Urban Naxals: The Making of Buddha in a Traffic Jam

by Vivek Agnihotri

Suresh never spoke to me after that. The students graduated and took up jobs in multinational corporations. Everyone else I understood, but why did Ravi try to sabotage his own baby? This kept baffling me until I found out that after graduating from ISB, he had started working for Suresh’s LANCO group.

Success brings forgotten friends. I got a call from Bhushan Kumar. He worships Vaishno Devi, the goddess of money and success. Bhushan wanted me to make something like Hate Story for T Series. In Bollywood, people just want to imitate a successful film.

At the same time, Bhushan’s wife Divya Kumar, fresh from the fluke success of her film Yaariyan, was mounting her next film and was struggling to cast some decent actors. Then came the news that she had signed Pulkit and Yami for the film and my dates were allocated to her film’s schedule. Same actors, same genre, same production house, same music directors, same locations and same marketing people. How was this possible? When I confronted Bhushan, he told me without any guilt that it was his wife’s birthday and she asked for her film to be released before mine on Valentine’s Day and he couldn’t say no as ‘how can I say no to madam… it’s my birthday gift to her!’ Bhushan’s birthday gift to his wife became my film’s coffin.

The media gets intellectual support and in return, they get good reviews. They have become the voice of Bollywood. When I started questioning this unfair equation, they started unfollowing me. Then they started blocking me on Twitter. And, slowly, from their lives. Discrimination isn’t always gender, race or colour-based. The most damaging discrimination is of the mind and ideology. I was discriminated against by almost all my Bollywood friends, whom I used to hang around with because, like them, I also believed in a certain ideology but found it fake and alienated from reality, and elitist.

Everyone needs a villain and Narendra Modi became the media’s and the intellectual gangs’ main villain as 2002 was tailor-made to suit their agenda of secularism. Secularism was nothing but a ploy to attract Muslim votes and keep a control on Hindus from asserting themselves. In order to give it sanctity, the Congress regime under Sonia Gandhi patronized every creative and intellectual voice that helped her further her agenda against a potential contender, Modi, by giving them alms.

When I raised questions about the intent of the petition signed by the liberal and Leftist filmmakers of Bollywood, out of whom most were non-practicing filmmakers cum activists like Anand Patwardhan, they started labeling me as communal, bhakt and Sanghi. This was that critical point when I should have withdrawn. But I decided to fight and take them on. I called up some journalist friends to write an article against the petition, only to realize they weren’t friends anymore. In these changing times, where mainstream media ends, social media begins. With no avenue left, I published a blog titled ‘15 Communal Questions to The Secular Bollywood’, which went viral. The response came from unexpected quarters – the real India. People who couldn’t articulate their thoughts but felt strongly against the intellectual discrimination and fakeness of secularism started connecting with me.

‘If Modi is so bad why are people connecting with him?’ ‘Who connects with Modi? I don’t know of any.’ ‘The poor man who sells mangoes on the streets connects with Modi.’ ‘I don’t care about the man who sells mangoes,’ Patwardhan got angry and almost screamed, ‘Modi must be stopped. He must lose.’ I kept looking at him and wondered how his frail body could contain so much hatred and anger. His aura was dark and negative. The other panelists were Nandita Das, Alyque Padamsee, Sam Balsara. All urban, sophisticated, English-speaking elites and Barkha was making it sound as if entire Bollywood was against Modi. I told her that this letter wasn’t the voice of Bollywood but of an ‘intellectual mafia’. I could sense that Barkha was rattled. Nandita gave me a dirty look and Patwardhan got furious.

When the film ended, I was called by the screening committee in the semi-dark hall of Liberty cinema. There were four men and a lady, all from different strata. One gentleman who looked like their leader because he had some forms in his hand, smiled and spoke softly. ‘Congratulations for making such a daring film. All of us just loved it. This film requires at least a thousand cuts…’ I exhaled all the air from my lungs and waited for the bad news. ‘But we discussed and have come to the conclusion that we will certify it with no cuts because we believe this is a very important film of our times and it must be released in its true form, else it will lose its meaning and impact.’ ‘You have made a very good film. I learnt a lot,’ said another member.

I met Anurag Kashyap, the self-proclaimed messiah of indie films, and asked him to see the film once and help me with its marketing but he pretended to listen to me while looking for someone more powerful and left the moment he saw Anushka Sharma.

In no time, the usual suspects like Barkha Dutt, Arundhati Roy, and all other Naxal sympathizers come out openly in support of Kanhaiya. A civil war-like situation is being created, the government is attacked for suppression of dissent, curbing freedom of expression and for being anti-Dalit. It’s a full-fledged war between the Leftist forces and the State. All front organizations and supporters have come out of the closet. JNU is the battlefield and Kanhaiya their puppet. In the chaos of the Kanhaiya episode, the media keeps a vital development in the Red Corridor hidden from us. In the last quarter, security forces have achieved greater success than ever in tackling left-wing extremism and there was over a thirty per cent decline in violence perpetrated by Naxals this year. Seventy-six Naxal cadres were killed in the first few months of this year in comparison to fifteen in the same period last year. According to the Home Ministry, as many as six hundred and sixty-five Naxals were arrested and almost the same number surrendered as compared to just above hundred last year in the same period.

Since distributors and studios were backing out regularly, and the Bollywood club was trying to sabotage the film, I realized that the only thing which comes between the film and its audience is an old, corrupt system of distribution. What if I completely avoid it and reach my audience directly? Of course, the digital route is there but that opens up only if the film gets a technical release in theatres. What if I completely avoid the traditional route of distribution? It wasn’t the time to think out of the box; it was time to demolish the box. Completely. I quickly made a marketing plan with just three slides and zero budget.

Around 11 AM, I start getting several calls from unknown phone numbers. At about 11.45 AM, Anupam Kher calls me to find out why the media is calling him. He wants to know if we have any documentary evidence to substantiate that JNU indeed discriminated against our film. I brief him and mail him all the documentary evidence. By 12.30, Rahul Shivshankar of NewsX breaks the news and soon, almost all TV news channels start beaming the news on how Buddha In A Traffic Jam is stuck in the JNU jam. Calls start pouring in. News channels insist on talking to me live. Almost every channel and newspaper cover it in their headlines. Social media is abuzz with the controversy, deciding the balance of power between the left and the right. Only two channels, who have been extra vocal about JNU and the FoE issue, never mention it – Barkha Dutt’s NDTV and Rajdeep Sardesai’s India Today. Also, as expected, nobody from the film industry, not even the champions of FoE, stand up in my support.

I call Kher saab. He takes a long pause after I inform him about my fears that there may be a chance of not many people coming to see the film, and media and opponents of the film, who suddenly popped up from nowhere, will try to show pictures of an empty hall to suggest that no one is interested in the film and therefore justify Ira’s discriminatory action. Anupam Kher listens to me patiently and then he says something I needed to hear most. ‘Vivek, our real job is to make movies and show them to our audience. Even if ten students come, we must show the film to them. Just because ninety people don’t want to see the film doesn’t mean we can take away the right of those ten people who want to see it. A film is successful even if it changes just one heart. I think your film has that power. In the end, you will get what you deserve.’ ‘Will you come?’ ‘Yes.’ In the film industry, no star worth his salt will ever do something like this. He is the only person, besides my wife Pallavi and my DA Naireeta, who wants me to screen the film, whereas everyone else is telling me why I shouldn’t be showing it anywhere before the formal release.

‘Sir, they refused to give us the auditorium saying there will be too few people. So, we decided to screen it outdoors but admin gave permission only from 5.30-8.30 PM.’ No filmmaker worth his salt would allow his film to be shown outdoors before the theatrical release. That too with bad projection, bad sound. That’s not what we work so hard for.

I quickly write to Ira Bhaskar, inviting her for the screening. Kher saab is insisting that he wants to go half an hour early just to walk around and interact with the students. So, we leave at 5 PM to be there at 5.30. When we reach JNU, we feel like we are in a different world. Definitely not the world we were promised. The entire arena outside the admin bloc is jam-packed with electrified students. The car can’t move further so we are forced to stop about four hundred metres before the venue.

Kher saab’s desire to walk gets crushed instantly by thousands of students shouting ‘Vande Mataram’. This is not the JNU I had known. The cop-in-charge whispers in my ears ‘Kam se kam paanch chhe hazaar ladka hai.’ Five to six thousand students? We try to walk towards the stage but it’s impossible to move even an inch. It’s not that we have never been amongst charged up fans but this seems like an unregulated crowd of uncontrollable students. That too in JNU. This is when more than two dozen girls come from somewhere and form a human chain around us and help us walk to the screen.

‘No, I am happy with the news… it’s just that we have the film, the audience, an investor but no distributor.’ ‘What do you mean no distributor? We have PVR, no?’ ‘No. They have backed out.’ ‘But why?’ ‘I don’t know. And I think we will never know.’

The first thing the film industry does to a free-willed filmmaker is that it makes him believe that there is no life without the producers, distributors, and money. Actually, it’s the other way around. There is no life for the middlemen without the creators. Since the middlemen have the money, they have set the rules of the game which make them more powerful and rich and the filmmakers weaker. This is the reason filmmakers give in and start playing by their rules to fit in and survive, and in return, the truth and the creative quotient of the film become natural victims. I shall not give in to the middlemen.

At IIT Bombay, I meet Professor Bapat and his colleagues. This is the computer science department which most toppers of JEE (Joint Entrance Examination) opt for. These are some of the best professors in India with several innovations and patents in their bags. It’s said that when these professors walk, instead of footprints they leave behind innovations. Despite such achievements and contribution to India’s technological growth, the head of the department and his colleagues aren’t happy people since Narendra Modi won the elections. Professor Bapat tells me that all his life he has been attending the Indian Science Congress and various conferences to speak on Vedic science, but since Modi became PM, wherever he speaks on Vedic science, people start calling him Sanghi. He is worried about such intolerance. He has been able to overcome the biggest of the scientific challenges but sees himself failing in front of this emerging political intolerance of an idea that is rooted in Hindu traditions and history. He feels an organized campaign is being run to demoralize such citizens who take pride in Hindu civilization and its traditional knowledge systems.

Indian Liberalism has come to mean the colour opposite of saffron. That’s their failure. In a desperate attempt, their new mantra is – ‘We don’t care if you are a murderer, we want to know whether you are a liberal or a Sanghi murderer?’ This is where the real intolerance lies.

My father was a vice-chancellor and I have met numerous vice-chancellors of that era – the pre-sycophancy era. They used to have wisdom, knowledge, integrity, and above all, fearlessness. They were the real intellectuals who shaped universities with value systems and because of their inspiring leadership, even governments feared them. Then something changed. Indira Gandhi started appointing only loyalists in all major institutions. Slowly, almost all appointments became political and the institutions started behaving like extensions of the Congress (Indira) party. Sonia Gandhi knew that she was a weak leader and, therefore, she not just wanted loyalists but also weak people with no spine, no real qualifications. They wore their sycophancy as a medal on their blazers. Now with the advent of a new government under Modi’s leadership, the entire ecosystem feels threatened.

‘For the revolution to come, we must destroy any narrative which is against Naxalism. Including your film.’ ‘Why are you doing this?’ ‘Because we want an India which is free of Brahmins like you.’ I should feel offended. But I like his arrogance and upfront contempt for the truth. The Leftists’ contempt for Brahmins is as dangerous as Brahmin discrimination against Dalits. India is facing reverse casteism. He isn’t a Dalit. He is a Bengali. He is an educated, English-speaking Bengali training to be a lawyer – a lethal combination. Leftists always target such young boys and girls, who are angry with the system, as soon as they enter the campus because angry people are most vulnerable. These vulnerable students are then brainwashed with a false argument against Brahminism and gut-wrenching stories of oppression and class struggle.

All this anger is consolidated in one enemy: RSS. Since RSS’ agenda is to create a Hindu nation, these young people end up hating everything related to Hinduism, including Hindus.

The Indian Institute of Science (IISc) ranks number one in India and it is one of the top ten specialized universities of the world. Once, the father of Indian industry, Jamshedji Tata, while travelling in a ship, had a chance meeting with Swami Vivekananda and they discussed various ideas, including Tata’s plan to bring the steel industry to India and Vivekananda’s quest for bringing scientific research to India. Many years later, Tata wrote a letter to Swami Vivekananda: ‘I trust, you remember me as a fellow traveller on your voyage from Japan to Chicago. I very much recall your views on the growth of the ascetic spirit in India, in connection with my scheme of a research institute of science in India.’ In the letter, he requested Vivekananda to guide him in this endeavour. Jamshedji Tata conceived of a university in 1896 that would work for India’s scientific development and at the behest of Vivekananda, the Maharaja of Mysore, Krishnaraja Wodeyar IV, donated three hundred and seventy acres of land in Bangalore. Since then, IISc has been headed by some of the best scientific brains of the world, such as Nobel Laureate CV Raman, Satish Dhawan, C.N.R. Rao, just to name a few.

After I failed to get into engineering, I tried to get admission in IISc but couldn’t make it. Today I am being invited to screen my film there. This makes one wonder about the concepts of destiny, luck, and intent.

‘Saar, they have created a perception that they are intellectuals and we are emotional buggers. They have convinced everyone that talking about our country or parents or rakhi for sisters or anything that is Hindu and Indian is regressive but talking about revolution, free sex, protest and Mao are progressive things. That’s why, saar.’

‘Because of our name, our ideology, we face lots of problems from the IIT administration and faculty, which is mostly captured by the Leftists. Most of the top management of IIT Madras openly favour Leftists. Leftists are allowed to distribute hateful pamphlets and anti-India substance whereas the voices of common students, who love the country, are being suppressed.’

‘During Independence Day in 2015, the Dean didn’t allow the ‘Vande Mataram’ song. Can you believe it?’ He laughs at the irony of it. ‘The slogan which has given independence to India?’ This is what I call intellectual terrorism. In the Kashmir Valley, they do not let anyone raise slogans like ‘Vande Mataram’ or ‘Bharat Mata Ki Jai’. In the rest of India, the Leftists take extreme steps to curb such sentiments.

‘Many Leftist activists, mostly from Kerala, have taken admission in the Humanities department. Many of them are associated with SFI, DYFI, CPI. Most of them are from non-engineering backgrounds and have taken admissions through tests and interviews conducted by department faculties. The admission process is highly questionable as it is mostly based on department faculty recommendations rather than any open competitive exam score. They haven’t taken admission through JEE, GATE, CAT or any other tough competitive exam.’

‘Students belonging to SC/ST are attracted to Leftist propaganda because of the fraud theory of Aryan-Dravidian divide. Leftists have also misrepresented Indian epics like Manu Smriti and manipulated Indian history books to brainwash students. Students from Kashmir with a jihadi mentality easily get attracted towards Leftists as they both have a common agenda of weakening India.’

‘Sir, the real tragedy is that the moment we start talking about Vedas, Ram, Krishna, Vivekananda or quote anything in Sanskrit, we are labeled Sanghis. Which means regressive Hindu fundamentalist.

For the last 70 years, English media has loved to paint any rightist organization, especially RSS, as regressive, uncivilized, aggressive and fundamentalist. Any organization connected with RSS e.g. ABVP is considered a party of goons. Whereas the student members of left-wing parties are considered rebels, revolutionaries, progressive and intellectuals.

Those raising slogans against the State of India are painted as The Superiors and the ones singing ‘Vande Mataram’ as The Inferiors. This is the reason why people like to associate themselves with the left – The Superiors. Some people like to believe they are liberals. Liberals are those who do liberal things, not the ones who are against the right.

‘Marx believed that society is divided between the financially empowered and the financially deprived. One has everything and the other has nothing. One is the oppressor and the other the oppressed. That’s why Marx talked about a revolution when these two forces would clash and that day everything would end. This is called class struggle. But Marx didn’t realize that between these two there is a vast middle class which works as a cushion between them and prevents a direct clash. That’s why Communists don’t want a middle class because they are not programmed or equipped to deal with the middle class and that is the reason they don’t work with the middle class.

‘Then there was a programme after Kalburgi’s murder: “I am also Kaburgi”. One speaker said, “What can happen if I piss on a Shiva lingam?” He compared Bharat Mata with a witch. The students who felt hurt at such provocations started questioning their theories. Soon, everything converted into mayhem. They started beating up those students who were questioning them. Police came. They have a very smart tactic. Whenever a clash happens between them and ABVP students, their girls start saying that they were molested. Bhaiya, you read reports about any incident, you google, in every single fight between them, the Communist girls always accuse ABVP students of molestation. Now even the police know it.

We love our malls and five-star hotels for their cleanliness but spit out our gutka the moment we are out on the street. If you want to see our civic sense, just take the staircase of any building in any part of India and look at the corners; if they aren’t painted red with paan spits, you aren’t in India. We pick up filth from private properties and throw them on public properties.

We want every anti-national kicked out of India while wanting our children to settle abroad after receiving subsidized education in India. We want the government to bring social justice but look for a gori, convent-educated, cultured, adept-at-household-chores bride with a good dowry, for our sons. We want the government to shower us with ‘achchhe din’ while we evade taxes.

We love to hate the rich but don’t hesitate to be corrupt to become rich. We take pride in our simplicity but do vulgar displays of wealth at our children’s weddings. We believe in reincarnation, but our funerals are very melodramatic. Our Constitution specifies our rights and their extent, yet we believe everything is our right: from unnecessary honking to spitting in public places, to eve-teasing a girl, to ragging juniors.

Liberalism is defined by attacking and ridiculing the majority while secularism is practiced by appeasing the minority.

Here, the Leftists have strong ties with Khalistan activists. In the rest of the country, they are trying to unite the radical Islamists and Dalits to create a bloc, here they are trying to connect Dalits with the separatists of the Khalistan movement.

Chanakya, the great political thinker, the great economist of India, said, “Money is the most creative invention of human beings.” Unfortunately, in our country, we never celebrated money. We always celebrate mediocrity. I have always seen in Hindi movies that a rich man’s son is always a rapist or a bad boy. A rich man’s daughter has to necessarily be a bad girl. We have always shown that it is good to be poor and it is bad to be rich. ‘If you travel to UK, US or any of the developed countries, you ask a young boy, “What do you want to be in life?” and nine out of ten will say, “I want to be rich.” Unlike us, they do not feel guilty about money. It’s not a moral issue. And why should it be a moral issue? Can we imagine life without money? I am deliberately using the word money here because whichever institute I go to, wherever I talk about money, people think here comes a capitalist bastard.

If we are so smart in solving problems with jugaad, any problem of any magnitude, be it a Mars mission, or expeditions to the Antarctic, having the largest number of IT professionals, and yet we are not the innovation hub of this world, it’s because we do not let merit succeed. ‘We do not celebrate merit. Whenever somebody talks about business, people think he is a bad guy as he trying to earn money. I believe if you want to change something, obviously you have to have new plans, new strategies, new systems in place, you have to have a different kind of systems thinking. Also, what you need is to change the conversation from a poverty mindset to a rich mindset; from scarcity to abundance. Once you change the conversation, in favour of innovation, the country will automatically start making money.

When a student graduates from IIT, he becomes an engineer. When a student graduates from AIIMS, he is a doctor. When a student graduates from any IIM, he is the future CEO. But when a student graduates from FTII, he becomes a struggler. A struggling actor, struggling director, struggling cinematographer and so on. Which other government-funded premier institute produces strugglers?

‘There needs to be clarity on the concepts of modernization, Westernization, globalization and liberalization. But Leftists oppose everything without any logical reasoning. A lot of them are pure vegetarians but they want the cow to be slaughtered because the right wing wants to ban it. They even try to convert basic tenets of social and cultural life into an “intellectual fight”.

On Barkha Dutt and Rajdeep Sardesai’s channels, the ones who are called intellectuals are actually not intellectuals. Have you ever heard the names of those people in the list of intellectuals who sent a mission to Mars? What is the reason that only those people make the list of intellectuals who abuse all the traditions and festivals of India, who abuse everything related to India and speak about breaking India? Real intellectuals are those who quietly work hard, who want to study, innovate and take this country forward.

What can I say about the students when our media also writes headlines like ‘Them vs Us’ (Indian Express headline on Yaqub hanging).

After an hour and half, while I am having dinner at the hotel, I get a call from one of the students and he tells me that they are being beaten up very badly by the Leftist students. I switch the TV on and the news is everywhere. On all the channels, I am the centre of the news. The fight started with a boy called Sandeep Das. He is a Dalit. Leftist boys asked him why he watched the film despite being a Dalit. He said he liked the movie and liked my speech as it made sense to him and opened his eyes. So, they started beating him up saying this was how he would learn to support them. Then riots broke out and the entire thing became political. The political sharks have hijacked the issue.

The drama began on May 7th, a night after the Jadavpur incident caught fire. A group of people in Lutyens Delhi, led by AAP-supporter scribe Abhinandan Sekhri of newslaundry.com and other journalist accomplices started a campaign to ridicule the film. Sekhri tweeted: ‘@vivekagnihotri and while I think no matter how silly or mediocre your film, it must be screened, that doesn’t take away from your buffoonery.’ This was nasty and unnecessary. He was commenting on the film without even seeing it. But he was not alone. The cocktail circuit of Lutyens intellectuals started attacking me on social media, columns, blogs and all available public forums.