Hello propaganda

Hello propaganda

A new symptom of election fever shows up: Biopics in Bollywood.

It seems to be suddenly raining biopics in Bollywood. From The Accidental Prime Minister about Manmohan Singh, via Uri: The Surgical Strike featuring a Prime Minister Narendra Modi character, to the still to be released Thackeray and the still to be made Modi biopics. Maybe we are finally ditching a long-felt squeamishness to cinematically scrutinise contemporary political events, by name. But one thing that sets political biopics apart from other films is that the brickbats and bouquets tend to fly on partisan lines. That is even more so when the biopic looks indistinguishable from propaganda.

BJP sympathiser Anupam Kher, whose wife is a BJP MP, plays Manmohan in The Accidental Prime Minister, which has been overwhelmingly described as making the former prime minister look like a pitiful puppet of The Family. A line about the 2009 general election in the film goes, “Yeh election Rahul ke bas ka nahin hai” (Rahul cannot handle this election). The line may be a projection of the filmmakers’ wishes for the 2019 election too. Whether or not Manmohan was an accidental prime minister, the timing of this film (or the other biopics, for that matter) is no accident at all.

Ironically it is not just Congress but even a youth wing of BJP ally Akali Dal that has objected to how the film lampoons Manmohan – who happened to be the country’s first Sikh PM. Mamata Banerjee excitingly suggests the making of Disastrous Prime Minister (but certainly wouldn’t take kindly to Disastrous Chief Minister). By comparison, as the party being lampooned in today’s biopics, Congress has shown relative forbearance. The test will be if it gains power and can still keep up this tolerance. Biopics will come into their own when they can take on the authority figures of today, not just yesterday.