Trivialising Indian History

Ajoy Bose

The much-publicised controversy around Bollywood actor and Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) MP Kangana Ranaut’s new film–Emergency–appears quite misplaced.

The film is neither outright party propaganda nor an attempt to denigrate former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi.

Instead, the film, which faced multiple delays, including due to troubles with the censor board, turned out to be a less than mediocre film. Full of historical inaccuracies and misrepresentations, Emergency is at best a ludicrous bid to trivialise Indian history.

The name of the film ‘Emergency’ itself is quite inappropriate considering it deals almost in passing with this historic turning point of India’s democracy. Ranaut’s effort is far more geared towards a biopic–albeit a crude caricature of the life and times of Indira Gandhi from her days as a little girl in Anand Bhavan to her brutal assassination by her Sikh bodyguards.

Needless to say, she makes a hash of both providing insights into the Emergency and a portrait of Independent India’s most remarkable leader.

There is little effort to portray–let alone analyse–the reign of terror unleashed in Delhi and other parts of the country by Indira’s younger son Sanjay Gandhi and his coterie who took advantage of a supine judiciary, puppet bureaucracy, and a muzzled media.

While the usual high-tech Bollywood melodrama is used to hype up the overnight arrest of thousands of political leaders, activists, and even some journalists during the Emergency, palpable mistakes such as confusing media doyen Nikhil Chakravarty with investigative journalist Kuldip Nayar, who was among those arrested, further erodes the credibility of the film.

The two major Emergency excesses–forcible sterilisations and arbitrary demolition of slums to implement Sanjay Gandhi’s infamous 5-Point Programme–are treated in the most cursory manner, failing to bring home the horrors of the doctors’ scalpel wielded on the manhood of captive male citizens of all ages in makeshift sterilisation camps and bulldozers brutally smashing through homes and displacing thousands of families.

Also Read. Take, for example, the depiction of the Turkman Gate massacre.

The demolitions in and around the large Muslim ghetto close to the historic Jama Masjid is considered as the single most heinous atrocity of the Emergency (and is the highlight of my book), but it is dealt superficially and is full of mistakes.

Public anger in the area exploded when demolitions of slums at Turkman Gate coincided with the setting up of a sterilisation camp by Sanjay Gandhi crony Rukshana Sultana at Dujana House, located opposite Jama Masjid. Both the controversial campaigns were in full swing.

However, the film gives the impression that sterilisations were triggered by the demolitions–and there is no mention whatsoever about the administration adopting ham-handed methods to achieve unrealistic targets that brought so much misery to hapless citizens.

Needless to mention, the BJP politician-director conveniently ignores the overtly anti-Muslim bias of the administration–and the politicians goading the brutal massacre.

There is also a complete absence of the political background leading to the declaration of Emergency.

The total revolution campaign by Jayaprakash Narayan in Gujarat and Bihar, leading to a brash call by him at a rally in the national capital to the armed forces and police not to obey orders and to citizens not to pay tax, is hurried through.

The assassination of railway minister Lalit Narayan Mishra a few months before the declaration of Emergency and Indira Gandhi’s fear of the Central Intelligence Agency destabilising her rule aren’t considered important.

Merely a few seconds are devoted to the astute lawyer-turned-politician Siddhartha Shankar Ray, a close friend and advisor of Indira Gandhi, who actually showed her how to use the Constitutional provision of internal Emergency to crush the Opposition and cling on to power.

Instead, the beleaguered prime minister–after failing to get a carte blanche from the Supreme Court to protect her from an adverse judgement in an electoral malpractice case from a lower court–is shown to suddenly become a puppet in the hands of Sanjay Gandhi.

Distorting history yet again, Sanjay is seen to singlehandedly impose the Emergency against the wishes of his mother’s Cabinet, led by of all people the then defence minister Jagjivan Ram, although the crafty but timid Dalit party veteran never at that point showed his opposition to the draconian decision to suspend democracy.
As for the other parts of the biopic–barring the brief interlude on the Emergency–the historical basis is equally dubious and the outright mistakes, distortions, and misrepresentations too many to recount.

Sadly, an ambitious venture to make a film on such a complex figure as Indira Gandhi falls short of doing any justice. Although there is a calculated effort to balance the bright and the dark side of her formidable personality, it is just a cardboard figure at best.

Unlike his mother, Sanjay is projected almost like a comic book villain. He is even blamed for plotting the rise of Sikh extremist leader Jarnail Singh Bhindrawale in the 1980s even though the young political heir died shortly after his mother stormed back to power in January 1980. What is also deliberately ignored is his leading role in the disintegration of the Janata Party government–and the collapse of the breakaway Charan Singh-led faction that briefly ruled before the mid-term polls.

It is sad to note that even when Bollywood turns to the neglected political scenario of the past several decades, it reduces the rough and tumble of Indian politics–that provides so much colour and nuances–into a simplistic farce.

[The writer is a Delhi-based senior journalist and the author of ‘Behenji: A Political Biography of Mayawati’. He wrote ‘For Reasons of State: Delhi under Emergency’ co-authored with John Dayal published by ESS Publishers, 1977, republished by Orient Paperbacks Vision Books, 1977, and republished by Penguin Random House, 2018.] [Source: The Quint]