I spent the last hours of this Independence Day in an eerily empty South Delhi theatre watching Laal Singh Chaddha, Aamir Khan’s adaptation of Forrest Gump. The empty chairs told more of a story than Laal Singh Chaddha’s flitting journey through historical events of the last half century. This was exactly the kind of movie that would have sailed through a decade back, riding on Brand Aamir’s magnetic appeal among the middle classes.The spectacular failure of Laal Singh Chaddha marks the end of that brand.
There was a time when Aamir Khan was to India what Oprah Winfrey would have been to America, had she also been a movie superstar. In the eight years between Rang De Basanti (2006) and PK (2014), Aamir Khan was the oracle of the Indian middle classes. The peak of this era was represented by the talk show, Satyamev Jayate (2012-14), where Aamir fashioned himself as the vehicle for his audience’s aspirations and outrages, ideals and fears.
By the latter half of the 2000s, the middle classes were throbbing with restlessness at the political system. As professor Leela Fernandes wrote in her book, India’s New Middle Class, the politics of the post-liberalisation middle classes has always been focused on shielding democracy from the “corrupting influences of mass-based politics and vote banks” and suspicious of “unions, subordinate castes and Muslims”. At that stage, though, the democratic anxieties of the middle classes were channelled through two different (albeit overlapping)streams. Put differently, the middle classes spoke in two voices.
One voice was Hindu majoritarianism.Ever since the Babri Masjid fell, Hindutva had steadily replaced secularism as the preferred ideological configuration of the Hindu middle classes. Politically, this had manifested in the support for the Bharatiya Janata Party over the Congress.
The second voice was a kind of anti-politics anchored to the credo that India was primarily held back by a rapacious political elite. This voice reached its crescendo with the anti-corruption movement led by Anna Hazare to which Aamir Khan was one of the first Bollywood actors to publicly pledge support. After all, Brand Aamir was wedded to a middle-class vision, which disparaged politics as the incubator of conflict, divisions, compromises and corruption. Instead of politics, the solution to India’s problems lay in a governance model rooted in technocratic expertise, enterprising individualism, and the moral values of honesty and integrity.The Aam Aadmi party eventually became the political vehicle for this voice.
This ersatz progressivism gave us the world of Rang De Basanti where a band of young, privileged urban vigilantes salvages the nation with the symbolic murder of the grimy politician. It was the perfect movie for Aamir’s middle-class audience: allowing them to vicariously revel in the Bhagat Singh-like revolutionary violence, while remaining blissfully unencumbered by the leader’s revolutionary message — on caste, class and religion.
A similar streak of moral crusading,with almost complete disregard for power hierarchies, ran through Satyamev Jayate, a show which aimed to heighten awareness and encourage societal intervention on issues such as caste discrimination, sex-selective abortion, child sexual abuse, dowry, and medical malpractice. These were all weighty topics, but the show never penetrated beyond the good versus evil melodrama where (in the words of a critic) Aamir was “Rama and Yudhisthira, slaying Evil, vouching Truth, all this without cumbersome props”. Or we might say he was echoing Rancho of 3 Idiots (or anticipating the alien, PK) in his heroic attempts at reforming institutions through superior logic or just sheer goodness of heart. Both those movies, much like Rang De Basanti, were less anti-Establishment(in all its socio-political dimensions) than anti-malignant individuals.
The scholars, Paula Chakravartty and Sreela Sarkar, noted that Satyamev Jayate contrasted the “good work of Indian middle-class entrepreneurs”against the “failings of the inefficient and corrupt government”. Further, it furnished individual “feel good solutions” against societal wrongs which “precluded any discussion of political struggle or conflict over necessarily complex social issues like the norms of gender and sexuality in contemporary India”.
The seduction of Brand Aamir’s comforting progressivism lay in its ability to reinforce the illusion of the members of his middle-class audience that they were the repositories of moral righteousness and all that ailed India was situated outside of them. No matter that these very middle classes were the beneficiaries of a combination of caste and class privileges that had few parallels in the modern world, or that the post-1991 State was geared towards the capitalist accumulation and consumerist expansion that served their interests. If the Nehruvian middle class was caste-blind, the post liberalisation middle class was also blind to class inequalities and communal prejudice (to put it charitably). The moment Aamir challenged them, howsoever gently, with his remarks on increasing intolerance, the spell of the brand was broken.
Today, the middle classes speak in one, clear voice: the voice of unabashed Hindu majoritarianism. In the same South Delhi theatre, where I experienced the shallow, non-political, ‘do gooder’ humanism of Laal Singh Chaddha (the core of Brand Aamir) fall on empty seats and deaf ears, I had watched another movie, more in tune with the national zeitgeist. The packed hall seethed with emotion and reverberated with applauses. It was The Kashmir Files, an Islamophobic screed, which self-consciously feasted on the basest of emotions.
The anti-politics voice has been easily appropriated and submerged in the Hindutva voice because the former was a poorly rooted moralistic stance whereas the latter stems from a deeply rooted ideology. The anti-corruption discourse bolstered by the Anna Hazare movement has been skilfully ridden by Hindutva politicians such as Narendra Modi and Yogi Adityanath who have projected themselves as pious outsiders unattached to any family or sectional interest. The technocratic insistence, fuelled both by news media and talk shows such as Satyamev Jayate, that politics is not about a negotiated division of power and resources in a political economy but a universalistic quest for efficiency has damaged both Mandal and Left politics. All that scorched political earth is now occupied by Hindutva that had always emphasised that it was for everyone, well, except minorities.
Meanwhile, the middle classes have been bombarded with eight years of unremitting Hindu majoritarian propaganda. They have been trained by television news channels to focus all their fears and anxieties on the figure of the Muslim Other. The middle classes are still the pre-eminent ideological supporters of Hindutva. The part amusing and part dreaded Residential Welfare Association WhatsApp groups are but a representative cross section of contemporary middle-class political opinions.
The AAP, for instance, has gauged the shift in the middle-class mood over the last many years and made two adjustments: one, it has started pandering to Hindutva symbols and, two, it has tacked onto free welfare goods as its marquee political platform,although it takes care not to exclude the middle classes from the welfare net. The Delhi middle class, which votes for AAP on its governance record in the state elections, switches to the BJP for its ideological platform in the national elections. The AAP is still groping for a distinctive voice to speak to the middle-class constituents enthralled by Hindutva.
The eclipse of Brand Aamir demonstrates a larger lesson: progressive politics is not driven by righteous men in positions of power and influence; it is driven by the mobilisation of social groups at the wrong end of the power spectrum in a political struggle. Near the end of Laal Singh Chaddha, the bedraggled protagonist abruptly stops his marathon run, a puzzled look gripping his face as if wondering to himself: what was the point? After a whimpering apology and pledges of patriotism couldn’t save his movie, Aamir Khan might well be wondering the same about his brand.
(Asim Ali is a political researcher and columnist based in Delhi)
