How does the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) turn characters like Savarkar, who propagated the two-nation theory that was picked up by Mohammad Ali Jinnah, and Mahatma Gandhi’s assassin Nathuram Godse into heroes? Incessant propaganda is the key to its plans.
RSS, say the Mumbai grapevine, is now helping fund Mahesh Manjrekar, known for a series of flop biopics, to make a film on Godse. The project, to add insult to injury, was announced on Mahatma Gandhi’s birth anniversary on October 2 this month.
Now Manjrekar cannot be faulted for accepting the assignment. He had earlier made a film Vaastav loosely based on the life of gangster Chhota Rajan, and paid for by the gangster’s brother, who was acknowledged in credits. The lead role was ironically played by Sanjay Dutt, who spent years in jail on the charge of receiving firearms from Rajan’s rival gang headed by Dawood Ibrahim.
Manjrekar must also be looking forward to the future because RSS plans to fund a lot of other films and TV serials on what it describes as lesser-known heroes of the freedom struggle. Since it has no freedom fighters in its own ranks and collaborated with the British to prevent India’s independence, it is not known whether it will pick up some freedom fighters from Congress and Communist ranks (like Bhagat Singh, for example, who it has been trying to appropriate for years without much success) or pass off K.B Hegdewar and M.S. Golwalkar as freedom fighters– after all, they did fight very hard to prevent emergence of an egalitarian society.