Khan and able: How Bollywood restored our faith in secularism

This belief was challenged by the 2019 election that brought BJP to office a second time in a landslide. It seemed the whole country had shifted toward Hindutva. That was confirmed by shifts in the attitude of the police, civil servants and even the judiciary.

In Bollywood, which used to be the prime example of Indian secularism with movies galore celebrating the brotherhood of different faiths, things began to change as well. The Khans hit bumps, both offscreen and on it. In 2015, Shah Rukh Khan pledged support for a string of writers, artists and scientists who returned national and state awards and spoke up on how intolerance “will take us to the dark ages.” It drew a strong backlash, with then BJP MP Yogi Adityanath saying that Shah Rukh spoke the language of terrorists. He was dubbed a ‘traitor’ by others and threatened with film boycotts.
Soon after, Shah Rukh’s films began flopping – ‘Fan’ in 2016, ‘Jab Harry met Sejal’ in 2017, and ‘Zero’ in 2018. Was this just because the films were bad? Or had the boycott calls affected his fan base? In 2021, the police arrested his son, Aryan Khan, on a charge of drug possession. Aryan was ultimately freed, but the arrest was interpreted as a warning to Bollywood.

Salman Khan never made political statements, but Aamir Khan has been critical of Modi, after the 2002 riots in Gujarat as well as after he became PM in 2014. In 2015, he declared at a journalism awards ceremony that he had discussed the communal situation with his Hindu wife, Kiran Rao, and she wondered if their family should leave India for safety. The social media overflowed with Hindutva sneers that Shah Rukh and Aamir should leave India and make the country happier.

Aamir had a huge success with ‘Dangal’ in 2016 but his next film, ‘Thugs of Hindostan’, was a disaster. He did not appear again for four years. But then came his much-touted film ‘Laal Singh Chaddha’ which sparked hashtags calling for a boycott. The film proved to be a big flop. Were these simply bad films that deservedly flopped? Or was Hindu alienation part of the story.

In 2022, Vivek Agnihotri’s ‘The Kashmir Files’ narrated the ordeals and killings of Kashmiri Pandits. Its success gave rise to a new genre of films that centred around hyper-nationalism. Many of them stoked the ‘evil Muslim’ narrative and spoke of the need to save Hindus from ‘foreign’ invaders.

At this point, I had to wonder if I had been mistaken in my assessment that the success of the three Khans proved that India was solidly secular. Had a hidden Hindutva India, lurking below the surface, come out in the open after 2019, and started carrying all before it? Even Congress had stopped mentioning the word secularism, having concluded that this was somehow associated with being anti-Hindu. Rahul Gandhi had started wearing a sacred thread and calling himself a Shiv bhakt. Was the whole of India turning in the Hindutva direction? Were the flopping Khan films part of the process?

But then came the record-breaking success of Shah Rukh’s ‘Pathaan’ in January 2023. This showed that his fan base was intact, and his earlier flops were simply bad films, not boycotted ones. He followed it with two more big hits, ‘Jawan’ and ‘Dunki’. Meanwhile, Salman Khan had his first big hit in years in ‘Tiger 3’. The Khans were back, big as life.

But 2023 also had ‘The Kerala Story’, a film on love jihad, and ‘Gadar 2’, which had a strong nationalist theme. The genre had not lost its audience. The two well-made films of this sort were big hits. By contrast, unremarkable films of the genre such as ‘Main Atal Hoon’ (about BJP PM Vajpayee), ‘Swatantrya Veer Savarkar’, and ‘Jahangir National University’, all flopped. Even films helmed by stars associated with the Hindutva brigade like Akshay Kumar and Kangana Ranaut found few takers.

What did this mean? It meant that audiences were still fundamentally secular when it came to watching films. The Khans had not lost their fans and had simply gone through a lean patch because of poor scripts.

This should have been an indication that the 2024 election was not going to be a BJP sweep, and that anti-Muslim sentiment was not a big vote-getter. The rest is history.