The teaser of the film ‘Ajmer 92’ is released on 13th July. This hard-hitting movie, produced by Reliance Entertainment in collaboration with U&K Films Entertainment, Sumit Motion Pictures, and Little Crew Pictures, will be released on 21st July 2023.
Based on true events, Ajmer 92 tells the story of the grim plight of as many as 250 girls who were trapped, sexually exploited, and blackmailed for years by many influential men, including Congress leaders and the caretakers of Ajmer Dargah, in the city of Ajmer in Rajasthan in 1992.
The teaser of the film directed by Pushpendra Singh opens with a phone call received by one of the the victim girls of the case. It then runs through the distressing visuals of the atrocities on the victim, tensed families, police officials, and politicians trying to comprehend the breadths and depths of the issue. The teaser spans slightly above one minute and gets hold of the viewer attracting him to the core subject handled in this movie. The film stars Karan Verma, Sumit Singh, Sayaji Shinde, Manoj Joshi, Shalini Kapoor Sagar, Brijendra Kalra, and Zarina Wahab, among others.
The Youtube description of the teaser reads, “The gripping teaser encapsulates the suicides of several minor girls who are raped, leading to widespread panic and hysteria. The story revolves around how grief-stricken girls are blackmailed by powerful men. Ajmer-92′ aspires to ignite a sense of empowerment within women, encouraging them to break their silence and bravely speak out against any form of atrocity.”
The plot of the film uncovers one of the largest rape scandals India has ever witnessed, in which hundreds of girls were blackmailed into being violently raped by influential people with political connections. Many of the girls were from affluent homes, even the daughters of government officers, but the perpetrators kept escaping justice for years.
We have seen many cases of rape, gang rape and exploitation in our country. But the sheer scale and brazen impunity in the Ajmer scandal is something very unusual and had shaken the conscience of the entire country.
The 1992 Ajmer Rape and Blackmail Scandal
In the year 1992, it was revealed that over 250 girls were raped and blackmailed in Ajmer, Rajasthan. The news of the scandal broke after a local paper, ‘Navjyoti’ published some nude images and a story that spoke about school students being blackmailed by local gangs.
It all started with Farooq Chishti grooming a female student of Sophia Senior Secondary School and raping her. He took objectionable photographs of the minor and threatened her to introduce other girls to him. Later, those girls were raped and blackmailed too.
Farooq Chishti was the president of the Ajmer Youth Congress while two other accused, Nafis Chishti and Anwar Chishti were the vice-president and joint secretary respectively of the city Congress unit.
Some of the Chishti Khadims (caretakers) of the Ajmer Dargah were among the accused in this case. The accused Chishtis included Anwar Chishti, Farooq Chishti, and Nafees Chishti.
Numerous girls were trapped, sexually exploited, and blackmailed for years by Farooq Chishti and his gang, including many influential men in the area with political connections. Since the main culprits were associated with the Khadims, the religious caretakers of the Ajmer Dargah, and had power and political links, the matter was suppressed by the police. Reports mention that over the years, many victims had even committed suicide.
The gang and its territory kept growing, adding more pain and suffering. As per reports, all the girls were between the ages of 11 to 20. When the scandal got exposed, the police initially stalled the matter because of political pressure. However, the protests spread rapidly in the region, and eventually, police arrested several accused in the case. After years of investigation, eight of the accused were convicted, including Chishti.
Further investigations led to 18 men in total being charged and tensions ran high in the town for several days. Most of the accused were Muslims, many from the families of Khadims, and most victims were young Hindu girls.
What followed next was another saga of political influence and administrative incompetence. There are speculations that the matter was suppressed to the point that many witnesses and victims turned hostile, and many details got buried. The witnesses and victims were threatened and blackmailed as well to stop them from coming forward. Some of them turned hostile due to social stigma. The case is often compared to the infamous Rotherham Child Sexual Exploitation Scandal in the UK.
The social stigma ran to such an extent that for years after the incident was exposed, people looking for prospective brides in the area used to ask if the girl was one of “those victims”.
The era of telling untold stories
It is notable that in the recent few years, the film fraternity is witnessing the courage of filmmakers to take up less-discussed topics as the core subject of their movies. These filmmakers are addressing the issues which otherwise could never be discussed in the secular liberal establishment during the age-old Congress regime post-independence.
In fact, the whole essence of the way Bollywood portrayed Indic values and awareness can be known from a simple fact that the villains in most of the films were shown as ardent devotees of Hindu deities while any Muslim character was usually shown as an epitome of loyalty. The minority appeasement policies of the Congress governments were rooted so deep even in a creative field like cinema that a separate genre of films called Muslim Socials arose in a country as Hindu in practice as India, if not on paper. Interestingly, there are no Christian Socials or Parsi Socials.
In the past few years, we have seen filmmakers like Vivek Agnihotri, and Sudipto Sen, and producers like Vipul Shah and Abhishek Agrawal who put in their creative efforts and monetary resources to make films that address the uncomfortable realities faced by Indians. Vivek Agnihotri’s ‘The Tashkent Files’ discussed the mystery behind the death of India’s former Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri. His next film ‘The Kashmir Files’ was a superhit film. It was based on the Islamic terrorism and genocide of Hindus in Kashmir, a topic that the ‘secular-liberal’ establishment tried its best to dismiss.
Sudipto Sen’s film ‘The Kerala Files’ depicts the issue of sexually profiled religious grooming of non-Muslim young girls in Kerala and their subsequent use as terrorists and suicide bombers and sex slaves in ISIS. Sanjay Puran Singh Chauhan’s film ’72 Hoorain’ was recently released. It discusses the idea of 72 hoors preached by Muslim religious figures to attract Muslim youths to join terrorism. Now, with ‘Ajmer 92’ director Pushpendra Singh is all set to tell the story of the heinous crime that took place in Ajmer in 1992 and was largely ignored by the media and the ‘secular-liberal’ system.
