As elections approach in an unnamed North Indian capital, an unanticipated crisis befalls the leading political party. When the chief suffers a paralytic stroke, the powerful dynasty that heads the party forks into two sibling factions (with characters whose similarity to real-life individuals has been widely commented on) that must now fight it out for the top post, as the fracas spirals into a desperate cycle of murder and betrayal. In broad outline, this is the plot of Prakash Jha's portentously titled new film, Raajneeti. Yet despite the title, the subject and the setting, one must refuse to see this as a political film. We should not only resist the temptation of making crass analogies between the film's characters and actual political figures, but we should also deny altogether that the on-screen shenanigans has anything to do with politics proper.
First, some reflections are crucial. A recent visitor to India, French philosopher Jacques Ranciere, often stresses that the question of politics arises when those with no means and no permanent position in the social structure insist that they be given equal foothold as those who have these advantages. Politics as the assertion of the unrepresented is perpetually contentious and destabilising. Accepting this axiom, another recent traveller to India, the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek, argues that the disavowal of political conflicts and their corresponding ideological visions is vital to the current form of politics. This non-committal, non-ideological version of politics – which he calls 'post-politics' – relies not on contentions but on pacts, whereby political decisions are arrived at through compromise, collaboration and apparent consensus that is less about representing people and more about administrating them.
The purported irrelevancy of 'old', blood-stained ideologies to contemporary politics goes unchallenged these days, and Jha himself has occasionally been a mouthpiece for this view. In pursuit of a party nomination as a candidate during last year's election in his home state of Bihar, he announced that he enjoys 'good relations' with all parties in the state, and added, 'I do not support the ideology of any one political party, but I do my bit.' Fellow celebrity Bihari politician, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)'s Shatrughan Sinha, was right to quip, 'When I was getting married, my problem was not whom to marry but whom not to marry. Likewise, Prakash's problem is which political party not to join, rather than which one to join.'
There is one central way in which the very conception of a film such as Raajneeti is predicated on this 'post-political' stance. Jha's depiction of an entire political field through the affairs of a single party is related to his assertion that the convictions of individual parties do not matter, as long as they 'do their bit'. The 'bit' is, simply put, the mere execution of preordained acts of governance – the expert and pragmatic management of the people. This is why the film makes no offence with its all-powerful party, as long as it is presumably doing the bit. Jha's ostensible intention is to underscore the abuses of political authority: the crime and corruption that always accompany such power. But rather, it seems to be the case that, with the innate drama of (ideology-based) politics discredited, the dramatic tension has to be sought in the abhorrent supplements of politics.