The Rise Of Bollywood's Vacant, Convenient, And Tacky 'Political Film' Since 2014

Maybe it’s not that surprising in a film directed by Madhur Bhandarkar--a ‘secret meeting’ among dissidents takes place inside a movie theatre. As they whisper their instructions and admiration for one another as the audience watches Kalicharan (1976), I wasn’t surprised Bhandarkar chose a fully-packed theatre as a rendezvous point. Only an adversary of good taste would casually endorse such cinema hall etiquette. But then again, this is not the most revolting thing about his film on the Emergency, Indu Sarkar (2017).

It might wear the skin of an anti-authoritarianism film, but based on Bhandarkar’s reported proximity to the Modi government, its priority might only be to remind us of the Congress party’s tyranny. Indu Sarkar would like to believe in its own noteworthiness for dredging up one of the most horrific periods in the history of independent India, but it’s only one among dozens of ‘political films’ made to fuel the government’s anti-Congress, anti-Muslim stance.

Like Bhandarkar’s film, most political biopics, war, and historical films made in the last decade have selective memory--like Laal Singh Chaddha (2022), a remake of Forrest Gump (1994) that retraces the protagonist’s journey across four decades, accidentally crossing paths with or observing historic moments. While it delves generously into the 1984 anti-Sikh pogrom (presumably because the protagonist is Sikh), it is thin on the Babri Masjid demolition and anti-Muslim riots in 1992, the Godhra riots of 2002, and doesn’t breathe a word about the Muzaffarnagar riots in 2013. But the film ensures referring to the prime minister’s Swachh Bharat Abhiyan, which kicked off in 2014.

Despite its best intentions, the film cops out at the most important juncture. While it can be reasoned that it as an expensive film trying to survive at time when artistic freedom is policed, it’s impossible to ignore Laal Singh Chaddha’s careful omissions of history, thereby painting a bleak picture of its own moral courage.

For Hindi filmmakers, the Emergency and anti-Sikh riots have become the thrusts over the last few years. In the last seven years alone, we’ve seen Indira Gandhi played by Lara Dutta (Bell Bottoms), Fatima Sana Sheikh (Sam Bahadur), Supriya Vinod (Indu Sarkar), Flora Jacob (Raid and Thalaivii), Kishori Shahane (PM Narendra Modi) and Avantika Akerkar (Thackeray and 83). Among these roles, only Sheikh comes close to playing something in the realm of a human being. In the rest, Gandhi is portrayed either as a vicious authoritarian or a cartoonish narcissist. It does make one think if Gandhi has been reduced to a totem of a ‘fact-based’ story. Never mind, the amount of fiction filmmakers will weave around it.

One might have hoped Emergency (2024), currently battling for release, would be different. It’s probably the first feature film to centre around Indira Gandhi. However, the trailer—where Gandhi seems self-serving and Atal Behari Vajpayee (Shreyas Talpade) is people-serving—shatters such hope. Ranaut’s caustic remarks about Rahul Gandhi, too, makes you doubt how nuanced her Indira will be.

Vikramaditya Motwane’s Indi(r)a’s Emergency—a feature-length documentary commissioned by Netflix—premiered at the 2023 Jio MAMI Mumbai International film festival. But earlier this year, reports surfaced that Netflix had dropped it. One thing that can be assumed about Motwane’s documentary based on his past work is that it won't be the Congress-bashing film we’ve become used to watching over the last decade—and that would be a reasonable explanation as to why it is struggling for release.

Films like Ali Abbas Zafar’s Jogi (2022)--set around the anti-Sikh pogrom of 1984—also show how Bollywood has used convenient ‘topical films’ to be in the government’s good books. Jogi released two years after Zafar was named in multiple FIRs for Tandav (2020), where he was accused of ‘disrespecting’ Hindu Gods. In Jogi, Zafar goes out of his way to show a Congress politician (Kumud Mishra) in Delhi at his most dastardly. He probably knew that the social media mob wouldn’t rally around this creative liberty. One might call Jogi Zafar’s apology for Tandav, showing the people in power that he could fall in line.

Most ‘political’ films in the last ten years have been dull hagiographies, hateful propaganda or simply ineffective. What was initially meant to be a genre of mostly inspirational(?) stories, is now not content at being just that. Even within the political biopic genre, each successive film is centred around someone more contentious than the last. Starting from Thackeray (2019), Gandhi Godse: Ek Mahayudh (2023), Swatantrya Veer Savarkar (2024) to Emergency now, these films do not seem particularly interested in the complex people inhabiting their stories. Rather, the intent seems to be to funnel ideology by cherry-picking facts about the subject’s life. This becomes blatantly clear in the Emergency trailer alone—where Indira Gandhi becomes a tool in the hands of the storytellers to cultivate anti-Sikh sentiments. How dangerous a fresh wave of disinformation triggered by the movie will be remains to be seen.

If Ranaut’s anti-Sikh comments and her most recent film are seen side-by-side, it becomes impossible to not see a design. Her callous crudeness seems to be the aping of a filmmaker who incentivised such behaviour: Vivek Agnihotri. If Agnihotri sets the bar for socio-political film discourse, nothing is too law and all our half-baked, diabolical thoughts will feature in a scene meant to elicit claps.

Agnihotri’s rise as a political filmmaker has been troubling. Considered a ‘right-wing intellectual’ today, it was in Buddha in a Traffic Jam (2014) that he first peddled his ‘Urban Naxal’ theory. He then directed Tashkent Files (2019), milking a conspiracy theory about Lal Bahadur Shastri’s death. Agnihotri hit the motherlode with The Kashmir Files, endorsed by PM Modi himself. He turned a complex issue of displacement into a Hindu-Muslim debate. For all purposes, he’s singlehandedly responsible for Sudipto Sen’s The Kerala Story (2023). It’s also resulted in various vile attempts to marry terrible craft with deliberately selective disinformation in the last year alone through films like Razakar: The Silent Genocide of Hyderabad, Jahangir National University, Hamaare Baraah, Godhra: Accident or Conspiracy.

One among them is Vikrant Massey-starrer Sabarmati Files, which has been awaiting release for a few months now—another attempt by Bollywood to justify the Godhra violence and, as a result, soften the image of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who was Chief Minister of Gujarat then. On some level, it’s fitting that the last mainstream Hindi film to depict the 2002 Gujarat riots was Abhishek Kapoor’s Kai Po Che (2013), right before the BJP government came into power. Kapoor’s film ends with an awakened Hindu hardliner, released after serving his prison sentence for shooting his friend. Alas, Bollywood’s current crop of vacuous, tacky political films are dealing with a different kind of ‘awakening’ these days.