Vigilante justice has been seen on and off in Indian cinema and the latest in the line is the Kamal Haasan starrer Indian 2: Zero Tolerance, a sequel to an earlier film Indian from 1996. The vigilante is a figure associated with the weak state since he or she is basically involved in enforcing justice when the state itself is helpless. In both films (directed by S Shankar) the target is corruption by officials at every level. The Indian in the film is an old man Senapathy (Kamal Haasan) living in Taipei teaching martial arts, specifically an Indian form ‘Varma Kalai’ that uses knowledge of the pressure points in the human body. With the past being valourised today, new kinds of knowledge are being attributed to it.
Those who solicit Senapathy’s help are a group of young men running a YouTube channel named ‘Barking Dogs’ involved in exposing the corrupt. The film begins with a long segment dealing with various kinds of corruption prevalent in India, things having gotten so bad that only the arrival of the aged Veerasekharan Senapathy could set matters right.
Senapathy, after his exploits in the 1996 film, is wanted in India and he therefore arrives in disguise, speaking Mandarin. The film begins in Tamil Nadu but in order not to single out the state for corrupt practices, Senapathy takes up cleansing projects in Gujarat and Odisha initially.
‘Indian 2’ is stuck in a tactical problem while pursuing vigilante justice against the corrupt in India, which is the extent of the corruption where virtually everyone is somehow or other tainted by it. Chitra Aravidhan (Siddharth) who is the man behind ‘Barking Dogs’, for instance, discovers that his own family has been subsisting on corruption.
Senapathy wants all citizens to ‘out’ members of their own family if found corrupt; but if corruption is so widespread, where is the concerned public they should be ‘outed’ to? Exposing the corrupt implies exposing them to untainted citizens who will then shame them, but the difficulty may be finding untainted citizens.
Secondly, there is little evidence that corrupt people will be ashamed at being exposed when they are actually admired. People, for instance, are known to celebrate the illicit wealth acquired by those of their jati groups as though they had personally benefited from it.
Most people travelling around Bengaluru would’ve met proud rustics pointing out land recently acquired by a politician which carries a sense of eulogy at new territory being conquered by a great king. Giving gifts to vassals and Brahmins was a way in which kings asserted their power, and receiving them was evidently legitimate.
Corruption may hence be a continuation of this practice since bribes must also be given with respect. Ill-gotten wealth is also given away generously to temples as a way of acquiring punya (religious merit). All this leads to the supposition that it is impossible to get any work done officially without participating in corruption, and a distinction is even made by social theorists between ‘being deliberately corrupt’ and participating at the minimum level needed to carry on one’s everyday life unhindered.
Senapathy has his work cut out for him but so does the director of ‘Indian 2’ given the magnitude of his terrain. In the recent past there have been big films, like ‘KGF’ that instead of dealing with the fortunes of a single protagonist, try to portray things on an epic scale, but the effort has finally become incoherent. ‘Indian 2’ corresponds to that pattern since the issue dealt with is nebulous; one would not know where to begin or end. The film has the air of wanting to show ‘everything’ and one wonders.
A possible reason for this ‘epic’ scale is the absence of a national narrative without patriotism as a component. The protagonist of a popular film is chosen to be exemplary — in the sense of representing a community and narrativizing its concerns. Where concerns were once aplenty — ranging from the perils of modernity (in the 1950s) to the end of Nehruvian socialism (in the early 1990s) — most Bollywood films today latch on to the only one available: propagating patriotism. This has finally led to Bollywood’s decline; south Indian films are not thus hampered and can explore local concerns, sometimes even conflicting with those of nation-states by having criminals as protagonists. ‘Indian 2’ is anti-patriotic in this sense since Senapathy is a vigilante-as-criminal and vigilantism happens when all is not right with the nation. But the difficulty is that the film (like its hero) is unable to put its finger on what exactly is wrong and hits upon ‘corrupt society’ which, given the scale of the corruption, is virtually everything.
There is some (unintended) irony in a messiah like Senapathy with ‘zero tolerance’ for corruption coming to cleanse India and fleeing (as Senapathy does) because the task ahead is too gigantic. One does not know how involved Kamal Haasan was in the conception of ‘Indian 2’ but the film has the appearance of something dreamed up by a failed political messiah. Perhaps Veerasekharan Senapathy’s failure is intended to remind audiences of what India missed by not giving Kamal Haasan a fair chance in politics.
(The author is a well-known film critic)