While it touts itself as a movie that advocates unity, and there it does raise real issues about the conflict between collective action and individual priorities, there is an insidiously anti-Muslim message here. The director makes sure that the Muslim community looks irrational in its reaction to police actions that are presented as being perhaps a bit excessive, but mostly reasonable. The reality of Muslims, members of scheduled castes, and other religious, cultural and political minorities in much of India is that it's not slight overzealousness on the part of police and violent over-reaction on the part of minority communities that causes trouble.Muslims, Dalits and Adivasis have been targeted for real violence,physically, economically, politically and religiously. Against this real backdrop, the fact that the "good Muslim" in this movie is contrasted with what is painted as a tyrannical and sometimes even thuggish community, is not a message of sangam it's a message that Muslims need to accept the brutality of the state as their due, and that if they engage in any kind of coordinated collective action that it is a sign of their prejudice and that they are disloyal to and unworthy of India and to Ghandiji. Note the "humble wisdom" of the Muslim rickshaw-valla that his community can't tell him what to do because "this is not Pakistan or the Taliban." This is NOT Ghandian. Ghandi believed in collective action against injustice, this movie does not.
Review of Road to Sangam
