The contrarian Kanhaiya Kumar

Filmmaker Vivek Agnihotri moves from highlighting the erotic to the more political with his latest that takes on student activists for their ‘critical and questioning’ approach

April 08, 2016 09:17 am | Updated November 17, 2021 01:52 am IST

Filmmaker Vivek Agnihotri has directed five feature films till date but these days he is better known for the YouTube video of his March 18 speech at Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU).

He was at the campus, along with actor Anupam Kher and filmmaker Ashoke Pandit, to screen his latest film Buddha in a Traffic Jam. This venture, unlike his earlier ones — Chocolate (2005), Dhan Dhana Dhan Goal (2007), Hate Story (2012), Zid (2014) — is based on a political subject.

Starring Anupam Kher, Pallavi Joshi, Mahie Gill, and Arunoday Singh, it aims to “expose the nexus between NGOs, naxalites and the academia”. That is why Agnihotri wanted to premiere it in the educational institution that has become the focal point of debates around nationalism, free speech and democratic rights.

The reference to Buddha in the title has no connection either with Prince Siddhartha who later became Gautama the Buddha or with the Ambedkarite movement. To Agnihotri, the word ‘Buddha’ is simply shorthand for a bright idea, a Eureka moment. The film is set mostly in a business school, and partly in Bastar.

The idea is to highlight how young talent is wasted on misguided activism and kept away from innovating cutting-edge solutions that might actually improve the state of affairs in India. They are stuck, according to Agnihotri, in the traffic jam of mediocrity.

“It is a milieu that Indian eyes have not seen in cinema,” he claims. “It is not at all like 3 Idiots, which was set in an engineering school. The campus, the issues, the themes – they are all different.” Singh plays an idealistic student, and Kher a professor who mentors him. Joshi plays the professor’s wife, and Gill an NGO worker. The film will release early next month.

“A sinister kind of politics is being played inside some of our universities,” says Agnihotri. “Just like the Taliban is training young people to become jihadis and suicide bombers, there are some professors who are converting students into activists and intellectual terrorists. Kanhaiya Kumar is the best example of that.”

While he might not see eye to eye with Kumar, president of the JNU Students’ Union, isn’t it a bit harsh and even unfair to call Kumar an intellectual terrorist? After all, they come from similar milieus. Kumar is from Begusarai, and Agnihotri from Gwalior. In fact, Agnihotri's speech at JNU highlighted the hardships faced by small town boys who move to cities for education and employment.

“Yes, Kanhaiya and I do share common ground,” says the director. “But the similarity ends there. I am interested in a constructive approach, which looks at how wealth can be created using bright ideas that will help India prosper. He is interested in criticising, questioning and accusing.”

What about the time when Agnihotri was a student at the School of Social Sciences in Bhopal, and the Indian Institute of Mass Communication in Delhi? You will be surprised at his response. “People call me a Modi bhakt now. I used to be a Marx bhakt . I was part of what I now call the intellectual mafia. I used to believe in it, and worked for it. My eyes opened up when I began to travel, and meet different kinds of people.”

Though Agnihotri is upbeat about the free market economy where start-ups are seen as the face of progress, his film has two songs based on poems by Faiz Ahmed Faiz, a Marxist intellectual who received the Lenin Peace Prize from the Soviet Union in 1962. He explains the choice. “There is nothing wrong with socialism or communism,” he says, “but they are irrelevant now. Some intellectual terrorists are provoking people in the name of these ideologies just like some religious terrorists go and demolish mosques and want to build temples in their place.”

At a time when many people from the corporate sector are making a switch to working in the development sector, you wonder what kind of NGOs Agnihotri is referring to in his film. There is a wide spectrum — from community-funded grassroots organisations to those that get funding from international donors. You wonder about a possible link to the Ford Foundation, which had been put on a watch list by the Home Ministry, citing concerns to national security. The Foundation has been known for supporting the work of the Sabrang Trust run by activist Teesta Setalvad. Agnihotri is reluctant to pin down any specific NGO either.

“It is a delicate matter,” he says. “When people watch the film, they will know. I am not painting all NGOs or all professors or all intellectuals with the same brush. When you show a corrupt police officer in a film, you don't mean that all policemen are corrupt. You just point to the fact that there is corruption in the system.”

Film festivals and literature festivals are also in his firing line these days. “The same people go there every year, and the criteria for being invited are that you have to attack tradition, religion and the nation.” He mentions that several festivals have refused to screen his film because they are not comfortable with his views, and therefore he is going to take the film to colleges and universities. He says that dates have already been finalised for screenings at IIT Bombay, SP Jain Institute of Management, and IIM Ahmedabad.

‘I am interested in how wealth can be created using bright ideas that will help India prosper’

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