India@2019 and the politics of entertainment

The BJP-led NDA government these days seems to be heavily invested in the idea of leveraging the power and reach of cinema to perpetuate its political legacy. Just a few days back, a full-fledged biopic on the life of Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been announced with Vivek Oberoi essaying the eponymous role. With the 2019 general elections just months away, it isn’t very difficult to understand what the BJP stands to gain from a film that aims to glorify the PM. So, it is only natural to question the film’s timing.

Now, there is nothing new about biopics made on the lives of retired or deceased politicians. But, clearly a new precedent is being set where a biopic is being made on the life of a sitting PM who will soon be contesting the general elections seeking a second consecutive term as the leader of the world’s largest democracy.

The power of motion pictures can best be understood from their remarkable reach. Unlike books which require a certain desired level of literacy, movies, with their strong audio-visual appeal, can easily transcend such barriers. In other words, the message can reach everywhere and everyone.

Now, if we look at the history of cinema, the best films that we come across are the ones which ground us in common values and beliefs and make us overlook our differences. The society, the culture and the economy form an integral part of good cinema which endeavours to fill us with all kinds of positive emotions.

On the other hand, we have another kind of cinema which tends to sensationalise things with an aim of driving home an agenda, whether covert or overt. Perhaps, one would have to go back to the days of the Bolshevik Revolution wherein the newly formed Soviet government under Lenin decided to use the power of cinema to sustain its political supremacy.

That’s how propaganda cinema was officially born. It was during this time that the legendary Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein made propaganda masterpieces like Battleship Potemkin (1925)—which was based on the 1905 Russian Revolution involving a warship and sought to create a new history for Russia—and October (1927), which depicted the Bolshevik perspective on the October Revolution in a bid to trick people into looking at the revolution from just one perspective.

Fast forward to 1935 and we will find a worthy successor in Leni Riefenstahl who unleashed the Nazi propaganda machinery under supreme leader Adolf Hitler by making notorious propaganda films about the party’s Nuremberg rallies such as The Victory of Faith (1933) and Triumph of the Will (1935). Of course, we will find several other examples of such films being made in different parts of the world at various times in modern history.

Whenever the governments find it difficult to meet the expectations of the people, they find ways of swaying public opinion by different means such as by feeding jingoism—an extreme form of patriotism primarily targeted at capturing the minds and imagination of the masses.

Today, with changing times, propaganda films have become far more sophisticated. In his 1992 book, titled Make-believe Media: The Politics of Entertainment, American author Michael Parenti talks about how seemingly apolitical entertainment has been used in the US to alter the people’s view of history, politics, race, sex and class differences.

In other words, we can be easily controlled by economic and political forces in more ways than we can possibly imagine. What we are currently witnessing in India in the name of entertainment such as the upcoming Narendra Modi biopic or the toxic hyper-nationalism depicted in films like Uri: The Surgical Strike is certainly a prime example of the modern-day propaganda machinery at work. This is a clear nod to what Parenti describes as the ‘Politics of Entertainment’. Therefore, as consumers of entertainment, the onus is upon us to be more discerning and discreet.