A look at India's finest films and their grim, satirical take on politics

In an Odisha village surrounded by stone quarries, the headman, contesting a state election, announces a bribe of Rs 100 for each vote. An impoverished couple — their son is about to wed and they need every extra rupee — “adopts” a tuberculosis-afflicted beggar, their eyes on the money his vote will fetch. Before polling day, the old man’s condition worsens and he has to be carried through the quarries to a hospital. They lose their way and stray into a dynamite blast. The beggar is blown to pieces.

a scene from Leader (1964) starring Dilip Kumar

That, in a nutshell, is the plot of the 1994 Odia-language film Nirbachana (Election), adapted by director Biplab Roy Chowdhury from a story by Bengali writer Prafulla Roy. Millennials are unlikely to be aware of the film’s existence, but Nirbachana remains one of the most savage takedowns of rural elections ever. The film laid bare several bitter truths in one sweep about the connection between rural distress and electoral skulduggery in the world’s largest democracy.

Anil Kapoor in Nayak (2001), a film that took popular disillusionment with the political class to another level

Cast in a different mould and raising concerns of a larger scale, Sinhasan, a seminal late 1970s Marathi political drama scripted by Vijay Tendulkar (on the basis of two novels by journalist Arun Sadhu) and directed by Jabbar Patel, forayed into the unstable world of a chief minister struggling to retain his authority over a state in the grip of drought, rising prices and youth unrest.

Has anything changed all these decades later? Clearly not. So, when Amit V Masurkar makes the critically acclaimed Newton (in 2017) and sets the narrative in a Naxal-infested Central Indian forest — in Dandakaranya (“forest of the damned”), to be precise — the questions he asks are pretty much the same as those that Nirbachana and Sinhasan had posed. These questions have been chasing the nation ever since the first general election was held in India in 1951-52.

Sinhasan, a seminal late 1970s Marathi political drama

The father of a disgruntled young man in 1999’s Hu Tu Tu says: “Is generation ke paas sawaal bahut hain (This generation has too many questions).” The male protagonist’s instant riposte — “Jawaab bhi toh nahin milta (Nobody gives us any answers)” — sums up a key source of conflict between two generations and their worldviews.

In this election season, several crude propaganda films have been churned out. A few of them have been barred until all the votes have been cast. But not all election-themed Indian films made over the years have been shoddy quickies aimed at pushing fanciful, if not outright false, narratives. And we aren’t talking only the three aforementioned titles.

A still from Mani Ratnam’s Iruvar (1997)

From Ram Mukherjee’s Leader (1964), in which Dilip Kumar played a law student and newspaper editor accused of murdering a revered politician, to Prakash Jha’s Rajneeti (2010), which examines the nexus between crime and hinterland politics, many Hindi films have played out amid the swirling heat and dust of elections.

S Shankar’s Tamil potboiler Mudhalvan (1999), which the director himself turned into the Bollywood film Nayak (2001) with the Hindi dialogue penned by Anurag Kashyap, took popular disillusionment with the political class to another level. A chief minister, under constant fire from a truculent journalist, dares the former to run the state for 24 hours. The hero accepts the challenge. He does such a good job that he sweeps the next polls.

Mani Ratnam’s 1997 political drama Iruvar (which, presumably under pressure, was pitched as “not a true story”) traced the rise of three Tamil Nadu chief ministers — 

A poster of Odia film Nirbachana (1994)

M Karunanidhi, M G Ramachandran and J Jayalalithaa — via a series of crucial state elections. The film ranks among the Chennai filmmaker’s most accomplished works. 

Last year, the flawed but entertaining Kannada-English satire, Humble Politician Nograj, directed by Saad Khan, brought a popular radio-FB Live-YouTube character to the big screen. It tells the story of a corrupt corporator who takes on an idealistic NRI in an attempt to become an MLA.

The joke here is eventually not so much on the politicians as on the voters. The message of Humble Politician Nograj is: we get the leaders that we vote for. The plot pits “One Big Party” and “Some Opposition Party” — yes, that is what the political outfits are named — and the former’s poll symbol is a chameleon. The timing of the film’s release was perfect — it hit the screens ahead of the 2018 Karnataka Assembly election.

In Newton, an understated exploration of the dynamics of democracy, a newly recruited government official leads a small poll team under paramilitary protection to a remote, violence-prone part of Chhattisgarh that hasn’t voted in years. The man, earnest to a fault, has unwavering faith in the electoral system and is determined to ensure a 100 per cent turnout despite the heavy odds that he is up against.

The CRPF commander on duty is more interested in getting out of the jungle with his men before sundown. It turns into a battle of attrition between two men — one doing his duty, the other going way beyond it. It is also a face-off between earnestness and cynicism.

Disdain and derision dominate most Indian films about the election process, even in scenarios where politicians aren’t necessarily projected as villains. Poet-lyricist Gulzar, whose maiden directorial venture, Mere Apne (1971), a reworking of Tapan Sinha’s Bengali film Apanjan (1968) and his most unabashedly political drama, cast two Hindi cinema comedians, Mehmood and Asit Sen, as a pair of election candidates who exploit two gangs of unemployed drifters.

Gulzar aims sharp jibes at the two politicians, Bilaki Prasad and Anokhe Lal, one of whose poll symbol is “a bird in a cage”. Their antics are seemingly harmless, but the writer-director loses no opportunity to put their words and deeds under the scanner, resorting to both scorn and bathos.

In one scene, Bilaki Prasad says pompously: “Panditji nahin hain, Netaji nahin hai, Gandhiji nahin hain, aur meri bhi tabiyat kuch theek nahin rehti (Nehru, Bose and Gandhi are all gone and I, too, am not keeping well).” Anokhe Lal does no worse. He intones: “Azaadi ki aag Himalaya se Jhumritalaiya tak phail chuki hain. Jhumritalaiya nahin Kanyakumari tak. Wohi azaadi hum logon ne, leaderon ne aapko de di hain (The fire of freedom has spread from the Himalayas to Jhumritalaiya, nay Kanyakumari. We the political leaders have passed on that freedom to you).”

Gulzar’s 1975 drama Aandhi, essentially a tale of a woman’s emancipation from the constraints of marriage and her steady rise as a mass leader, addresses the decline in political discourse. The film has a qawwali-style number that hauls politicians over the coals. In a stinging potshot at how elections work in India, a line of the song goes thus: “Salaam kijiye aali janaab aaye hain, yeh paanch saal ka dene hisaab aaye hain (Salute the high and mighty, who has come to account for the past five years).”

In Mere Apne, the youth grapple with joblessness. “Haal chaal theek-thaak hai, sab kuch theek-thaak hai, kaam nahi hai warna yahaan aap ki dua se baaki theek-thaak (All’s well, we have no jobs, but all’s well),” they sing in unison. In Aandhi, the female protagonist (Suchitra Sen) has to reckon with the political might of a particularly cynical opponent and ward off vicious attacks, physical and otherwise.

By the time Gulzar made Maachis (1996) and Hu Tu Tu (1999), both of which probe the genesis of militancy, his mood had turned darker. In these two films, disaffection among the youth assumes such proportions that they now not only plot to kill others, but also think nothing of killing themselves. They have turned into ticking time bombs.

Two of the principal characters in Hu Tu Tu, a rural schoolteacher-turned-politician and her mendacious mentor, are faces of the politics of expediency that has impacted the electoral sphere. “Politics naukri nahin hai, business hai, bahut bada business (Politics isn’t a job, it is business, big business),” says the woman. At the other end of the film’s spectrum is a Dalit activist and poet who articulates the frustrations of the people in his songs, one of which goes: “Ghapla hai bhai ghapla hai (It’s all a scam).”

Systemic distortions are reflected in the plight of a eunuch who dares to contest for the post of village sarpanch in Shyam Benegal’s Welcome to Sajjanpur (2008). The landlord’s wife is the rival and her husband is determined to eliminate all her opponents. In Bhootnath Returns (2014), however, the electoral system is projected in a positive light. Amitabh Bachchan, playing a benign ghost, takes on a shady politician and wins. The Election Commission, impressed with the film’s messaging, advised state governments to grant it tax exemption. Only a ghost stands a chance in the hurly-burly of fictional poll battles.