The cops in Shetty’s cinematic franchise represent this fantasy of authoritarian populism: strong-man leaders, governed by a neoliberal, entrepreneurial commitments, can perform the unthinkable. They can create an absolute political-ideological consensus between the nation-state and its people. Cop-films like Sooryavanshi and Simmba present an incisive articulation of authoritarian populism in India “that combines strongman leadership, strident ethno-nationalism, populist strategies, and elements of neoliberalism.”[15] [open endnotes in new page] They glorify the culture of impunity in law enforcement machinery and valorize the muscular Hindu vigilante cop as the patriotic savior of the nation and its women. In the films, panics around rape and terrorism respectively, thus, serve to “win for the authoritarian closure the gloss of popular consent.”[16]

Furthermore, such a political consent is echoed in the bodies of the male superstars and at the level of the star texts of actors who play the cops in the two films: Akshay Kumar, as Sooryavanshi, and Ranveer Singh as Simmba. Bhavya Dore has written about Akshay Kumar’s ingenious dabbling in right-wing political visions by modeling himself as a nationalist hero, championing the BJP government’s Brahmanical, patriarchal, protectionist policies, and in the process setting himself up as a Hindu alternative to the three big “Khans” in the industry.

Radhika Raghav unpacks the star text of Hindu superstar, Ranveer Singh, to suggest that despite modeling himself as a fashion rebel through his iconoclastic, bohemian, and contrarian sartorial choices, he participates in “normalizing Hindu gender ideologies” that confirm the status quo.  His corporate-managed persona only strengthens normative cultural politics and millennials’ values around gender, caste, class, and religion. Put another way, a key element of the process by which Bollywood has been Hindutva-ized is the way in which A-list male actors have enlisted their varied masculinities in the service of establishing Hindu hegemony within the film industry and have simultaneously emerged as exemplars of Hindu-Indian entrepreneurialism. Despite their divergent, self-curated, star identities and masculinities, both these actors can play cops in Modi’s India. Such is the cohering function of authoritarian logics—the actors gladly subsume and neutralize ostensible tensions in their individual presentations of celebrityhood to serve as a masterclass in ideological conformity.

“No arrest. No long cases. Justice on the spot.”
Simmba encounters the rapists

The third film in Shetty’s cop-universe and a remake of the 2015 Telegu hit film, Temper, Simmba depicts the eponymous orphan and corrupt cop (Sangram “Simmba” Bhalerao) who is only interested in filling his coffers with bribes. Then his conscience is aroused: a young woman he develops brotherly affection for (Aakruti Dave) is fatally gangraped by the brothers (Sada and Giri) of a local criminal-drug lord (Durva Ranade). The conscience of the sleeping lion (Simmba translates as lion) awakens. He dons his khakee police uniform and roars with vengeance to kill the two rapists in a staged “encounter” in his police station. Simmba, thus, belongs to the subgenre of the post-millennial “encounter films” in which cops “encounter” or commit extra-legal killings to deliver “justice” by ridding the social landscape of those deemed criminals.[17]

What is especially remarkable about Simmba is how it manipulates and instrumentalizes Aakruti’s rape and the politics and discourses around it. As a narrative trope, this plot development builds consensus across multiple, disparate constituencies—judges, politicians, cops, middle-class men and women, young and old—to condone aggressive, muscular, individuated solutions to women’s gendered-sexual precarity. The final solution—to kill the rapists—is presented as the will of the people who appoint (and anoint) the cop as a strongman-leader and their political representative. The cop executes their wish in a context where both the people and the police are frustrated by the constraints and failures of democratic institutions. Vigilante justice becomes their only alternative.

The film’s opening makes its political stance explicit through the God-like voice over, soaring above the wail of sirens, as a procession of jeeps screech to a halt outside a police station. The voice-over tells us,

“Two encounters have happened. While these encounters are unofficial, this is the first honest deed that the officer-in-charge of this station has done.”

This loaded, opening exposition, does important political work to determine how the audience should make sense of what has happened. On the one hand, the choice of the words “first honest deed” critique Simmba’s erstwhile corrupt actions (he was until recently a shameless bribe-taking cop). But the voice-over’s ultimate force lies in its declaration that the encounter, “while unofficial” was an “honest deed.” The narration ostensibly sets up “honest” in tension with “unofficial.” But the tension is precisely what brings legitimacy to “encounters” as police practice. Indeed, the encounters are “unofficial” in that they’re undertaken by a cop who’s working outside sanctioned judicial processes and bureaucratic channels. However, the word “honest”—with all its attendant associations of fair, good, just, right—establishes for the viewers the legitimacy of the extra-judicial act. Importantly, audiences and fans would easily recognize the voice-over as belonging to Singham (Bajirao Singh), the super-cop from the inaugural film of Shetty’s cop-universe franchise. Singham, played by Ajay Devgn, is already established as a cop whose self-righteous zeal lends even more moral weight to the endorsement of vigilante justice.

If the opening with Singham’s voice frames and overdetermines how we read Simmba’s actions, the film itself is an illustration of how Simmba operates as he marshals vigorous support for authorizing an “unofficial-honest deed” of murdering rapists. His vigilantism might be outside the bounds of legality, but it is not without process. It may not follow legal routes, but it does adhere to systematic, ritualized protocols. The film lays out the contours of these extra-judicial systems of justice in the age of authoritarian populism. This logic does not signal mayhem but an alternative rationality and set of intentional practices that accompany this worldview.

It’s fun and games in the first forty-five minutes of the two-hour and thirty-nine-minute film, which establish Simmba as a rogue-ish cop without a conscience. He is flamboyantly dishonest in his dealings. The main lead, Ranveer Singh, hams it up as he plays, with cartoonish gusto, a feisty orphan-turned-cop who enjoys his chosen profession: he became a cop “to make money, and not to be Robinhood and help others.” We see him out-crook the crooks and out-swindle unscrupulous businessmen with his own crass corruption. Simmba becomes a cop because he wants “power;” it is precisely the authoritarian nature of law enforcement that draws him to this calling.

So enmeshed is his subjectivity with his occupation, his personhood and corporeality with that of the state, that he has “police” tattooed on his bulging forearm, which on numerous occasions he proudly flexes and flaunts. Simmba is literally the “strong arm” of the state. Even though his tattoo is a nod to Vijay’s iconic forearm tattoo—“Mera Baap Chor Hai” (my father is a thief)—in Deewar, Simmba’s persona is far removed from that of the angry young man. As a policeman, he is nothing like the haunted, desperate cop in Zanjeer. Simmba’s tattoo does not signify a traumatized and scarred body, or bespeak a history of shame and helplessness, as it does in Deewar.

It is not a forcible branding that is a “signifier for marginality and social displacement,” or of existing “outside the pale of the family.”[18] Simmba’s tattoo is a marker of pleasure and pride, of just how unmitigatedly he revels in being a cop, and how glad he is to exist as an extension of the state. Melodramatic excess rather than physical restraint defines his relationship to his profession. Unlike the angry young man version of the cop, he has no skepticism toward “the rituals of the family/nation,”[19] hegemonic institutions that exact more than their pound of flesh. Instead, Simmba invests in an indiscriminate familial-ization of the body politic that he polices. The orphan-turned-vigilante-cop turns the nation into his family and forges a familial relation with every person he meets.

With the rape of a young woman, the film’s tenor shifts from comedy to action/social drama. This turning point is anticipated in an exchange between Simmba and Nityanand Mohile, an ethical head constable whom Simmba supervises. After Simmba strong-arms an ordinary and helpless middle-class man into signing off his home (property and land) at a reduced price to a corrupt corporator, Mohile berates Simmba for “betraying his duty.” While Simmba has previously ignored Mohile’s withering looks, this time he loses his patience with Mohile’s accusations and snaps back: “You’re accusing me like I raped someone.” In the film’s ideological schema, rape is the worst crime. Duping old men out of their property and cozying up to landsharks doesn’t compare, and that behavior doesn’t even deserve any verbal chastisement. As the film progresses, we come to learn what the adequate punishment for rape is: the termination of life. This exchange, which precedes Aakruti’s assault and murder, provides an insight into how the film is interested in “muscular masculine celebrations of Maratha chauvinism and patriarchy,” which are more “insulted by rape” than anything else.[20]

Through Aakruti’s gangrape and death, Simmba invokes implicitly but also names explicitly the gruesome 2012 Delhi rape case and the discourses surrounding it.[21] Simmba co-opts the fears and anxieties associated with rape to drum up support for his own violent-masculinist-authoritarian populist agenda. Women’s gendered and sexual precarity is not an occasion to address structural issues, but it offers an opportunity to forward a conservative ideological stance that legitimizes coercive and exclusionary state practices. Historically, as feminist scholars (such as Lata Mani in the context of sati in colonial India)[22] have noted, women’s bodies have been used as the ground or site on which other debates are staged. Ultimately, women’s voices are silenced to support other ideological stances and political agendas. This film is no exception in that the violence committed against a woman’s body offers provocation to build consensus for unconstitutional and undemocratic delivery of justice.

The film steadily builds momentum toward normalizing its argument about how rapists should be dealt with. It harnesses and manipulates how the discourse around rape permeates different sites and spaces: in public protests and vigils, in the economic realm, within households, and in the courtroom. The film performs multiple forms of appropriation, of disparate ideologies articulated as distinct modalities of resistance—civic unrest, women’s anger, parental insecurity, patriarchal protectionism—and melds them all into one to produce a singular meaning and outcome. The film thus does the important ideological work of mobilizing a “fractured public … through profoundly modern calls for civic participation, into violence and into condoning violence.”[23]

The film’s politics continue to reveal themselves in how it presents the protests and candlelight vigils that follow in the wake of Aakruti’s rape and death. First, protest is presented as something that the middle class does as it stands in for “the people;” and thus the poor and working class is entirely absent from participation and investment in the cause. In fact, one of the kids (Chhotu) who is speech-impaired and who was a key eyewitness in the Aakruti case, turns “hostile” and disappears. The poor are thus either rendered mute witnesses or can’t afford principles and can be easily bought. The class-precariat, and class precarity, are “cinematically cleared”[24] while middle-class voices are amplified. Second, the focus is on middle-class outrage and what the film amplifies is their bloodthirsty, regressive demand for capital punishment for the rapists. The film spotlights protest signs that are held by middle-class young men and women—“Hang the rapist or we riot;” “Hang all the rapists. We want justice;” “There is no place for a rapist in society.” None of the protest signs demand legal reform or legislative changes to address gender-based violence.[25] The film has nothing to say about socio-economic precarity, and its relation to gendered violence, produced by neoliberal capitalism in India.

Third, since the film is invested in enshrining the cop as the ultimate agent of justice, the police join and support these protests, rather than trying to disperse the crowds. This is a far cry from how the police operate in India in the context of public protests. In fact, those protesting Pandey’s 2012 rape were met by the state’s draconian reaction. Curfew was imposed in some parts of the city; and protestors were hosed down, lathi-charged (struck by wooden batons), and tear-gassed by the Rapid Action Force units of the police.[26]

What the film does dial up is the rhetoric of the need to protect Bharat ki betiyaan (daughters of the nation).[27] It is critical to note that the nation is specifically invoked as “Bharat,” which is the word “nation” to connote “India” that the Hindu Right prefers to use. In analyzing this discursive shift, Christophe Jaffrelot sees the increasing use of “Bharat” instead of “India” as expressing the saffronization of the public sphere. In a statement made during an interview on a major news network after the 2012 rape, Mohan Bhagwat, the leader of the Hindu right-wing Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) organization, suggested that, “Such crimes [of rape] hardly take place in Bharat, but they frequently occur in India.”[28] In Bhagwat’s worldview, Bharat is associated with the “virtues” of a traditional idyllic Hindu nation, while India signals the “vices” of modernity or secularism. And the crimes of “India” must be prevented from occurring in Bharat through the protection of its chaste and virginal women (read: Hindu women).[29] The strategic invocation of Bharat ki betiyaan provides an insight into how the film’s patriarchal-protectionist and nationalist-populist message work together to disempower women.

In the courtroom, Simmba appeals to a female judge, reminding her that she too, like the victim, is a Bharat ki beti. His address positions her not as a public official or a professional working-woman, but as mother and daughter. Conveniently, the judge is swayed and grants another hearing date to the prosecution. Even more emphatically, when the rapists’ mother takes the witness stand, this judge castigates her, blaming her for her sons’ deviancy: they wouldn’t be rapists if it weren’t for her faulty upbringing. Here, the film transfers the responsibility for women’s precarity onto women in the legal field to bring the violent men to justice, and to women as mothers to raise men who are not rapists. Importantly, then, the male vigilante steps in to deal with the rapists, when all the women in public-professional and domestic spheres fail to fulfill their responsibilities.

The Bharat ki Beti discourse also resonates with the Modi government’s Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao (save the girl child, educate the girl child) campaign. In one scene, Nandini Mohile propels Simmba into action: “the daughters of the country are getting educated but who will save them from the monsters.” Her exhortation is a tacit endorsement of Modi’s campaign launched to address female feticide.[30] It encourages families to stop treating their daughters as a liability and give them a good education. That is what will enable them to maximize their “capacity to become virtuous market citizens” and be empowered to serve their family and nation. Simultaneously, though, Nandini’s words mark the limits of what the government can do: it can’t protect women from monstrous men who interrupt their emergence as prospective neoliberal subjects. Hence the need for an “eda” cop (slightly crazy cop) to rectify the challenge of monstrous men who pose a physical threat to women’s emancipation. However, the narrative of “monstrous men” does not acknowledge systemic operations of patriarchal power and masculine privilege and also sidetracks the other, everyday obstacles that stand in the way of women’s education. After all, we must not forget that Aakruti’s father, with his lower-middle-class salary, is barely able to pay for her education to become a doctor. Women’s aspirations encounter many more roadblocks tied to the neoliberal economy besides rapist men. The film makes no room for this conversation.

A closer look at the 2012 Delhi rape case, from which the film borrows heavily, enables us to observe the extent to which Simmba evacuates the wider neoliberal context that fuels such violence against women. Jyoti Singh Pandey was the daughter of an airport worker who came from a family of agricultural workers; she was the first in her family to have a professional career. She was enrolled in a physiotherapy course, and to pay for her education, she was working nights at an outsourcing firm, helping Canadians with their mortgage issues.[31] On the night of her fatal sexual assault on December 16, 2012, in South Delhi, she was returning home with a male friend, after watching a late-night show of The Life of Pi. On the private bus they boarded, he was beaten up and she was brutally raped by five men, all friends of the bus driver. Jyoti succumbed to her injuries a few days after the attack.

The event sparked mass anger and nation-wide protests and international attention and censure, resulting in the establishment of five fast-track courts to deal with issues of sexual violence against women. The Justice Verma Committee, a special commission comprised of legal experts, was formed to recommend changes to the laws pertaining to gender-based violence. While one of the perpetrators allegedly committed suicide in jail, the High Court sentenced the remaining four others to capital publishment, and the seventeen-year-old minor was sentenced to three years in a reform facility.