A New Axis of Evil
Loosely inspired by the 2010 attack in Dantewada in which 76 personnel of the Central Reserve Police Force were killed, Bastar: The Naxal Story would have you know that it’s delivering to you hard-hitting truths. Like, for instance, that in a tent, in a Naxal camp in the depths of Chhattisgarh, there is an espresso machine so fancy and gleaming, that the sight of it would make any self-respecting barista feel weak at the knees. And that every now and then, the aforementioned camp becomes an offsite for banned and terrorist organisations, including members of Lashkar-e-Taiba, United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA), Liberation of Tigers of Tamil Eelam, and “Ronald Johnson of the Spanish Communist Party”. And that activism for human rights, exercising the democratic right to dissent, and demanding accountability from those who abuse their powers is all a spectacle that can be put together (like a film?) at a cost — Rs. 600 crore to be precise. (Just like that, Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s lavishly over-budget films seem so much more economically viable.)
Also that Naxals make for terrible poets, spouting lines like “Tum sach mein thak gaye ho torture man/ Relax, relax, relax.” Leaving aside the fact that revolutionary ideology has inspired many powerful and moving works in modern Indian literature, from the subtitles of Bastar: The Naxal Story, it’s evident that if anyone is tired, it’s those involved in the making of this film — because no one noticed that “fertile” becomes “fartile”, “warrior” becomes “worrior”, “stealing” becomes “steeling”. They’re almost like the Freudian slip of typos.
There are more than three spelling mistakes in Bastar: The Naxal Story, but let’s leave the errors and fact-checking aside for now because ostensibly, this is a movie not a history lesson. Director Sudipto Sen, riding high on the unexpected success of The Kerala Story (2023), has teamed up with Shah and Adah Sharma again to tell the the story of a woman CRPF officer named Neerja Madhavan (Sharma, with freckles) who is determined to erase Naxals and their ideology from India. Her opponents are many. In Bastar, her chief rival is Lanka Reddy (Vijay Krishna), with his Veerappan-inspired moustache, who opens the film by hacking a man to death. Further away in Delhi, there is the left liberal Vanya Roy and her Machiavellian lawyer Neelam (Shilpa Shukla). Also in the national capital is a Home Minister who speaks with a slight south Indian accent and who doesn’t grant Neerja the resources she wants. In addition to the Naxals and their stunts, there are the following: A court case, an enquiry, a “Gandhian activist” who is a front for funnelling money into the Naxal movement, and a short detour into the campus of Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) “the most prestigious university in the world” (Shah and Sen’s words, not mine).
