Diljit Liya: Why ‘Jogi’ is a Film with Heart and Humanity

Jogi  

Cast: Diljit Dosanjh, Kumud Mishra, Mohd. Zeeshan Ayyub, Hiten Tejwani, Amyra Dastur 

Direction: Ali Abbas Zafar 

Rating: ★★1/2 

Streaming on Netflix   

Writer-director Ali Abbas Zafar’s Jogi, starring sabka favourite Diljit Dosanjh, is a strange, shape-shifting movie. It is, by turns, incredibly humane, powerful and real, but also totally filmy, superficial and tedious. I can’t recall the last time I watched a film that is moving and poignant, but also irritating and boring in equal measure. 

Jogi begins powerfully as a historical fiction to tell us the story of Delhi’s anti-Sikh riots. But soon its rooted-in-reality tragic saga turns into an escape-rescue thriller, only to take yet another bizarre tangent and become a craven dost-dost-na-raha saga that harks back to college days, a pretty girl and a bhai who didn’t approve. 

The film is strong during action scenes, and in big, dramatic moments. But in smaller, routine scenes that link these, the storytelling is cursory, flat. 
Written by Ali Abbas Zafar and Sukhmani Sadana, the fault lies with the dull, uninspired writing and the equally indolent direction.  

Yet, there is something special about Jogi.  

There are the performances, of course – of Diljit Dosanjh, Kumud Mishra, Mohd. Zeeshan Ayyub and Hiten Tejwani – that keep lifting the film every time it begins to sink.  

But more than that, it’s the film’s good intentions and warm heart that are endearing. 

At the end, the emotion that stays with us is that of deep sadness about a tragedy that has been ignored, a crime that has gone unpunished and a community that has been wronged. Not for a moment does Ali Abbas Zafar, who earlier made Tiger Zinda Hai, Sultan and the series Tandav, make us feel hate towards any community or religion.  

Jogi doesn’t flinch from showing us the carnage. It doesn’t obfuscate facts. But it never stoops to pander – to a community or a political party.  

Jogi is set in Delhi and tells the story of the Capital’s shame over three days, beginning on October 31, 1984, the day Indira Gandhi, India’s then Prime Minister, was shot dead. 

The film’s main focus is set in Trilokpuri, a colony in west Delhi that was one of the worst affected (300 to 400 Sikhs were killed there) in the anti-Sikh riots. This is where Joginder aka Jogi (Diljit Dosanjh) lives a life of happy lower-middle-class normalcy with his family. 

In Joginder’s house the day is just beginning. There’s banter over breakfast about a birthday in the evening for which Jogi needs to help blow up balloons. There’s also his father’s office retirement party.  

As Joginder and his father set out for work, news of Indira Gandhi’s assassination begins to travel. Students are sent back from schools, roads are deserted. But there’s hectic activity at the house of Tejpal Arora (Kumud Mishra), Trilokpuri councilor. A riot is brewing there.  

He needs voter lists. Mutton biryani is ordered for the area’s “habitual criminals,” and intezam is being made for kerosene, swords, country-made pistols, crates of Molotov cocktails, cloth to cover faces. 

As Jogi and his father take a bus to get to their offices, they are abused, beaten, kicked by men whose rage is being fanned and bolstered by statements of politicians. 

Delhi’s skyline, meanwhile, is being maligned by massive black clouds of smoke rising from the colony they have left behind.
In councilor Tejpal’s house, tools and paraphernalia for a riot are to be had for the asking. 

Desperate to get a party ticket for the general elections, he hands out area-wise voters’ lists and briefs the local cops, all under the “upar se order hai” mandate. 

All the names that have an ‘S’ written against them must be struck off in three days, before the Army arrives. Each strike is worth Rs 1,000. And if it’s someone famous, important, the strike could mean Rs 5,000.
Two police officers from the Trilokpuri thana are to oversee the operations. One is obsequious and nods his head in agreement; the other, Rawinder Chautala (Mohd.  Zeeshan Ayyub), is worried and scared, especially when he hears “Galli No. 6.” It’s where his friend Jogi lives.  

As men with their faces covered begin the pogrom, in narrow colony lanes, burning men flail about, screaming for help.  

Inside homes that are not yet burning, desperate mothers dress young boys as girls and cut the kesh of older ones. 

In Tirlokpuri’s gurudwara, old, proud men talk in whispers, mothers weep, girls are petrified, and young boys who till a day before were students, worked in offices or ran small shops, rise to take charge. They stand as human shields between the marauding hordes. 

Amidst all this, Jogi cuts his hair and, with the help of his friends Rawinder and Kaleem Ansari (Paresh Pahuja), drives a truck to take a few old men and mothers with young kids to safety. 

This rescue-escape thriller gets especially tense with the arrival of Laali Katiyal (Hiten Tejwani) – a cop who is keen to see Jogi and Galli No. 6 burn. As Rawinder, Kaleem and Jogi try to hoodwink Tejpal and save a few more men and women, the film takes another turn, harking back to an unrelated past. Many years ago, when Jogi, Laali and Rawinder were in college, there was one Kammo (Amyra Dastur) who loved Jogi, but her brother did not approve.  

This filmy track muddies the film, taking away its political and moral power and confuses a riot with a personal grievance.  

Jogi is not a great film, but it’s a special one because it doesn’t frame the perpetrators in their religion. It relays a tragedy, recreates a shameful chapter in Indian history by showing a government that is deliberately absent for the victims because it is busy providing weapons for their murder, and a police force whose jeeps are stacked with kerosene jerry cans. 

Scenes of brazen, staggering criminality and inhumanity unleashed at the behest of the state are powerful and poignant because the massacre of Sikhs is not shown as a war between two communities, but as genocide driven by men with political agendas and ambitions.  

Jogi clearly shows that it was the state and its foot soldiers, some in uniform, others with cloth covering their faces, who, through phone calls, easy access to voters’ lists and handsets lying off-hook in police stations, rendered even Delhi’s gurudwaras unsafe.  

While reminding usthat India owes the Sikhs justice, gratitude and an apology, the film doffs its hat to a community which has, despite the tragedy and the suffering, retained its humanity. And this is what gives Jogi a heart.