Ahead of India's elections, Bollywood propaganda films get to work

Indian voters will head to the polls this month to elect their next political leaders. Sitting Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) are contesting for a third consecutive term. He will square off against an opposition coalition that includes leaders like Rahul Gandhi, Mamata Banerjee and others.

Political campaigns usually revolve around traditional modes of reaching out to the masses. But the BJP campaign is now supplementing this approach with soft influencing tools like propaganda films, churned out of Bollywood amid a changing ecosystem.

Some of the movies have already been released, while others are slated to hit the silver screen during the two-month-long electoral process, which starts April 19.

These films widely align with the BJP's politics, and stand a chance to influence and bolster public opinion on political issues on a range of issues.

This includes but is not limited to how to govern Indian-administered Kashmir, the role of Muslims in Indian society and redefining the heroes of India's Independence movement.

In other words, the films aim to boost and justify the sitting government's policies and most certainly retell history in a Hindu nationalist way.

How it started

Propaganda films first came into force during World War I, when Britain began to understand the power of cinema in shaping public opinion. "Battle of Somme," an early propaganda film, was released in the autumn of 1916 across 34 movie theatres in London, and a further 100 screens countrywide.

Shot partly as a documentary and partly a dramatisation, this was England’s first cinematic attempt at glorifying their men during the staggering war. The idea was to whip up public sentiment through images that went beyond imagination by showing the lives of English soldiers on the battlefront, facing hardship while fighting the "enemy" day in and day out.

Soon the Soviets and the Germans also began propagating their political ideologies and goals through cinema. Nazi filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl made the most prominent film of her career, "Triumph of Will," in 1935.

The movie, which contained exclusive footage of Adolf Hitler, went on to win the best artistry award in the World Exhibition in Paris in 1937.

During this time period, German propaganda cinema was well-defined. Its sole purpose was to uphold Hitler's ideology, and included virulent antisemitism uncannily similar to how propaganda cinema is being used in the Hindutva regime of current India.

To be fair, earlier Indian politicians have also infused nationalism and political messaging in cinema. But the dynamics were quite different.

Nehruvian cinema

For India's first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, cinema was areligious and anti-caste, as Partha Ghosh writes in "Nehru’s Hero, Dilip Kumar in the Life of India (2004)."

This was in tandem with the original idea of Indian nationalism as a "a form of territorial nationalism, wherein all individuals inhabiting the state's political borders are deemed to be not only citizens but also members of the nation," according to scholar Tridib Bhattachariya.

Nehru applied this understanding to everything including cinema, which he believed was an important medium to reach the masses. He went on to establish the Films Division in 1948, a government agency dedicated to film production and distribution.

He also involved leading celebrities of his time like Dilip Kumar, Raj Kapoor, Nargis, Prithvi Raj Kapoor, Mehboob Khan and Mohammad Rafi to help spread the dreams and goals of a free India through cinema. In that sense, films produced in the 1950s and '60s were Nehruvian.

The storylines spoke of an India where religion was of the least consideration. Instead, the scripts were about human aspiration, harmony, development and empathy towards the less-resourced - an overall reflection of an egalitarian society. Some of the many films produced with this political messaging include:

Kalpana (Imagination, 1948), which was directed by legendary dancer Uday Shankar. This was a fantasy film about a young man’s dream project of starting a progressive dance academy, where the artist's expression of freedom would be held high.

Among the songs in the film was one that spoke directly about Nehru's agricultural policy, including the lyrics "Hindustan Ka Bal Hai Hal" (the power of Hindustan lies in its plough). This expressed the urgent need for food security and industrialising farming methods, affirming the herculean power of Indian farmers.

Meanwhile, Jagriti (Awakening) hit movie screens in 1954, voicing the need for universal school education, an issue that the Nehru government had prioritised from the start of his term. The script highlighted the importance of liberated education systems with a progressive slant on the teacher-student relationship.

Then there was Khwaja Ahmed Abbas' Awaara (The Vagabond, 1951), a crime drama that picked up Nehru's socialist discourse by tying it finely into a story about an accidental thief and a privileged woman. The childhood sweethearts were played by Raj (Raj Kapoor) and Rita (Nargis). Abbas emphasised humanising criminals, which aligned with Nehru's approach to social reforms.

Dhool Ka Phool (Flower of Dust, 1959) followed by Dharamputra(Son of Faith, 1961) were both directed by Yash Chopra and explored communal harmony at its best. While the former is about a Muslim man raising a Hindu child single handedly, Dharamputra reverses the scenario and questions Hindu fundamentalism when showing a Muslim child raised by a Hindu family.

Critiques

However not all films were supportive of the government and its function. Some heavily criticised India’s rising inequalities, hunger, unemployment and the untimely failure of the people's dream that Nehru had envisioned for the country.

These were films like Footpath (1953), Pyaasa (Thirsty, 1957) and Phir Subah Hogi (There will be Dawn Again, 1958).

Interestingly, Dilip Kumar who has been attributed as the ultimate face of the onscreen Nehruvian hero did not hesitate to play the complex, rather negative role of Noshu in Footpath – a film that visibly criticised the government.

In the film, Kumar played an erstwhile honest journalist compelled to choose smuggling as a living.

Pertinently, Kumar's choice to star in Footpath did not impact his relationship with India's PM. In 1957, at Nehru's request, Kumar addressed several electoral rallies on behalf of the PM's close ally V.K. Krishna Menon.

In Pyaasa, director Guru Dutt also plays the protagonist Vijay, an Urdu-speaking poet who eventually meets success. The film was released during Nehru’s second five-year plan. An unapologetic critique of the corruption and exploitation rising in India at the time, the film is considered a cult classic now.

Its songs penned by poet Sahir Ludhanvi vents the frustration of an average Indian, with lyrics like "Jiney naaz hain Hind par woh kahan hain," (You who were proud of India, where are you) and "Yeh Duniya Agar Mil Bhi Jaye Toh Kya Hai" (What next if I become an achiever finally).

Yet in these films, the propaganda-esque ones and their counterfoils, there was no "otherization," divisiveness or contrarian understanding of India’s composite society. Nor did the government oppose the release of movies that showed India's plight.

In fact, Nehru countered criticism that Pather Panchali (Song of the Little Road, 1955) peddled poverty of India to the world, Partha Ghosh writes in Nehruvian Cinema and Politics, 2019.

"He argued, what was wrong about showing India’s poverty? Everyone knows that we are a poor country. The question is: Are we Indians sensitive to our poverty or insensitive to it? (Legendary Indian filmmaker Satyajit) Ray has shown it with an extraordinary sense of beauty and sensitiveness."

Nehruvian cinema reached the masses albeit by being wholesome. On the contrary, current propaganda films mostly made after 2014 are heavily polarised and openly divisive.

This owes to a reactionary understanding of nationalism in which "Hindutva" (or Hindu-ness, short for Hindu nationalism) followers in India conjure up an image of a peaceful Hindu self versus the threatening minority, writes Dibyesh Anand in Hindu Nationalism and the Politics of Fear, 2011.

Hindutva playbook

Even before emboldened propaganda films were systematically churned out, there existed movies that bordered on propaganda with their crude, low-budget demeanour.

Vivek Agnihotri. known for The Kashmir Files (2022), produced The Tashkent Files – Who Killed Shastri in 2019, based on the controversial death of India's second prime minister, Lal Bahadur Shastri.

Agnihotri’s film implicated Indira Gandhi and her Congress Party rule, without naming anyone. In The Kashmir Files, he is far more systematic in dehumanising all who are not favourable to his version of the story, meaning Kashmiri Muslims.

Relevantly, tickets to watch The Kashmir Files and The Kerala Story were made tax-free in BJP-controlled states in order to reach wider audiences. Despite being critiqued for their high quotient of half-baked information laced with Islamophobia, both movies were super hits at the box office.

Between 2014-24, there have been many films highlighting government's wins and policies like, Toilet Ek Prem Katha (Toilet A Love Story, 2017), championing the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan or Clean India Mission.

There was also Mission Mangal (Mission to Mars), based on India’s space programme Mars Orbiter Mission. While these films were about achievements and as such contained minimal jingoism, others like the blockbuster Uri – The Surgical Strike (2019) compensated with the retelling of an attack by Kashmiri militants on Indian Armed Forces.

Modi heaped praise on the film and has even publicly quoted some dialogue. "How is the Josh" soon went viral.

After Uri, at least half a dozen films have situated Pakistan as the "enemy" in the past five years. These films rode on ultra-nationalist pride and championed the prowess of India as a geopolitical power.

The most recent one was the big-budget Fighter (2024). Released on India’s Republic Day in January, it stars A-listers like Deepika Padukone, Hrithik Roshan and Anil Kapoor.

As if these utterly aggressive epic war films were not enough, period films simultaneously stoke national Hindutva pride, portraying the Mughals and any Muslim ruler in a bad light.

They are painted as brutal, animalistic, grotesque and anti-Hindu in films including Padmaavat (2018), Tanhaji: The Unsung Warrior (2020) and Samrat Prithviraj (Emperor Prithviraj, 2022).

Padmaavat was a lavishly mounted historical drama, directed by Sanjay Leela Bhansali. The story based on the namesake epic poem from 1540 by Sufi poet Malik Mohammad Jayasi is about a Hindu Rajput queen called Padmavati, who chooses to commit suicide along with other women of the palace instead of surrendering to Sultan Alauddin Khilji.

According to American film critic Roger Ebert's website, "Padmaavat is after a certain point, propaganda for a pseudo-traditional and highly romanticised fundamentalist attitude."

Historical films made in recent years have often been called out for their inaccurate information and vile depiction of Muslim rulers, but that has not stopped Bollywood from retelling the "real" story, or basically purging Indo-Islamic history.

Ahead of general elections, the list of recently released or upcoming films that involve polarising topics is rather long.

It includes biopics like Main Atal Hoon (I am Atal), about the life of former PM Atal Behari Vajpayee, a BJP co-founder); and Swatantrya Veer Savarkar (biopic of Hindu nationalist ideologue Vinayak Damodar Savarkar); and films related to government decisions and policies like Article 370 about Indian-administered Kashmir.

The list also has films that touch on public lives like Razakar - The Silent Genocide of Hyderabad, Emergency (on Indira Gandhi’s Emergency period in 1977), The Sabarmati Report and Accident or Conspiracy: Godhra, both based on the 2002 Godhra train burning.

There's also JNU: Jahangir National University on Jawaharlal Nehru University, perhaps the last bastion of liberal education in India.

It is not really coincidental to have an outpouring of movies that promote the governing party's interest. There were a slew of releases before the 2019 elections as well, including Uri, The Accidental Prime Minister, ManiKarnika and The Tashkent Files.

Every time a propaganda film has been released, polarisation amid citizens has only become sharper. What needs to be watched this time is how beneficial the films act in propagating Hindutva nationalism and how much more divided the nation can get.