Hate Unlimited:
In India, most people will suppress their natural compassion and advise not to get involved in other people’s problems. Karan Tejpal’s Stolen is about two brothers who get caught up in helping an underprivileged woman and experience the horrors of mob frenzy.
At a small station in north India, the baby of a woman Jhumpa (Mia Maelzer) is stolen while she is asleep on the platform. Raman Bansal (Shubham Vardhan), a photographer from the city, who has just got off a train and is waiting for his brother, Gautam (Abhishek Banerjee) to pick him up, is accused by the frantic mother of kidnapping her baby. The cops are called, the misunderstanding is sorted out, but despite Gautam’s offer of a bribe, the cop on duty, called Panditji (Harish Khanna) won’t let them leave till they have given a statement.
Seeing that the cops are not too keen on helping Jhumpa, Raman, naively believing that his upper class privilege will work, agrees to go hunt for the baby, and Gautam is reluctantly dragged along.
Unbeknownst to the brothers, the small fracas at the station has been captured on camera, and shared with local online groups that mistakenly believe that the two men in a black SUV are baby abductors. Soon they are being chased by armed mobs, because there have been other missing babies in that area and they want to punish the men who they believe are responsible.
The pleas that it was a misunderstanding falls on deaf ears, even when Panditji tries to intervene. During the chase, Raman gets shot, and they have to desperately seek medical help to prevent him bleeding to death. Turns out Jhumpa’s story is not so straightforward—she has lied about where she came from and why she has a large sum of money with her.
The film is based on a real incident of two innocent men being lynched for being child snatchers. In the film, Tejpal adds other elements – like illegal surrogacy and a child trafficking racket—to somewhat deflect from the trauma the well-meaning brothers suffer. They had come to this unknown place to attend the second wedding of their mother, but fell into an unimaginable nightmare. In real life, an honest and dutiful cop might not have been on the scene, but there are layers of male hate and violence in India, that is at odds with the image of peace Indians like to project. A slight provocation, however, brings out the beast in ordinary people. At some point, the story stops being about a stolen child and distraught mother, it becomes about the Bansal brothers encountering an unfamiliar hell.
The three actors on whom the film focuses, do their roles with sincerity and portray their ordeal so realistically, that the viewer feels like they are being pulled into the situation too. Because, it’s only luck that prevents anyone from being in their place. And then, expect their faith in the police will get them out of trouble. That in itself could count as a fairytale in these times.
(This piece first appeared in seniorstoday.in)