How Prime Ministers and Presidents use Bollywood to connect with citizens

Irrespective of the popularity that Hindi cinema enjoys in India or even across the globe, one wouldn’t readily think of Zanjeer’s (1973) Sher Khan or the lines of a song from it—‘Yaari hai imaan mera, yaar meri zindagi’—as a part of an official speech by an Indian Prime Minister. Yet, PM Modi’s reference to the film’s unforgettable Pathan played by the legendary Pran and his ode to friendship in the closing lines of his address to the Afghan assembly during his recent visit joins a growing list of heads of states using Bollywood to connect with people.

In a single year, 2015, Bollywood was a part of not just the Indian Prime Minister’s speech but also the US President as well the British Prime Minister’s successful re-election campaign. At a town hall in New Delhi, President Barack Obama apologised to the crowd for not being able to schedule any dancing with Michelle Obama like he did during a previous visit to India by quoting the famous ‘Senorita bade bade deshon mein…’ dialogue from Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge (1995). In the run-up to the May 7 elections, Britain’s Conservative Party launched a Bollywood style campaign song in Hindi to woo Indian-origin voters. The song’s catchy chorus repeated David Cameron’s name and encouraged the Indian diaspora to join hands with the incumbent PM for the future as well. While Obama’s reference to Bollywood could be attributed to smart speechwriters, it along with Cameron’s Neela hai aasma (Blue sky) song, acknowledges Bollywood’s status as a global cultural mosaic.

Although the Hindi cinema industry became the world’s largest film producing outfit way back in 1971 when it produced 443 films in a single year, the recognition of being a global phenomenon took a few years to come. It was only in 2012 that Hollywood caught up with that number but by then Hindi cinema was churning out over 1000 films annually. In the mid-1970s when western media started exploring the frenetic film scene in Asia, TIME magazine put Parveen Babi on its cover in 1976. The same year also saw Kabir Bedi become a television star in Italy with Sandokan (1976). A few years later Persis Khambatta featured in Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979) but such instances were considered exotic and didn’t change the stature of Hindi cinema vis-à-vis the West. In the mid-1990s following the global success of Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge and then in 1999 when Amitabh Bachchan was voted the greatest star of stage or screen in a BBC News online poll, where he topped the list over the likes of Sir Laurence Olivier and Sir Alec Guinness who came second and third respectively, the image of Bollywood being a force to reckon with began to come up. The other thing that contributed was a global surge in scholarly interest in all things Bollywood especially the kitschy, masala, psychedelic 1970s. According to Ella Shohat, Professor of Cultural Studies at New York University, the most significant impact of western interest in cinema from developing and third world countries has been in the rise of academic research into as well teaching of Indian cinema.

Mr. Modi isn’t the first Indian Prime Minster to use Hindi cinema as a reference point. In fact, keeping in mind the extensive citations he makes to Indian culture one would have expected him to perhaps cite Rabindranath Tagore’s Kabuliwala, which was also made in films in Hindi as well as Bangla, instead of Zanjeer. Beginning with Pandit Nehru, the first Indian Prime Minister following its independence, who inspired the top-three box-office stars of the 1950s—Dilip Kumar, Raj Kapoor and Dev Anand—to imbibe some aspect of his brand of socialism, till Mr. Atal Behari Vajpayee and Mr. LK Advani, the PM and Deputy PM during NDA-I, who often held special screenings of the latest releases, Indian heads of states have been closely entwined with popular Hindi cinema. Almost all of the 15 PMs that India has seen understood the impact that mainstream Hindi cinema could wield and often used it for specific messaging. It was India’s second PM, Mr. Lal Bahaduri Shastri, who, following a screening of Shaheed (1965) invoked the patriot within the film’s star Manoj Kumar to make a film based upon his clarion call of Jai Jawaan, Jai Kisaan. The result was Upkar (1967) where Manoj Kumar’s character Bharat readily gives up his life as a farmer to join the Army when the dark cloud of war looms over India. When Shastriji’s successor Mrs. Indira Gandhi imposed the Emergency, her cabinet ministers who allegedly adhered to the whims of Mrs. Gandhi’s son, Sanjay, said to be at the helm of a parallel centre of power, coerced many Hindi cinema stalwarts to sing praises for the government. A few of them like Dev Anand and Kishore Kumar refused to tow the line and were troubled by Income Tax officials and other government machinery. According to an article in The Caravan, in 1977 when the Janta Party was slated to hold a huge rally as a show of strength against Mrs. Gandhi on the eve of the elections that she had announced, the PM ordered Doordarshan to telecast Bobby (1973) as the Sunday evening film. Her son and successor Rajiv Gandhi even got their then close friend Amitabh Bachchan to join the Congress and unleashed the star against Hemwati Nandan Bahuguna in Allahabad in 1984. Later Rajiv Gandhi also got Rajesh Khanna to contest elections against LK Advani in the 1991 general elections.

While most Indian PMs seem to prefer typical Hindi cinema, legend has it Rupert Murdoch personally gifted VHS tapes of world cinema films to the then PM PV Narasimha Rao, who could speak 17 languages including Spanish, French and German. Murdoch had a tough time thinking of the perfect gift for a head of state that he was meeting for the first time and there were newspaper articles about how pleased Mr. Rao was with the media baron’s gesture. Irrespective of how and why heads of states end up with Bollywood reference, no one doubts its scope and once they use it, it more often than not ends up doing the trick.