Prahaar examines Ujjwal Nikam’s role in landmark terror trials, championing due process while struggling to humanise its protagonist. Arnab Banerjee reviews Avinash Arun’s courtroom drama, its compelling performances, moral questions and uneven storytelling overall.

The Untold Story of Ujjwal Nikam: When the Law Takes Centre Stage, Its Hero Falters 

Directed by: Avinash Arun

Written by: Sumit Roy

Starring: Rajkummar Rao, Wamiqa Gabbi, Jaideep Ahlawat, Sikandar Kher, Ashish Vidyarthi, Lalit Prabhakar and Ritvik Sahore Cinematography: Avinash Arun

Rating: ★★½

Truth is what we ostensibly fight for, yet it is often the first casualty of the very battles waged in its name. Nowhere is this paradox more acutely felt than in a courtroom, where the clamour for retribution must yield to the rigours of evidence and the dispassionate demands of the law. It is this uneasy intersection of public outrage, legal obligation and the pursuit of justice that lends Prahaar: The Untold Story of Ujjwal Nikam its most compelling premise. Unfortunately, a film that understands the moral stakes of its subject does not always possess the dramatic finesse to do it justice.

Prahaar Examines the Pursuit of Justice

Directed by Avinash Arun and produced by Dinesh Vijan under the Maddock Films banner, Prahaar traces the professional journey of public prosecutor Ujjwal Nikam through some of India’s most consequential criminal proceedings. Revisiting the legal battles arising from the 1993 Bombay bombings and the 2008 Mumbai terror attacks, the film eventually settles on the trial of Ajmal Kasab, the lone surviving terrorist captured during the 26/11 carnage. Rather than merely reconstruct the horrors of that night, it turns its gaze towards the protracted judicial proceedings that followed, examining what it means to uphold the rule of law when public sentiment clamours for swift and uncompromising vengeance.

This is fertile dramatic territory. The capture of Kasab was only one dimension of the national trauma; ensuring that he received a fair trial, despite the overwhelming evidence of his culpability and the fury of a wounded nation, posed an altogether different challenge. Why must the law extend its protections to someone who has shown so little regard for human life? What distinguishes justice from vengeance when the identity of the accused leaves little room for public sympathy? These are questions worth asking, and the film deserves credit for placing them at the heart of its narrative.

Rajkummar Rao Brings Restraint to Nikam

Arun recreates the aftermath of 26/11 through the tense proceedings of the courtroom, where defence counsel Abbas Kazmi (Sikandar Kher) labours to dismantle the prosecution’s case under the watchful eye of the presiding judge (Ashish Vidyarthi). The exchanges are, for the most part, persuasive, lending the proceedings a measure of procedural authenticity. As Nikam, Rajkummar Rao brings sincerity and restraint to a role that might easily have invited bombast. He tempers the prosecutor’s reputedly combative temperament, investing him instead with a quiet determination that serves the film better than theatrical displays of righteous indignation would have.

Yet, even as Nikam insists on the primacy of hard evidence over popular sentiment, the screenplay occasionally appears to lose faith in its own argument. Several decisive turns owe less to the prosecutor’s forensic acumen than to circumstances beyond his control. The result is a curious inversion: a film ostensibly devoted to celebrating its central character’s professional prowess repeatedly allows others, including the accused, to drive its dramatic momentum.

Lalit Prabhakar’s Chilling Portrayal of Kasab

Lalit Prabhakar’s portrayal of Kasab is among the film’s more disquieting achievements. Affecting an air of innocence, professing an interest in Bollywood and attempting to manipulate the judicial process, his Kasab seeks to fashion himself into a victim of circumstance rather than confront the enormity of his crimes. Prabhakar navigates the character’s evasiveness, calculated deceit and flashes of cruelty with unnerving conviction. The physical resemblance is not entirely persuasive — he looks much older than we’ve ever imagined him to be based on what we’ve read or seen — and the Punjabi inflection occasionally distracts, but the performance acquires a chilling plausibility as Kasab’s courtroom pretensions give way to the consequences of his actions within the confines of his prison cell.

The film’s willingness to examine the perpetrator beyond the monolithic image of evil that public memory has assigned him is a potentially rewarding gambit. To humanise a criminal is not necessarily to exonerate him; indeed, understanding the methods by which he manipulates others can make his culpability all the more disturbing. Kasab consequently emerges with a more discernible dramatic arc than the man charged with prosecuting him. That this should happen in a film bearing Nikam’s name is both an irony and a measure of its central weakness.

Jaideep Ahlawat Strengthens the Courtroom Drama

Sikandar Kher’s Abbas Kazmi supplies a credible counterpoint, deploying the familiar stratagems of defence counsel in an attempt to establish that his client was framed by the Mumbai police. More intriguing still is Jaideep Ahlawat as Zulfiqar, Nikam’s Pakistani counterpart, who arrives in Mumbai determined to challenge allegations of Pakistan’s complicity in the attacks. Though allotted relatively little screen time, Ahlawat brings intellectual gravitas and admirable restraint to the part. His performance draws a distinction between those who allow political rhetoric to dictate their position and those who remain guided by reason, evidence and the principles of due process. In a handful of scenes, he articulates the film’s most persuasive proposition: justice derives its legitimacy not from the identity of the accused, but from the integrity of the process. 

Nikam’s Personal Life Lacks Depth

If Kasab is granted psychological complexity, however, Nikam is afforded remarkably little interior life. The film’s designated hero remains strangely opaque beneath the armour of professional rectitude, his convictions more clearly articulated than his character. Only when the narrative ventures into his domestic sphere do we glimpse the man behind the prosecutor’s robes. Even here, the writing proves disappointingly unimaginative.

His altercations with his son serve rather too conveniently to reinforce his credentials as a vigilant custodian of public order. More egregious is the subplot involving his wife, whose battle with cancer becomes an occasion to underline his consuming professional commitments. That he appears unable, or unwilling, to attend to her emotional needs, even as she lies in a hospital bed, makes his neglect deeply jarring. The device seems calculated to elicit sympathy for a man whose vocation supposedly leaves him with neither the time nor the emotional bandwidth for domestic obligations.

There is, of course, a potentially revealing story in the personal sacrifices exacted by an all-consuming profession. But it requires psychological insight, not emotional coercion. Screenwriter Sumit Roy could have explored the tensions between public duty and private responsibility with greater subtlety. Instead, the marital subplot feels awkwardly grafted onto the narrative, diminishing the protagonist rather than deepening him. In a film so invested in the distinction between evidence and assertion, the attempt to establish Nikam’s moral stature through contrived domestic suffering is particularly unpersuasive.

Prahaar Resists Chest-Thumping Nationalism

What saves Prahaar from becoming an exercise in chest-thumping nationalism is its relative refusal to exploit the emotional charge of its subject. Given the prevailing political climate, the filmmakers could easily have transformed the trial into a rousing spectacle of national righteousness, with righteous indignation standing in for dramatic complexity. Such an approach might have delivered uncomplicated applause and predictable commercial dividends. To the film’s credit, it largely resists that temptation, allowing the judicial process to occupy centre stage rather than subordinating it to the consolations of patriotic triumphalism.

This restraint is not incidental. A film about the rule of law must be willing to acknowledge that justice is most severely tested when the accused is least deserving of public sympathy. The right to a fair trial cannot be contingent upon popularity, nationality or the enormity of the crime. Prahaar understands this principle, even when its own dramatic construction occasionally compromises the argument.

Ultimately, the film is more convincing as a defence of due process than as a portrait of the man entrusted with upholding it. Its courtroom passages possess tension and moral purpose; its performances, particularly those of Prabhakar and Ahlawat, offer moments of genuine distinction.

But an underdeveloped protagonist, contrived domestic drama and an uneven distribution of narrative agency prevent the film from achieving the incisive, emotionally resonant courtroom drama its subject promises.

Prahaar makes a worthy case for the sanctity of the law, but a less persuasive one for its hero. Its central irony is that while it insists that justice must rest on evidence rather than sentiment, it occasionally relies on contrivance to establish the moral credentials of the man at its centre.