Cinema Under Fire: India

What forces are threatening filmmakers’ freedoms? In a series of contributions from international film critics, Filmkrant reports on the political and economical forces at work on national film production and culture. This month: India, where ten years of Hindu-nationalist rule has turned Bollywood into a propaganda tool.

On January 10, 2019, the Hindi filmmaker Karan Johar posted a selfie with the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi along with a bevy of other stars of the Hindi mainstream film industry (commonly referred to as “Bollywood”). “As a community, there is a huge interest to contribute to nation building”, the post read. “There is so much that we want to do. And can do and this dialogue was towards how and what ways we can do that.”

While the biggest stars of the Bollywood industry are Muslim, none of them were present for the meeting with the leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

The next day, the film Uri: The Surgical Strike starring Vicky Kaushal (one of the many actors in that selfie) was released, about the Indian army’s 2016 retaliatory strikes following a Pakistani terrorist attack on an Indian army base. The nationalistic film’s tagline “How’s the josh?” (“How’s the spirit?”) was boosted by Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman along with a video of her watching the film in a theatre with army officers and a crowd waving the national flag and chanting jingoistic slogans. Modi quoted the slogan too, while inaugurating a film museum.

Two months later, Modi launched his campaign for re-election to the country’s leadership, and won – boosted by his “handling” of India-Pakistan tensions. Having Uri as a reminder surely didn’t hurt – the film it premiered on streaming in March 2019, mere weeks before the start of he elections.

Neither the villainization of Pakistan nor the alliance between the Hindi film industry and the ruling party are a new thing. What is new is the brazen weaponization of Hindi cinema to further the cause of the Hindu rightwing through narratives that demonize Muslims, critique the Congress Party, and/or present “alternate” histories of wars, riots, and current affairs – versions in which Hindus either emerge morally or militarily victorious, or become victims of Muslim cruelty. Much like Donald Trump’s government in the USA, there is growing disdain for liberals and intellectuals, which translates to pretty much anyone trying to hold the country to its secular constitution.

In 2019, Uri’s box office success was followed by several films in a similar vein, though they struggled to find similar traction. There was Abhijit Panse’s Thackeray, on the life of ethno-nationalist politician Bal Thackeray, whose Shiv Sena party was a political rival to the BJP; Vijay Ratnakar Gutte’s The Accidental Prime Minister, a revisionist biopic of Congress Party politician Manmohan Singh, the Indian Prime Minister before Modi; and the nauseatingly hagiographic Modi biopic PM Narendra Modi.

What has followed is an untamed escalation.

Following the 2020 suicide of Hindu actor Sushant Singh Rajput, the government launched tax raids and somewhat indiscriminate and unfounded probes into the offices and lives of Bollywood stars. Among them was Aryan Khan, the son of Shah Rukh Khan, one of the biggest stars of the industry for decades and a Muslim who has largely remained silent on the country’s politics throughout his career. Though the drug charges against Aryan Khan were soon dropped, his arrest sent a clear message that no one – no matter how famous and wealthy – was safe unless they were toeing the party line.

Opposition to the government will result in online trolling and threats by self-proclaimed “nationalists”, and can have even graver consequences, such as arrests (as in Khan’s case) and calls for bans. In some cases, goons have destroyed film sets. The resulting atmosphere of fear has effectively prevented the country’s few subversive filmmakers from working on their projects.

Additionally in 2021, the government dissolved the Film Certification Appellate Tribunal, where filmmakers could appeal the cuts prescribed by the Censor Board of Film Certification. Now, the only way out for filmmakers who disagree with proposed cuts is a lawsuit.

While the censor board has been in place since 1952, its rising and unappealable power has resulted in the halting of the release of films like Dev Patel’s Monkey Man, which paints a stark pictire of a fictional religious rightwing society bearing many resemblances to India, and Sandhya Suri’s scathing criticism of Indian police brutality and caste discrimination in Santosh, the UK’s Oscar entry for last year.

The most recent censor board tussle revolves around Phule, based on the lives of Dalit visionaries Jyotirao and Savitribai Phule, social reformists belonging to the lowest caste of the Hindu social order, deemed untouchable. The board prescribed cuts essentially meant to gloss over the atrocities meted out by upper caste Hindus against the Phules, thereby aiming to create a sanitized version of India’s history, which in truth is marked by the violent casteism of upper caste Hindus.

All in all, these measures have resulted in a proliferation of films that appease the government. One surefire way of doing that is to prove history as we know it to be false. 2022’s The Kashmir Files, on the exodus of Hindu Pandits from the state of Kashmir in 1990, completely lacks the nuance the complex history of the land demands. Instead it plays into the BJP’s narrative, with evil Muslims ousting innocent Hindus from their homeland. The film, starring Anupam Kher (who is married to a BJP politician) and Mithun Chakraborty (also a BJP politician), was largely panned by critics, but became one of the highest grossing releases of that year. When screened at the International Film Festival of India, jury president Nadav Lapid called it “vulgar propaganda”, for which he was subjected to extensive trolling by BJP followers.

Another case in point is 2023’s The Kerala Story, a film “inspired by true events” that stokes the paranoia of the widely discredited idea Islamophobic conspiracy theory around “love jihads”, claiming Muslim men trick Hindu women into marriage with the intent of converting them to Islam. The plot of the film revolves around a Hindu woman who is manipulated into wearing a hijab and then coerced into converting by a Muslim man who impregnates and then abandons her.

Praised by Modi for “unearthing a hidden truth”, the film was used by BJP and the the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a Hindu rightwing paramilitary organization, when campaigning in the southern state of Karnataka. One leader organized free screenings targeted at young Hindu girls. When Congress objected to the film, they were labelled terrorists. The film, like many others of its genre, received tax exemptions in several BJP-ruled states.

And then there’s The Sabarmati Report (2024), which tries to counter the prevailing narrative around Gujarat’s 2002 riot and the BJP’s role in it. Modi promptly took to social media to praise it.

Propaganda films have been an easy weapon for autocratic governments throughout history and their proliferation in India is hardly a surprise. What is alarming is the rigour with which they are used to fuel the ruling party’s larger project to move away from the idea of a secular society. It is important to note that the Hindi film industry is among the largest in the country (and the world) and has often been used as a glib illustrative example of the country’s diversity – a Muslim actor would play Hindu roles, a Hindu actor would play a Sikh, all of them would lip sync to a Hindu devotional song or dance to a Sufi tune, and so on. But what was largely an apolitical industry has in just a few years been radicalized into a mouthpiece for the government and its pogroms. Coupled with rampant misinformation, this kind of propaganda poses a risk to democracy itself.

While Islamophobia has always been a part of the country’s social fabric, the BJP’s rule has fanned on the brazenness of its display. The culture of inhibition fostered by this government has robbed the industry of its creative streak. It’s a playbook of repression that the regime had already perfected in public universities, where free political thought has been squashed and BJP pawns have been installed in positions of power implementing academic decisions that align with the Hindu rightwing agenda.

The film industry has suffered for it. In December 2024, Financial Times reported that the Indian box office was down 7% compared to the same period in the previous year. The biggest recent hits have come from the South Indian film industries and streaming platforms are seeing a steep rise in viewership. In a bid to get audiences back into the theatre, multiplexes are re-releasing older hits.

A once thriving industry that used to churn out films for all audiences by the dozens is now in a creative rut, producing films that are neither profitable nor watchable. And even as Indian independent films amass global festival recognition, the end for this tragic downturn is nowhere in sight. When the India-Pakistan strikes broke out in early May, dubbed “Operation Sindoor” in India, no less than twelve Bollywood production companies made a beeline to trademark the name, even as attacks and counter-attacks were still ongoing.

Cinema has rightly been referred to as the mirror of its times, reflecting both the good and the ugly for the world to see. But in India, the joint forces of capitalism, Islamophobia, and misinformation have turned cinema into a funhouse mirror – a mirror that lies. Who do we become, in the world’s largest democracy, if we forget what we look like?

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Born and raised in India, Bedatri D. Choudhury is a film critic, programmer, and journalist based in New York City. An alum of Berlinale Talents Press, her work has been published in outlets such as Mubi Notebook, Reverse Shot, Filmmaker Magazine, and Film Comment.

A Dutch translation of this article was published in Filmkrant #480, June 2025.