Bollywood’s Unholy Capitulation To The Right Through Its Music

A solitary lamp burns in a quiet room, when the shadow of a gun appears out of nowhere. As the sound of a bullet pierces through a dark screen, a grim sequence of images follows, showing the destruction in the aftermath of communal violence. The screen fills with the innocent face of a baby Tiger Shroff and a song begins. His father, Jackie, gently cradling him in his arms, sings, “Sun sun sun mere nanhe sun, sun sun sun mere munne sun, pyaar ki ganga bahe, desh mein ekta rahe.” The lyrics of the song are an appeal to the audiences to give up hate and reforge relationships of love and solidarity.

The year was 1993. The country was embroiled in the turmoil of communal tension, in the wake of the Babri Masjid demolition. Several lives had already been lost to unrelenting violence. It was during such a time that Bollywood director Subhash Ghai received a call from the Information and Broadcasting Ministry.

“I was asked by a secretary if the film industry can come together and give a message of brotherhood to the people. To which I agreed,” he recalled in an interview with The Indian Express. That’s how “Pyaar ki Ganga Bahe” came into being. The song was unique because alongside the film stars, it included some of their children. Ghai has said that he wanted the message reaching not just adults, but also the children who were to be the future of the country. This is why along with Shroff and his son, the song also features Rishi Kapoor with a toddler Ranbir and Anil Kapoor with a young Sonam. While Bollywood stars such as Govinda, Naseeruddin Shah, Salman Khan and Aamir Khan were also part of the production, its star cast ranged beyond the Hindi film industry and roped in the likes of Rajinikanth, Chiranjeevi, Prosenjit Chatterjee, Sachin Pilgaonkar, Mammootty and others from the regional industries. According to Ghai, none of these actors charged a single rupee for the song.

Cut to 2025. In a recent release by T-Series Music, a song titled, “Modi hai to Mumkin hai”, created by the Meet Bros has appeared on the scene, with more than a million views on YouTube. The song, an elaborate prostration to the prime minister’s achievements in the ‘development’ of the nation, features Bollywood stars like Rajkummar Rao, Varun Dhawan, Vikrant Massey and Arshad Warsi grooving to its rhythms. Among glimpses of prolific roads, zooming trains and airplanes, Chandrayaan missions, and snippets of various armed forces, a significant part of the video is dedicated to the grandeur of the Ram temple that was inaugurated at Ayodhya in January last year. “Ayodhya mein deep jalaye, maryada purushottam aaye. Satya, dharm, nyay ka pyaala, ram rajya ka sapna sajaye,” plays in the background, as we see Modi bowing before the Ayodhya idol on screen, much like how the industry is bowing to his endorsement.

The timing isn’t inconspicuous. With less than a month to go before the Bihar Assembly elections, it is rather obvious why this moment has been chosen for the song’s release. However, this is not the first time that Bollywood has buckled under the pressure of participating in the prime minister’s public relations exercises. Five years ago, when the country was reeling under a terrifyingly unplanned and unforeseen lockdown to contain the Covid pandemic, Bollywood actors had once again come together to paint over the frenzy that besieged Indian citizens through the song, “Muskurayega India”. Under the umbrella of Akshay Kumar’s Cape of Good Films and Jjust Music, actors like Rao, Ayushmann Khurrana, Kriti Sanon, Kartik Aaryan, Ananya Panday, Sidharth Malhotra, Kiara Advani, Vicky Kaushal, Bhumi Pednekar, Taapsee Pannu among others participated in creating this “melody of hope” with the aim “to bring back the smiles on everyone's faces and keep the spirit of togetherness intact”. Tiger, whose face as a child came to symbolise the heartwarming initiative of “Pyaar ki Ganga bahe”, was also a part of the Covid initiative. It is another matter that the latter song was tone-deaf in its visualisation in comparison to the former, not least because the lockdown came to be heavily criticised for mismanagement and police excesses, which weighed down the poor and disenfranchised. As noble as it sounded in its intent, there was little to no explanation on why “Muskurayega India” began and ended with glimpses of the prime minister in the video.

It is not as if the Hindi film industry didn’t collaborate with incumbent regimes on national and social issues in the past. Many yesteryear actors and actresses participated in fundraisers for the government during times of war. Actor Dilip Kumar was part of an initiative to broker peace during wartime between India and Pakistan. Songs such as “Kar chale hum fida” from the 1964 film Haqeeqat—India’s first prominent war film made on the Sino-Indian war of 1962—highlighted the human cost of war, even while newsreels of Jawaharlal Nehru, the then Prime Minister, featured in it.

In 1988, Doordarshan and the Indian I&B Ministry promoted “Mile Sur Mera Tumhara” on Independence day—a song composed by Pandit Bhimsen Joshi, which featured musicians and artists from across states including the likes of Amitabh Bachchan, Shabana Azmi, Hema Malini, Sharmila Tagore, Waheeda Rehman, Jeetendra and many others. The idea behind the song was to spotlight unity in diversity in a multicultural country like India. But what changes with the current wave of productions is the deliberate fudging of the fine line between an initiative for collective social upliftment and an exercise in personal propaganda for a politician in a powerful position.

Though Hindi cinema and its songs may have always played a role in propping up certain regimes, there was always a sharp critique that also got its fair share within these narratives. For a “Dharti Mata Ki” from Mehboob’s superhit film Mother India (1957), which glosses over Nehruvian socialism, there was a cultural counternarrative in “Jinhein naaz hai Hind par wo kahan hain” from Pyaasa, also made in the same year. Nearly 70 years later, however, the diversity of thought and the intellectual capacity to be able to portray and sit with political differences that should have proliferated in cinema, has faltered instead. What’s left is an industry so steeped in profit-making that it is willing to buckle under any kind of political pressure to ensure evasion of censorship—even if it means isolating those who are facing flak for the remotest critique of the current regime through their films.

As right-wing narratives move from the fringes to the mainstream in the Hindi film industry, the off-screen capitulation to the saffron ideology by its actors and directors doesn’t remain far behind. Counter narratives do seem to emerge to works like “Modi hai to mumkin hai” in songs like “Saheb”, produced by Paranjoy Guha Thakurta, which came out right before the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, and offered a stinging critique of the Modi regime. But it seems unlikely that Bollywood biggies will throw their weight behind productions like these, at least in the near future.