The film makes a few critical and telling changes in its fictionalized dramatization of this incident. In the film, like Jyoti, Aakruti is a young female Hindu (medical) student, who is gangraped and murdered. The film, however, attempts a “sanitization” of the victim’s profile; and she is presented as the ideal Bharat Ki Beti, the kind of gendered subject who can be valorized within the politics of neoliberal Hindutva. The film takes pains to establish Aakruti, always dressed in modest “Indian” clothes, as a chaste Hindu woman. Her goodness, purity, virtue, innocence, and diligence are repeatedly emphasized. This is what makes her an uncomplicated recipient of the audience’s sympathy.

This is why her nocturnal activities are assiduously reframed by the film. Unlike Jyoti, Aakruti is out at night not for recreational activities, but to teach street kids. She is raped and murdered not while she’s out with a male friend, but as punishment for discovering that the Durva and his brothers are using street children as drug mules. Ironically, women as neoliberal subjects—aspirational, educated, hardworking, successful—must still be desexualized in order to qualify as sympathy-worthy cinematic subjects. Jyoti, as a modern, mobile woman could easily be read as deserving of her lot. In an interview, Mukesh Singh, one of her rapists, maintained that a “decent girl wouldn’t [have been] out at night.” In the misogynist worldview he represents, “A girl is far more responsible for rape than a boy … Housework and housekeeping is for girls, not roaming in discos and bars at night, doing wrong things, wearing wrong clothes.”[32] [open endnotes in new page] The film cleverly sidesteps these contradictions in neoliberal India’s public sphere by disassociating the rape-victim from any threatening markers of modernity.

In another divergence from the 2012 case, the film establishes both Aakruti and her perpetrators as middle-class. This is in contrast to Pandey and her perpetrators, who, as internal migrants from the rural to urban center, represent aspirational India. This alteration, of class location, has the effect of erasing the complex intersections of gender and class inequalities or precarities present in the 2012 incident. As Tithi Bhattacharya has noted, gender violence and misogyny need to be contextualized against the promises of neoliberal capitalism in India, and its failures which are managed by the deflection of frustrations and resentments of one oppressed and aspirational group (working-class men) upon another precarious segment of the population (working-class and lower-middle-class women). 

Simmba has nothing to say about these messy politics in which neoliberal economics intermesh with traditional forms of patriarchy and Hindutva ideologies. Instead, it mobilizes the moral economy of patriarchal nationalism. Overall, then, the distortions in the film have the effect not only of valorizing a certain type of female subject who appeals to the conservative gender values of the Hindu nationalist-authoritarian populist project but also of marginalizing or erasing the larger socio-economic context and contradictions resulting from the adoption and failure of neoliberal reforms. The wide and complex arena of the neoliberal nation is in fact distilled and visually shrunk to a tiny locality: a dhaba (eatery) and the police station that is located across from it.

The film’s interpellation of women in the endorsement of violent vigilante justice, with the cop as political agent, reaches an escalation in the dhaba, where multiple women, young and old, traditional, and modern, gather and speak up. Thus, while Aakruti’s death silences her voice, the film does not silence women’s voices in general. Rather, its insidiousness lies in how it makes the middle-class Hindu women speak: loudly, angrily, and in unison, to support a politics of individuated, retributive/vigilante violence as the solution to women’s sexual precarity. Whether it is the rape victim herself, the female court judge, Simmba’s love interest (Shagun Sathe), the head constable’s daughter (Nandini Mohile), or the home minister’s daughter, women characters are incessantly recruited and willingly offer themselves up, as Bharat ki betiyaan. Their response is homogeneous, and they accept a patriarchal, protectionist lens, thus negating the history of feminist activism around sexual violence in India, including the unprecedented mass protests after the 2012 rape. These women conveniently delegitimize themselves as political agents and gladly accept the mantle of political provocateurs who urge men to act on their behalf.

Simmba goes to each one of them to solicit their opinion, and in every instance, they give him the permission and the encouragement to become an agent of change by acting “unofficially.” As Simmba asks these women what they feel each time they encounter news of rape, and what they think should happen about Aakruti’s case, they are resoundingly unanimous in their demand that the rapists be killed. Their demand perfectly echoes the language and ideology of the candlelit vigils and public protests that also espoused a lethal solution to the rapists: “They don’t deserve to live. Just kill them;” “They should be castrated in public.” The film, then, becomes an archive of women’s perspectives. Importantly, their perspectives are not mismatched at all. When official avenues fail, the unofficial recourse to justice becomes linear and coherent. No complications or contradictions muddy the waters. And, ironically, the unofficial pathway becomes the gateway for dominant Hindutva ideology to surface and take precedence. These women may emerge from different walks of life, but their voices and opinions arrive at a shared crescendo that reiterates and legitimizes a vigilante, authoritarian politics.

The rapists deserve to die.	Simmba pats his gun, resting in a holster around his waist.

With every confirmation Simmba receives from the women, he pats his gun, resting in a holster around his waist. The gun, as a phallically loaded object, becomes an apt vehicle of choice for vengeance, and to reinstate a protectionist-patriarchal masculinity.

Despite the heavy overlaps, the film insists that Simmba’s masculine self-positioning stands in sharp distinction to the patriarchal violence of the rapists. In fact, on two different occasions, Simmba mocks the rapists’ masculinity in the police station. He enlists female cops to beat the perpetrators. He taunts the men to dare to rape these women, while the latter snicker and snort, in response to Simmba’s goading of the men.  The scene of the female cops slapping and beating up the men with their bare hands is oddly reminiscent of violent public action, or mob lynching episodes, which in contemporary India have been largely directed against the poor, Dalits, and religious minorities. The scene, then, participates in the normalization of “vigilante publics” and their “spectacular violence.”[33] As Shakuntala Banaji argues, a violent, fascist public consciousness is the “necessary base for state fascism.” This scene recruits women as participatory agents of vigilante violence.[34]

Later, when he’s preparing to stage the encounter, Simmba taunts the rapists for their “impotence,” their inability to do anything when the women cops beat them up and other civilian women witnessed their emasculation. Nothing, Simmba tells them, can be more humiliating. All these insults to their “mardaangi” (manhood) have the desired effect: the rapist-brothers lash out, and Simmba shoots them in “self-defense.” As they are shot, the image of Aakruti appears in soft focus, in white, smiling, and signaling her approval of vigilante vengeance.

As Stuart Hall notes, authoritarian populism is distinguished by its ability “to construct around itself an active popular consent.”[35] The film manufactures consent for cop-vigilante justice, presented as a necessary, moral, and rightful circumvention of the law. In contrast to the angry young man films of the 1970s in which the angry cop was celebrated as a figure of anti-establishment populism, here, the cop functions to serve a rightwing, establishmentarian populism.

Of course, Simmba goes scot-free for these extra-judicial killings because, by the end of the film, there is a strikingly single note sounded as the assembled bloc—of ordinary middle-class people, the state (judges, politicians), the cop—condones Simmba’s actions. Singham (the original cop-hero from Shetty’s film franchise, and whose voiceover the film opens with) returns at the end of the film. He is appointed by the Home Minister as a “neutral officer” in an SIT (special investigation team) inquiry to investigate the veracity of Simmba’s claim that he killed the rapists in self-defense. Predictably, Singham is not all that “neutral,” and he too gives his stamp of approval to Simmba’s extra-legal methods: “No arrest. No long cases. Justice on the spot.” This is the new way under neoliberal Hindutva.

The overburdened justice system cannot deliver, and hence police brutality—not recognized or acknowledged as such—is necessary for a swift dispatch of justice. The film’s populist consent depends on the failures of the system to stoke public distrust and contempt for institutions.[36] Importantly, unlike “classical fascism,” authoritarian populism “entails a striking weakening of democratic forms and initiatives, but not their suspension.”[37] The film ratifies this qualification: the state (through the home minister) does play a role, albeit a feeble one. He shows little regard for constitutional reforms or the legal system and processes. And, therefore, the state assists in its own peripheralization. It self-sabotages its predominance, thus enabling the vigilante cop to usurp its authority as the people’s representative. There is no tension between the police, the politicians, the people (the middle classes). Everyone’s on board with the new sidebar judicial order in which a paternalist vigilante cop operates as a brutal state executioner. Such a man is hailed as a fearless leader, and a protector of women’s virtue.

Homeland (in)securities: Sooryavanshi

Sooryavanshi’s SVU entourage.

Sooryavanshi follows predictable plot points—the threat of another terrorist attack looms large in present-day Mumbai. The anti-terrorism squad (ATS), led by the protagonist Soorya (played by Akshay Kumar), spends its time tracking down the forty “sleeper-terrorists” that infiltrated India from Pakistan a decade and a half ago, and the six hundred kilos of RDX that has been hidden in India since 1993 (the year of the first major bomb blasts in Bombay). The film is action-packed from the get-go: all detective-work is absurdly quick and always yields successful results. The film has its fair share of SUV entourages speeding down highways, helicopter chases, bazaar-brawls between terrorists and the police, and averted bomb blasts. All of this transpires to the beat of an aural landscape that’s come to be associated quintessentially with Shetty’s cop-franchise: the name of the cop-protagonist is turned into a hypnotic incantation that plays in the background to the action sequences. And the chanting of the hero’s name is overlain with the sound of sirens and drums, creating a background score that’s akin to a euphoric public celebration during a Hindu festival.

Indeed, ATS officer Soorya is godlike. The high-angle frontal shots through which he’s introduced compel us to savor his impeccable physique, his easy corporate-golfer aesthetic of aviator sunglasses and cargo pants. He enjoys a reverential status from his subordinates, who are in awe of his leadership but also share an intimate bonhomie with him; they feel comfortable enough to tease him about his minor flaws (he forgets and confuses everyone’s names, including the names of criminals, his colleagues, and his own wife). The film’s rather generic narratology is matched, then, by its template use of the body of the male superstar: larger than life and basking in adulation that he receives both on and off-screen.

In many ways, there is nothing new here. The way in which Akshay Kumar as Soorya swallows up the film’s visual landscape is reminiscent of Hindi cinema’s enshrinement of fantasies of a fearless, dynamic and erotic masculinity ever since the emergence of the angry young man in the 1970s. And yet, there is a critical difference: Amitabh Bachchan as the angry young man was a one-of-a-kind actor, corporealizing a new on-screen articulation of discontent. As Samir Dayal suggests, “Bachchan’s muscular elegance” could only be “aspirational, belonging to a fabulous and fabulist manhood, in reality inaccessible to most spectators.” Bachchan’s embodiment of wrath that pointed to the frustrations of an entire post-Nehruvian generation was thus expressed through a “nonrepresentative representation of Indian masculinity;” it exceeded any “correspondent referent of Indian masculinity.”[38] Akshay Kumar as the cop-hero, however, signifies a whole brood of men—a franchise-nation of martial patriots; “ede policewale”[39] played by Hindu actors, who, in the Hindi film industry, exemplify an alt-universe to the monopoly of the Khans, and, on screen, announce a death-knell to terrorists and rapists. If the angry young man marked a cinematic adjacency to the gentle, urbane, encultured masculinity of the Nehruvian postcoloniality, the Sooryavanshis, Simmbas, and Singhams indicate the new national, aspirational mainstream. They are slightly funnier and a tad more accessible and personable than their main-man, the ultimate strongman[40] Prime Minister Modi, in whose shadow they follow and whose version of ethnonationalist masculinity they work overtime to normalize and popularize.

Sooryavanshi assumes and addresses an audience with whom it shares insider knowledge and consensus about how much India has suffered because of terroristic violence. The film begins with a disembodied voice-over giving us a synoptic history lesson of bomb blasts in the country since the early 1990s. Everyone conversant with Bollywood star texts and Shetty’s cop-universe, recognizes the absent-body of Ajay Devgn as the somber, officious teller of this history. Devgn is, after all, the actor who plays Singham in the first superhit installment of the cop-franchise. Devgn’s auditory slippage from his own film to another film in the shared cinematic universe smooths the way for an easy-automatic transfer of ideologies between the filmic universe and its real-world counterpart as well. When actors and characters across films share a particular narrative, the audience is also encouraged to imagine itself as co-inhabiting the same, all-encompassing worldview and interpretive framework. Ultimately, the giving of information—about terroristic-events over the past three decades and how the Indian state has curtailed terroristic activities—is not about giving the audience new information at all. It is about jogging certain memories of national trauma that should never be forgotten; and it is about interpellating audiences into normative scripts about the state and its enemies. In the guise of telling them what they already know, the film in fact perpetuates a vociferously linear account of what is to be remembered and believed.

There’s a telling moment in the film: A Mr. Nayar from the Intelligence Bureau arrives from Delhi to warn the ATS team in Bombay about the likelihood of another terrorist attack. Addressing an audience of politicians, bureaucrats and policemen, all gathered around in a boardroom, he says:

“As you all know, after Section 370 was scrapped in Kashmir, it has become impossible for terrorist organizations like Lashkar to create animosity between the people of our country, or to infiltrate and send arms and ammunition into India.”

Through this utterly casual and passing reference, the film turns what was an extremely controversial and contested decision by the Modi government—to revoke a constitutional provision of autonomy granted to Kashmir—into an occasion for establishing a community of shared wisdom. The “jaisa ki aap sab jaante hain…” (as you all know) in the same breath confirms for the audience the obviousness of the motivation for scrapping Article 370, as well as the success of the enterprise: that it was all about the management of terrorist infiltration, and that it has in fact yielded exactly what was anticipated. The off-hand manner of conveying this information gives the audience a remarkably innocent and incontestable rationalization for the Indian state’s rather drastic measure of changing its constitution. It also nudges the viewer to accept that this is the version of explanations that they should all already know. The film works hard to establish that everyone within the film, and those watching the film, are all on the same page. Ajay Devgn’s auditory-documentary-esque summaries of the dates and sites of terrorist attacks, which are then repeated later in the film by Soorya as well, is one means of achieving such a continuum and ubiquity of knowledge about key political events that have shaped the trajectory of the nation today.

This unrelenting pervasiveness of the state’s master narrative produces a serious consequence: the figure of the cop, unlike his angry young man predecessor, is no longer in competition with the state to fulfill the responsibilities that the state has reneged on. Rather there is a perfect synchronicity and collaboration between the two; there is no room for frustration with or criticism of the state. In fact, even when the cop acts illicitly, it is never without state sanction but in anticipation of state permission that is always already guaranteed.

Documentary style images of destruction caused by Muslim terrorism that accompany Ajay Devgn’s voiceover at the start of the film.

Early on in the film, Kabir Shroff, the joint commissioner of police, asks the chief minister to come to the ATS headquarters late at night. Upon his arrival, the minister is given an update about the whereabouts of a Pakistani insurgent—Riyaaz Hafeez—who has been hiding out in Jaisalmer, Rajasthan, pretending to be a hotelier for the last fifteen years. We see Shroff and the politician with their backs to us as they stare at multiple screens flashing with images of places and people under surveillance by an array of uniformed (female) officers sitting in the room. The central screen has an image of two dead bodies, lying on the ground covered over with white sheets. The “investigation of these two suspects,” we learn, has led the police to Hafeez’s whereabouts. The paucity of details surrounding the death of these “suspects” is astounding. After the barrage of information that the audience has been given, via Devgn’s voiceover, at the start of the film (excruciating details about terrorists in India and Pakistan, and their nefarious plans), the film barely pauses to let us register the death of these two men, who have most likely been “encountered” as terrorist suspects. Even the Chief Minister does not ask any questions about them; the cop’s word is the final word. He determines our response to death, frames certain bodies as victims of the nation and certain others as disposable, relevant only as information, or for the evidence they generate about other things and people that really matter.

Encountered bodies on screen; no questions asked, no answers given.