by HARSH MANDER
As always, Harsh Mander lists his favourite Indian films of the year and discovers gems not just in Hindi but in other languages too.
In our land – still swept constantly by the poisonous hot winds of hate and grievance – 2025 was one more broken year.
Hateful speeches exhorting the cleansing of the country of its Muslim populace continued to thunder. Bulldozers continued to rumble razing Muslim homes and shrines. Temples continued to be discovered or imagined under medieval mosques. Churches and chapels continued to be vandalised by raging mobs. Crowds continued to thrash and stone men to death claiming they had slaughtered a cow or romanced a Hindu girl. Security forces continued to muzzle dissent and rebellion with bullets. Some of our finest hearts and minds continued to be locked away in prison barracks.
Piercing through the toxic haze of loathing, iniquity and fear that enveloped us all in 2025 were a handful of films of exceptional humanism. Films rose daring to voice difficult and dangerous truths about injustice and suffering and resistance. Films lit up with the audacity to imagine kindness. Films tender with the fortitude of hope.
Heading my list of the most consequential films of the year is a film that most Indians have not been given the chance to watch. This is Panjab 95. Intensely troubling and profoundly stirring, Honey Trehan’s film is a tribute to one of free India’s great heroes Jaswant Singh Khalra, a man sadly little known outside Punjab.
Trehan’s film hurtles us back to one of the darkest, most traumatic chapters in the journey of our republic, but one that most have completely forgotten. This was the decade from the mid-1980s of militancy in Punjab. The film recalls for us a regime in which the police was not just given a free hand but actively incentivised to murder innocent people. Policemen who killed enough numbers of unarmed men and women in cold blood were rewarded with out-of-turn promotions. It was a time of terror, in which no family in Punjab was safe. Young men were disappearing in droves, and their bodies burnt in covert mass cremations or thrown into the canals that dissect the state. Policemen would extort fortunes from parents threatening that their sons would otherwise be murdered. No one knew whose turn was next.
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