflect a misunderstanding of its challenges, too. New parties can voice arguments that citizens feel are missing. But a consumerist search for the perfect party can seek to side-step the inevitable frustrations of compromise. Politics is about how societies make collective decisions when we disagree. Whether we have four-, five- or six-party politics, the challenge for parties - old and new - is how any can secure broad enough support to govern in such fragmented and polarised times.
Sunder Katwala is the director of thinktank British Future and the author of the book How to Be a Patriot: The must-read book on British national identity and immigration.
ONE reason I watched the BBC documentary Amol Rajan Goes to the Ganges with particular interest was because I have been wondering what to do with the ashes of my uncle, who died in August last year. His funeral, like that of his wife, was half Christian and half Hindu, as he had wished. But he left no instructions about his ashes.
Sooner or later, this is a question that every Hindu family in the UK will have to face, since it has been more than half a century since the first generation of Indian immigrants began arriving in this country. Amol admits he found it difficult to cope with the loss of his father, who died aged 76 three years ago. His ashes were scattered in the Thames.
Amol, who is 41, was born in Calcutta and was brought to Britain when he was three.
“My dad was my hero, totally and utterly,” he declares.
He recalls: “Very suddenly, three years ago, he got pneumonia, went into hospital, spent five dreadful weeks in intensive care, and died. This was really shocking to me because it was the first time I’d ever lost someone I loved.” Watching the grand final of University Challenge, in which Christ’s College, Cambridge, beat Warwick 175–170 in an exciting finish, we saw Amol’s intellectual and secular side as a BBC TV presenter.
He says he is an atheist, but nevertheless undertook a pilgrimage to the Ganges to see if he could emancipate his father from the eternal cycle of birth, death and rebirth and help him gain moksha. He couldn’t get to the confluence of the Ganges and the Yamuna at the Kumbh Mela because of a stampede in which 30 people were trampled to death and hundreds injured. But he participated in pind daan and took a dip in the Ganges.
Rajan offers the pind daan in honour of his father and ancestors
He says: “I think that one of the things that I wanted to go to the Kumbh Mela to do, was to confront my grief, reconnect with my dad, but also to try and work out what the next 38 or 40 years of my life would have to do with the first half.”
Expressing grief on camera, as Amol does, is a little odd, but he explains: “I think there are three things I want people to take away from this documentary. One is about grief, the other is about faith, and the final one is about family. Every grief is different, and everyone grieves for somebody they’ve lost in a very unique way, but I do think there are certain rules about grief. I do think it does get easier over time, and I do think that sharing grief by talking about it, by connecting with other people that are aggrieved, is a really valuable thing. This documentary is a way of trying to grieve in public, not for vain reasons, but because I think there’s something that people could learn from that.”