Shaka, when the walls fell.

This is supposed to be a review of Diljale (1996), but it's Diljale (Abridged) because the cut of the movie I watched has had more than an hour trimmed off its running time.  It was a long movie before, and there's still a lot of plot left, but the climax hinges on a few crucial changes of heart which apparently took place during off screen conversations.  It certainly helps keep the pace up, though.

Army officer Ranveer (Parmeet Sethi) is exploring the countryside around his new posting (they never explicitly say which state the movie takes place in, but it it clearly and obviously Kashmir, and not just because the movie was filmed in Switzerland, a popular Kashmir-double) when he catches sight of a mysterious and beautiful woman (Sonali Bendre) walking through the woods.  He doesn't manage to catch her, but he's already in love, and he sings a song to his men about how in love he is.

Later that night Ranveer meets his father's old friend Raja Saab (Skakti Kapoor) at a party, and is introduced to Raja Saab's daughter Radhika.  Radhika is the woman he saw in the woods, and since the families know and like each other, the pair are almost immediately engaged.  It's a remarkably easy love story, but there's a twist; Radhika has a dark secret in her past that her father is desperately trying to ensure stays secret.

Just as the engagement party is about to begin, Ranveer is called away to deal with a terrorist attack, and for some strange reason Raja Saab decides to go with him.  It's a diversion, though, and after they leave the notorious terrorist Shaka (Ajay Devgn) attacks the compound and then burns down the wedding pavilion.  He exchanges portentous glances with Radhika, and then leaves.

After the attack Shaka visits his mother (Farida Jalal), and the movie switches to a long flashback to when Shaka was a carefree but deeply patriotic college student named Shyam, son of a deeply patriotic village leader (Akash Khurana.)  Shyam's good heart and overwhelming patriotism catches the attention of Radhika, who is studying at the same college, and she starts sending him anonymous love notes.  Many, many love notes.  Shyam asks Radhika to help him figure out who is sending the notes, and she thinks it's funny to pin the blame on an overweight classmate.  (It is not funny, it's cruel, and if I were in charge of cutting an hour from the movie I know exactly where I would start.)

After a lengthy song about how he's not going to fall in love with anybody, Shyam figures out that Radhika sent the notes, and promptly falls in love with her.  This should be happy news, but Raja Saab is not happy when he finds out.  Not only is Shyam of a lower social status, his father is a thorn in Raja's political side.  He frames the father for sheltering terrorists, and the army makes the man disappear.  Shyam tries to find his father and get him released, only to be disappeared as well.  Raja Saab makes sure to show up at the prison so that father and son know exactly what he did and why.  After a brutal beating Shyam's father dies, and Shyam manages to escape, finally finding shelter with avuncular terrorist leader Dara (Amrish Puri).  

Back to the present.  Ranveer vows that he will not marry until he has killed Shaka.  For his part, Shaka keeps pretending that he doesn't care about Radhika anyway and busies himself doing terrorist stuff, finally kidnapping a bus full of pilgrims to exchange for four of his recently captured comrades, and the fact that Radhika happens to be on the bus is just a coincidence.  Honest.

Shaka's partner Shabnam (Madhoo), who is not-so-secretly in love with him, wants to execute Radhika right away.  Shaka can't bring himself to hurt her, though, and he won't let anybody else hurt her either, which means they get to play mind games with one another for a while.  Meanwhile, Ranveer is tearing up the countryside looking for his missing fiance, and Dara is plotting to bring his men to "a neighboring country" where they can be trained as suicide bombers and return to destroy India from within.  (Whenever a Nineties Bollywood movie plays coy about "a neighboring country" they always mean Pakistan.)

In a lot of ways, this is all typical Nineties fare, featuring a cast doing what they usually do.  Farida Jalal is the ideal mother, Shakti Kapoor is despicable, Amrish Puri steals every scene he's in, Sonali Bendre gets to display some real spine, and Ajay Devgn stumbles through his romantic scenes as Shyam but glowers impressively as Shaka.

The treatment of the politics, though, is surprising.  Dara and his men are not two-dimensional fanatics driven by ideology, they are people with a legitimate grudge against the Indian government, which is in fact disappearing people.  It's the same period covered in Haider, Vishal Bhardwaj's adaptation of Hamlet set in the Kashmir insurgency.

Of course, there's only so much nuance you can fit into a Nineties action-romance. The movie is very clear that being a terrorist is bad, even if you have a point, and Dara and company get a comeuppance in the end, though perhaps not the comeuppance you were expecting.  (And fair enough; terrorism absolutely is bad, even if you have a point.)  If you want a thoughtful, in depth fictionalized examination of the situation in Kashmir at the time, watch Haider.  On the other hand, even with its saccharine ending and the stated moral that "love can stop terrorism," it's remarkable that this silly action movie goes as far as it does in criticizing India's handling of the conflict while the conflict was still going on.