V for Wednesday

The timing of these films and a renewed middle-class interest in Bhagat Singh is no coincidence. They are both motivated by a growing scorn for the institutions that govern modern India. Bhagat Singh is today built up by the middle classes as a counter to the Nehru-Gandhian vision of passive pluralism, a vision blamed for India’s current problems. Films such as A Wednesday are based on the same thumbs down to the Indian nationalist project.

Bhagat Singh’s own life defies simple icon-making. Born to a Sikh nationalist family, he rejected God at an early age. Though closely linked to Veer Savarkar, he turned against Hindu nationalism and advocated Marxist-socialism. An early follower of Gandhi, he was to reject civil disobedience, flirt with violence, and take part in killing a British police officer. He never justified his violence, and deliberately surrendered to the gallows, “in the process” as the eminent historian and Teen Murti Director Mridula Mukherjee says “making the trial the biggest propaganda coup for Indian nationalism”. His early death ensured that he never had to deal with the messy compromises that transfer of power entailed.

Yet the Bhagat Singh legend that the middle-classes have now constructed simplifies him as representing the militant wing of Indian nationalism who grew disillusioned with the dominant strand of the national movement: the moderate passivism of Nehru and Gandhi that is the legacy of the current Indian state. In the last 20 years, many groups have contested this legacy. Bhagat Singh has become a convenient foil for Sikh sub-nationalists, muscle-loving Hindu nationalists and bitter Communists to reflect their profound rejection of the Nehru-Gandhian Indian state. Driven by the same concerns, the spate of vigilante films, and the five films on Bhagat Singh himself, reflect the preoccupations of the Indian middle-classes, uneasy at a state that has abandoned governance to vote-bank politics. To be fair, Bhagat Singh, as Mridula Mukherjee says, “never played up differences between the revolutionaries and the larger Indian national movement”. But the Bhagat Singh of today represents an iconic counter to what is seen as a failed Indian state.

This enthusiasm is misplaced. As Gandhi counselled: “If I had an opportunity to speak to Bhagat Singh and his comrades, I should have told them that the way they pursued was wrong and futile. We cannot win Swaraj for our famishing millions by sword.” India’s Independence was messy, multifarious, entailing compromises that would have sullied the whitest of lilies. The enemies were not just the British. They were staggering inequities (of caste, religion, class), corruption, and a contentious nationalism. These enemies didn’t leave with the British. They lurk on, requiring engagement and compromises, not flashy nihilism.

Naseeruddin Shah in A Wednesday rejects civic engagement to reform moribund Indian institutions (a venal political culture, incompetent police and an unresponsive judiciary). Instead, fed up with the failed “system”, he unleashes his own violence to the applause of an engaged audience. In this, he does disservice to legions of middle-class Indians — Kiran Bedi, Shailesh Gandhi and the Amtes amongst them — who have chosen engagement to nihilism. Long, boring films like Swades are preferable to the entertaining but troubling A Wednesday.

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