Rana Daggubati became a household name all over India with his role of Bhalladeva in SS Rajammouli’s Bahubali 1 and Bahubali 2. Rana is a fine actor and has done many movies before Bahubali gave him a pan-Indian identity. Rana’s upcoming movie is named ‘Virata Parvam’, scheduled to release on June 17. The movie also has Sai Pallavi, Nandita Das, and Priyamani in other roles.
The trailer of the movie shows that Rana plays the role of the central character Ravanna, a Naxal leader while Sai Pallavi plays a besotted starry-eyed village lass who falls in love with Ravanna’s writings and eventually with Ravanna himself, then becomes a Naxal to join him.
Now, there is nothing wrong is telling stories of Naxals, but any aware Indian knows how much the violence, bloodshed and depravity the movement has caused. Naxal apologists often try to portray the movement as a righteous war for justice and equality, something that is reverberating with very dramatic music and visuals in the Virata Parvam trailer, but they pretend to forget that Naxal terrorists have also exploited, killed and raped tribals all these years, the very people whose rights they have been claiming to protect.
Naxals reject the idea of the government bringing roads, healthcare, jobs, schools and other facilities to people living in the hinterlands. They want the people living in those areas to perpetually live in the darkness of superstitions, diseases and anarchy, deprived of the opportunities that a common Indian gets.
Leftist political parties, which are the apologists and ‘city-branch’ of the Naxal terrorists operating in the hinterlands, oppose every single infrastructure project, announce support for China and try to recruit young people into the anarchist movements where lives are lost in despair and depravity.
Whatever the political equations of earlier decades, the reality is that Naxals are terrorists, home-grown terrorists who work against the Indian nation, inspired and aided by foreign powers.
So why are mainstream Tollywood stars with millions of dedicated fan following so hell-bent on romanticising a dead, decomposed ideology that has brought nothing but despair and destruction to every single country that experimented with it? Leftists have killed more people than any other political power in modern times, more people than even Islamic terrorists, and nuclear weapons have killed. Leftist ideologies invariably bring dictators to power in country after country, who then go on committing genocides and keep their own subjects inside walls. Be it Cambodia, North Korea, South America, China or Soviet Russia, communist Leftist ideologies have always, always brought doom and mass murder.
So why is this failed, rejected, discarded ideology that has only deaths and depravity to show for being romanticised by mainstream moviemakers? Why?
Ram Charan and Megastar Chiranjeevi’s recent movie Acharya is another Naxal-worshiping drivel
While most of India is rejoicing and celebrating the super energising, visually extravagant RRR by Rajamouli where Telugu superstar Ram Charan, the son of Megastar Chiranjeevi plays the role inspired by freedom fighter Alluri Sitharamaraju, Ram Charan has stared in another movie Acharya, where his father Chiranjeevi plays the lead role.
Acharya is nothing but Naxal-worshiping drivel packaged as a movie that seems rich with Indic, Hindu visuals. The movie hides the Naxal ideology behind the curtain of Hindu traditional visuals and tries to portray that it is only the Naxals who protect the traditional Ayurvedic practices and rural villages that are rich in biodiversity and proudly follow their Hindu practices.
The movie even goes to the realm of employing visual effects where the Naxal leader, who is defined as a hero who kills the ‘evil’ police and paramilitary forces, is shown ‘chosen’ by the divine powers of Maa Durga who protects the ancient Ayurveda practitioners of the village depicted in the movie.
Storytelling is important, storytelling is beautiful. But is it necessary to tell fake stories that fan a fake narrative and nudge a vulnerable population group towards an ideology that brings nothing but death and despair?
Stories need to, deserve to be told. Agreed. But who made the rule that storytellers have to be stupid? Movies that focus on the angry young man working against the system have always been popular. Take Pushpa, KGF, or even a number of Hollywood hits, but peddling a politics that has kept whole regions of India unsafe and in poverty for decades? Seriously? What exactly are superstars like Rana Daggubati, Ram Charan and Chiranjeevi trying to achieve by it?
