For the ones who have traveled to Delhi via the Karnal bypass, the sight of a mountainous garbage heap is not hard to recall. Alongside this heap, the Yamuna, plagued by wastes of all forms, flows. Looking at its blackened liquid form, it’s hard to differentiate if one is looking at a river that fuels the water needs of Delhi or if it is a sewage discharge from the nearby residential colony of Ghazipur. Curated in haste, this residential area was where Congress left people to rot after demolishing their homes during the Emergency, Sanjay Gandhi himself leading the charge. Yes, the slums and other houses that were demolished were not established through any legal route, but instead of adopting a planned course correction, Sanjay Gandhi ordered demolitions, the price of which the nation pays even today, especially Delhi.
The pollution of Yamuna is far from constrained. Fueled by the economic progress of the recent decades, Delhi finds itself engulfed in a cloud of pollution it has no escape from. Tribunals, Government and Non-Government entities, and other relevant organizations continue to issue obsolete and redundant reports, and yet, each of them bites the dust, much like the case files of the 1984 Delhi ‘Mighty Tree’ massacre victims. I recall the above knowledge from the book India After Gandhi by Ramchandra Guha, but unfortunately, the same information isn’t replicated anywhere online, including Wikipedia. Apparently, since 1977, Congress has been successful in calculatedly eliminating their link to any visible or invisible consequences of the Emergency. This has been made possible due to the existence of an ecosystem Congress itself has nourished at every front, physical and virtual, to which we shall come back later.
When the trailer of ‘Indu Sarkar; was released, it gave the Congress party quite the jitters. Clearly, the two Gandhi(s) in focus, Sanjay Gandhi and Indira Gandhi have been deceased for over three-decades, but their names and actions are a part of the legacy of the present Congress led by Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi. The trailer focusses on mass sterilizations, curtailed press freedom, demolitions, firing on crowds, RSS, and most importantly, the dictatorship of Sanjay Gandhi. With 6-million views on YouTube, the movie has garnered enough eyeballs for a decent run on the Box-Office, even though the latter is not the primary priority for Madhur Bhandarkar, unlike his contemporaries.
Certainly, ‘Indu Sarkar’ isn’t the first movie to be based on the Emergency of 1975. Numerous other artists and filmmakers have attempted to showcase the atrocities committed in the name of disciplining civilians and national unity through comedy and satire, but none of them had the scale, reach, or audience for the Congress party to feel nervous. Movies depicting any Congress leader in a truthful manner, or as the current Congress feels, in a demeaning manner, were immediately banned. This inherent trait of acting against any artistic representation of the Congress has its origins in the actions of Sanjay Gandhi who was convicted (the conviction was later overturned) for burning the prints of a movie based on his mother (Shabana Azmi was playing Indira Gandhi) in Gurgaon back in 1977. ‘The Accidental Prime Minister’ came out after NDA came to power, but it was more about the inability of Dr. Manmohan Singh, and hence, wasn’t on the radar of a Congress freshly routed of power. So, what changed now?
Back in 2013, when I caught ‘Madras Café’ in an underwhelming presence for any first-day show, I couldn’t help but notice how carefully Rajiv Gandhi had been portrayed as a victim of countless simultaneous conspiracies. At the end of the movie, the alternate government in power was also showcased as the reason for Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination for they refused to acknowledge the need for additional security. Any assassination can never be justified, even if the person in question has a different set of objectives, inclinations, ideologies, or is the father of Rahul Gandhi. However, the way the assassination had been used in the movie in the backdrop of LTTE and the Sri-Lankan Civil War, a few months before the National Elections, I, personally, felt an underlying attempt by the director to play the Gandhi card. Was it an intentional portrayal due to the lobbying of a few influential people or not, it’s too late to decide (The same production house is now making a movie on the events of Pokhran-II). For those times, the movie became another entity in the ever-expanding Congress ecosystem.
‘Madras Café’ isn’t the only attempt by Congress to showcase itself as a messiah of the nation. Sagarika Ghose’s latest work, Indira Gandhi’s biography, was titled ‘India’s Most Powerful Prime Minister’. Rajdeep Sardesai wrote about the ascent of Narendra Modi to power in ‘The Election that Changed India’, the launch for which was conducted so many times. Barkha Dutt’s book ‘The Unquiet Land’ was about the emerging social fault lines in India, owing to Hindu Terror obviously (Recall how RSS facilitated the Kashmiri exodus). Rana Ayyub, a self-proclaimed journalist wrote ‘The Gujarat Files’, which like her Twitter Feed made no absolute sense. Movies based on the Gujarat Riots of 2002 have been actively endorsed even years after their release by the Lutyens’ fraternity across global film-festivals, the same fraternity that today wants to hinder the release of ‘Indu Sarkar’. Turns out, they finally sensed a threat to their cocoon like ecosystem of self-satisfying intellectuals.
Back in 2002, Sagarika Ghose, the idol of Lutyens’ liberals, JNU’s revolutionaries, and media’s leftists propagandists published an article with the title ‘Science is Tough’. Here a few excerpts from the article;
“Indians love Science. Science is beloved of the Indian middle-class and particularly of the Hindu patriarchs of the Sangh parivar. In India, Real Men all study Science. Boys are programmed from an early age to make Science their chief obsession. The IITs are shrines to a certain high Hindu male technological libido.”
“Science, suggests Australian writer Dan Madigan, is particularly compatible with religious fundamentalism. The hard sciences, as opposed to the soft humanities, create an orthodox and extremist mentality. A technological education, Madigan writes, has a ‘can do’ approach. It believes that with the right design and the right materials you can build just about anything, including a technologically engineered history and a technologically controlled society.”
“The technological mind-set is profoundly impatient with the tentativeness, the ‘softness’ and the endless ‘may-be-may-not-be’ of the humanities. Guess what Osama bin Laden studied? Engineering, naturally. And Mohammad Atta? You got it. Also engineering.”
There’s an intricate reason for which I requested you to put yourself through the above excruciating excerpts.
The Congress Ecosystem.
As evident in the above words, the Congress party and its celebrity support base thrive on artistic proclamations. From books to movies, documentaries to debates, live-sessions to parties, and from Sonia Gandhi to the lobbies she coordinated in the era of UPA, Congress has always used art as a tool to project its views or to demean its opposition. You can find the likes of Barkha Dutt working with ‘Washington Post’, unknown writers conducting hit jobs against PM Modi before his international visits on portals like ‘The Economist’. After years of underground work, Congress has established a firm network of students, teachers, groups, NGOs, and other lobbies in significant places of India to work against anyone who is against the Congress. When they are not engaged in breaking India from within, the Lutyens’ loyalists are seen scratching each other’s backs in some pointless social gathering. Go to YouTube and you can easily access Arundhati Roy’s speech on how India conquered Punjab, Kashmir, Goa, and a dozen other states after 1947, and yes, there is an audience for that.
For the last 3 years, Congress has ordered the use of this very ecosystem to overthrow Modi. Congress loyalists are seen mingling with numerous authors, artists, and musicians from Pakistan, and some even go ahead and seek help to defeat Modi. Words like ‘Intolerance’ are fused into the news cycles within a day. Press clubs protests, marches, and so on are nothing but the elements of this ecosystem in play. How else do you think they were able to mobilize the ‘Award Wapsi’ gang with such ease? Bollywood is not alien to this ecosystem either as the degradation of Hindu idols, places of worship, or beliefs is a regular practice. This very ecosystem is bigger than a single ‘Unofficial’ Facebook page or party, and this is what Congress is using to sustain itself in times when it has been reduced to nothingness in terms of National Politics.
This intellectual vandalism against Indu Sarkar isn’t because they are afraid of the movie. There have been a number of books pertaining to the Congress Emergency, Akali presence in Punjab, Khalistan, Bofors, Bhopal Gas Leak, and numerous other crimes of the Congress, and the authors have not been troubled.
Also, the central character of the movie is named Indu Sarkar, if Wikipedia is to be believed, and doesn’t mean ‘Indira’s Government’ as many of us thought after the trailer launch. If the director is to be believed, 70% of the movie is fiction and merely 30% of it is based on real events, and yet, Congress has occupied its ecosystem’s resources to fight against that mere 30%. The question is why?
Soon, we are going to see the movie adaptation of ‘The Accidental Prime Minister’, with Legendary Actor Anupam Kher himself playing Dr. Manmohan Singh. Even if Congress is able to live with the release of Indu Sarkar, they have a lot to lose if artists, writers, and production houses take up issues or topics pertaining to the misdeeds of Congress or their leaders. Imagine a movie having the character of Rajiv Gandhi making the ‘Mighty Tree’ statement or escorting Warren Anderson out of the country after the Bhopal Gas Leak?
Indu Sarkar, as a movie, isn’t a threat to the memory of Sanjay or Indira Gandhi, but to this entire ecosystem of the Congress, given for the first time the supporters of NDA are now close to beating liberals and leftists at their own game.
The mainstream media, another entity controlled within this ecosystem is already in its dusk, and if the Congress is reduced to a position where they can no longer control what people watch or read in movies and books, they will be required to fight on merit.
Should you watch Indu Sarkar?
Yes but that’s not where it should end.
You shouldn’t only watch ‘Indu Sarkar’, but go beyond that and educate yourself about the Emergency, about Bofors, about Bhopal, about Sri Lankan Civil War, about Kashmir, about that every single event when Congress used your nation as a bait to further the cause of one family.
The vandalism against Indu Sarkar is nowhere in sight. However, on 28th July, your one choice will make a huge difference. We obviously will review the movie for you, but don’t let this event pass without provoking you to rethink the way Congress conducts its politics. More than Madhur Bhandarkar, you, as the citizens of a free nation, have to lose if this movie doesn’t hit the theaters.
