In 1987, filmmaker Anil Sharma – best known for the blockbuster Gadar: Ek Prem Katha (2001) – released Hukumat – in which, upright cop Arjun Singh saves the good folks of Shanti Nagar town from a cabal of corrupt and tyrannical politicians, contractors, government officials, and Chinese and Pakistani mischief-makers.
Despite its mediocre production, ‘Hukumat’ had enough to emerge as one of that year’s biggest hits. Most notably, it featured ‘He-Man’ Dharmendra in the lead, and a mix of earnestness and a comic book-like quality to its dialogue, characterisation and depiction of violence and emotion.
The latter kept things light, but avoided the film’s slide into clumsy farce. (This was then. Present-day audiences who have seen better will find the film shoddy and laughable.)
The ‘Hukumat’ Template
The Hukumat template may not have inspired the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the Narendra Modi years, but it has certainly served it well during this time. The BJP has repeatedly projected Modi as India’s saviour, capable of taking on the phalanx of dynasts, opportunists, middlemen, fixers, urban Naxals, presstitutes, pseudo-secularists, anti-nationals, compulsive contrarians, liberals, communists, meat eaters, and their friends from Pakistan, who have connived to keep Indians poor, diffident, divided and insecure over the years.
And the ‘Hukumat’ template has worked for the BJP, for the same reasons it worked for Anil Sharma once: forceful articulation of the commoner’s misery – indeed, preying on their biases and anxieties; targeting the evil nexus between multiple, systematically demonised characters; the projection of a one-man army committed to restoring respect and justice; and, a reliance on bombastic dialogue, emotional manipulation and simplistic solutions to drive the larger message home.
Most importantly, the BJP, like Sharma in Hukumat, while doing all this has (more often than not) got the balance between earnestness and drama right – with the drama element reinforcing, rather than taking away from the earnestness of its pitch. With Modi’s thunder, the path to glory has been illuminated.
Why BJP’s Previously Successful Strategy Is Now Failing
Come 2019, and the BJP appears to have chosen to replicate the Hukumat template again. The Opposition is a bunch of anti-nationals, in ‘cahoots’ with Pakistan, and India must vote Modi and his party to ‘save’ itself and achieve its rightful place in the sun, is the party’s central pitch.
This stance is understandable, given the electoral success the party has enjoyed with this template, but not without risk.
The principal risk is of overplaying the drama element, and, in the process, coming across as manipulative and insincere, losing the earnestness factor that has made the drama credible so far. The loss of an authentic emotional ring is hardly unprecedented, especially when previously successful scripts become lazy and formulaic. Sharma himself failed to repeat Hukumat’s success with Elaan-e-Jung (1989), in which he had used the same tropes and the same core cast.
The question is, why would the BJP now fail with a strategy that has worked so far.
For one, as recent assembly election results have shown, the law of diminishing returns has set in. The BJP barely hung on to its Gujarat citadel, and could not form the government in its strongholds like Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan, despite giving the Hukumat template significant play.
Too Late for BJP to Change Course
BJP sympathisers can argue that such mixed returns owed to the limited resonance of national security issues in the assembly elections, and a possible fatigue factor, both addressed and set to give the party a decisive advantage now, given the national canvas of the parliamentary election and the recency of the Balakot air strikes.
However, the questions surrounding the air strikes – about the escalated warmongering at election time, about the optics of the BJP top brass campaigning, even as the nation grieved the Pulwama tragedy, about piggybacking on the Army’s heroics, about lip service to soldiers and their problems, about intelligence failures that led to the Pulwama terror attack and other similar ones before it – could lead to lower than expected political mileage for the BJP.
And this, after discounting the skepticism among international agencies about whether the damage inflicted on the targeted terror facility and the Pakistani side was similar to what has been claimed.
It is too late now for the BJP to change tack, especially since it has few meaningful achievements to showcase (its star campaigners’ silence on the acche din promises of 2014 and subsequent ‘masterstrokes’ like demonetisation have not gone unnoticed), and the party can be expected to milk the Hukumat template to the extent it can, going forward. Risks notwithstanding, that is its best chance of hanging on to power, as it stares at a contest that is proving to be tougher than expected.
(Manish Dubey is a policy analyst and crime fiction writer and can be contacted at @ManishDubey1972. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.)
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