‘Indu Sarkar’ Review: Why Blow the Chance to Depict Emergency?

Bollywood stays away from producing hard-hitting political drama for fear of hurting sentiments.

A poster of the film Indu Sarkar. (Photo: Screenshot)

Madhur Bhandarkar, you had ONE JOB!

As a ’90s kid, I can tell you everything about cable TV and dial up internet connections, but as far as the Emergency period goes, I have to fall back on books and films. And that’s why Madhur Bhandarkar had an important job as the director of Indu Sarkar.

Indu Sarkar is a film with deplorable acting, paltry dialogues and sub-par direction, but that is the secondary concern. The primary problem is how it handled the portrayal of the Emergency period.

As loud as Bollywood can get with its sexist, practically soft porn item numbers and the likes of Mastizaade, it pisses its pants when it comes to producing political dramas. With the blades of censorship and the threat of hurting sentiments so close to our throats, it is already hard to depict the truth as it is, lest anybody gets offended. However, here Bhandarkar had one great opportunity, with the Indian government favouring at least this political topic, to depict the dark blotch on Indian democracy. He flopped.

But Bhandarkar’s film can be a guide on how to not make a political drama in Bollywood.

Don’t Chicken Out!

When the film starts with distancing itself from facts, characters and events and calls any resemblance a mere ‘coincidence’, with a blaring disclaimer which is read out loud, just in case the audience doesn’t read it, once in English and then in Hindi, double-checking just in case, you know the director and the producer has chickened out.

A film based on the Emergency needs to bear resemblance to reality because for youngsters who didn’t live through the period, it is meant to be informative and not coincidental.

If political events cannot be depicted in film, then India is only going to be a democracy on paper. (Side note to CBFC: If female oriented sexual scenes cannot be depicted in films, then India is a democracy for only men)

At Least Name Your Characters, Boss!

After the scaredy-cat disclaimer, of course Bhandarkar never once calls Sanjay Gandhi ‘Sanjay Gandhi’. Neil Nitin Mukesh looks eerily like Sanjay but he’s always called “Chief”. What’s worse, Indira Gandhi’s character has a five-second cameo, again never once called by her name but referred to as ‘Mummy’ by Sanjay.

One would think Mrs G, the former prime minister who thwarted constitutional rights, needed more than five seconds on screen.

But Bhandarkar is so cautious about avoiding controversy that he names his plebeian protagonist Indu, who becomes Indu Sarkar by marriage, just so that he can symbolically place the looming character of Indira without actually naming her.

You will also find Sanjay, sorry, Chief, hanging out with his mute entourage consisting of an emasculated Jagdish Tytler lookalike and a laconic Farzana Sultana lookalike.

It’s Not Good vs Evil

Indu Sarkar is more like Aesop’s fables – the bad guys gets defeated, the good girl goes through hardships and wins the day. If that were the case it would a merry world, no?

The film has references to events like the demolition drive at the Turkman Gate, the ‘family planning’ aka forced sterilisation, the crackdown using MISA Act and so on. However, the impact is lacking.

The characters are unintelligently shown to be either bad or good. However, political drama is a little more complicated. For starters, there’s this shade between black and white called grey, and the one way to not sell out to any political party is to understand that political characters are grey.

Visually too, the film doesn’t bring out the fear and censorship of the mid ’70s. The setting and the colours are too bright to symbolically highlight the dark environment.

Facts, Nothing But Bitter Facts

The film’s stammering protagonist says the Emergency lasted 19 months, which is factually incorrect. The film also gives a definitive figure of the deaths in the Turkman gate demolition, whereas no such figure exists in reality.

There are a few other discrepancies but one can’t be nitpicking when the filmmaker himself flatly said that the film is 30 percent real and 70 percent fiction. Despite a lenient CBFC (and one should make hay, when the CBFC is your friend) Bhandarkar doesn’t dare rock the boat.

Even with the government favouring the film, Bhandarkar fiddles with actual accounts, giving it only a shade of truth and not the whole bitter truth.