Underplayed Gems

Muzaffarnagar 2013 (2016)

Muzaffarnagar 2013 poster
Directed by
Harish Kumar
Genre
romance, action, drama
Country
India
Runtime
2h 14m
Rated
UA
Rating
4.5 of 10 from 2 voters
Elsewhere
IMDb
The 3D catalogue: film cases on wooden shelves, with the cat sitting at the counter next to its greeting.

The catalogue in 3D

The film shelves have a room of their own that you can walk around in. The cat behind the counter is the AI Catbot, and they pick real films from the same catalogue when you tell them what you feel like watching. Nothing is for sale, here or in there. Go in from here and this film is already out on the counter, with more like it waiting on the shelf next to it.

More films like thisWatch the trailer

or watch the trailer on YouTube

How it feels

This film dramatizes the events of the 2013 communal riots in Muzaffarnagar, India. It shows how a local killing escalated into widespread violence between Hindu Jats and Muslims, leading to dozens of deaths and mass displacement.

grimtensesoberingrawunflinchinggroundedheavydisturbing

What happens

The 2013 Muzaffarnagar riots were religious clashes between the Hindu Jats and Muslims in the Muzaffarnagar district of Uttar Pradesh, India. A total of 62 died in the clashes, 42 of whom were Muslims, and 20 Hindu. More than 50,000 people were displaced. The inciting incident was the killing of a Muslim man by two Hindu Jat cousins, Gaurav and Sachin Singh, on 27 August in the village of Kawal; sources describe the motive as arising from either a traffic altercation or sexual harassment of one of the cousins' relatives. A Muslim mob killed the cousins as they tried to flee. Violence escalated over the following week, fueled in part by a perception that local police were reluctant to apprehend the cousins' killers. On 7 September, a mahapanchayat assembly was called, and was attended by over 100,000 Jats and politicians from the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the Bharatiya Kisan Union, and the Congress Party; police described the rhetoric at the assembly as inflammatory. Widespread rioting broke out the following day, and the army was brought in to attempt to restore order and to evacuate Muslims to Muslim-majority villages. By 17 September, the curfew was lifted from all riot affected areas and the army was withdrawn. The refugee crisis created by the riots persisted for years afterward. The riot was described as "the worst violence in Uttar Pradesh in recent history", and was the first time in 20 years the army was deployed in the state. 97 legal cases were launched involving accusations against more than 1000 people, most of whom were acquitted over the next decade; seven were convicted of the murder of the Singh cousins. The Supreme Court of India, while hearing petitions in relation to the riots, held the Akhilesh Yadav-led Samajwadi Party guilty prima facie of negligence in preventing the violence and ordered it to immediately arrest all those accused irrespective of their political affiliation. The Court also blamed the Central government for its failure to provide intelligence inputs to the Samajwadi Party-governed state government in time to help sound alerts. In 2021, a local court allowed the Yogi Adityanath-led BJP government to withdraw a case of inciting violence against 12 BJP leaders involved in the riots. In 2022 Vikram Singh Saini, a BJP Member of the Legislative Assembly, and 11 others were sentenced to two years' imprisonment by a special court that convicted them of rioting and other offences. (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

More like this

This page is from Underplayed Gems. Not quite it? You can browse by genre, country and year, or take this one into the 3D catalogue and ask the Catbot for something closer.