Jai Gangaajal

Director: Prakash Jha

Actors: Prakash Jha, Priyanka Chopra

Priyanka Chopra deserves at best a distant second billing.

Both these main characters play cops in a fictional North Indian town. While Jha’s the older local policeman, deeply entrenched in the wholly corrupt criminal-legal system, Chopra is his new boss, a young IPS officer, in her first posting as district chief. Clearly the two don’t get along.

since this is very much a Prakash Jha film. And therefore one that broadly looks at the collusion between politicians, bureaucrats, and businessman, that produces a self-perpetuating system designed to further enrich the already empowered.

I guess is a piece of land that has to be cleared out, with help of local authorities, and passed on to a company that sounds like Vedanta.

But as the old Bollywood politics cliché goes, “elections sar par hai”. And so the cops under an electoral code of conduct can technically make a difference, without their political masters dictating every move.

Despite the Indian obsession for partisan politics, India has had a fairly poor track record with political films. This is quite natural in a democracy where the state fears popular dissent, and therefore popular culture, the most. The current BJP government is no different. If anything, it is far more stringent and vigilant on such matters.

How does Jha work around this problem? Well to begin with the offending politicians in this picture—the chief minister and his MLA—are clearly shown to be members of the Indian National Congress.

To his credit, Jha (like several other filmmakers currently) has managed to pull in crowds with films that are “movies” movies, yes, but also meaningful, with a personal voice. He struck a fine balance with Gangaajal (2003), which was based on the Bhagalpur blindings of 1980 and looked at mob lynching as a means of dispensing justice, when all else have failed.

He followed this up with Apaharan (on Bihar’s kidnapping and ransom industry), Rajneeti (on politics within the party system), Aarakshan (on affirmative action, or reservations in in the education system), Chakravyuh (on Maoist insurgency), and Satyagrah (on the anti-corruption movement).

As you scroll down that playlist, you can sense a visible decline in the quality of his films, mainly because they read like formatted entertainment with an obvious formula. This is perhaps narrative, newspaper journalism with loads of high drama. This one is not an exception.

Jai Gangaajal is meant to be a sequel of Gangaajal, although it is in effect a franchise flick, taking off from the first part—the premise being the same.

The point it’s trying to make, which may well be lost on you eventually, is that the wholly compromised political system usually cooperates with the corrupt. But only up to a point. Or until the bhrasht blokes begin to take the system so much for granted that they begin to brainlessly exceed their limits.

This is probably as true for ‘Sahara Shri’, or Mohamed Shahabuddin, or the politician villain in this movie (Manav Kaul, such a bright talent), or his brother, who goes completely berserk in this picture.