Shah Rukh Khan’s Raees, the character, is made a hero figure on two levels. First, let’s put his religion aside. He is a gangster. To make a gangster someone to root for, you make a him a daredevil Robin Hood, someone who swindles the morally corrupt establishment ( here, the politicians) and does crime but also takes care of his ’people’. So, Raees maybe making money selling alcohol, which may or may not make a person beat his wife - we don’t know because that is not the story - but with that money, Raees is buying notebooks for the school he studied in. He is building a housing complex, a hospital and an English medium school for his ’people’, so he can happily see his mohalla’s kids talk in ’Tip-top Engliss’.
In one scene, Raees also gives a short speech on secularism and goes, Dhande mein koi Hindu-Muslim nahi hota. Later, on realising that he has been conned by a Mumbai-based don to play a part in a terrorist attack, Raees travels from his homeland Gujarat to Mumbai, alone, to kill the bad guy because he cannot do dhanda based on religion. Herein comes the Muslim part; how else do you make a ’good Muslim’ for the Indian screen if he is not the loyal sidekick ( Pran to Amitabh in Zanjeer, Shah Rukh himself to Kamal Haasan in Hey Ram) ? Simple. You make him kill the bad Muslim; the terrorist.
Rahul Dholakia’s Raees wears religious imagery on its sleeve and the Indian audience has enough dimaag to figure out the story’s parallels with a certain time period in Gujarat when a Muslim bootlegger was running wild in the state. There’s the character Raees himself with his Robin Hood persona and his closeness to the then-Chief Minister of Gujarat. The opposition politician takes a rath yatra out to bring Raees down to his knees and soon enough, Raees is lied to by a Nawab bhai from Mumbai who gets the good gangster to traffic RDX into the country. Yes, this is a risky film, regardless of where you get your information from; newspaper archives or WhatsApp forwards.
Alothogh its a good movie