India’s An Insignificant Man, a Semi-Significant Movie

No, Indian movies are not all dancing, fighting, and chasing; drama, love, and action flicks. These elements do dominate the silver screen, true, but one can easily find socially engaged movies or documentaries on important themes sans dancing.

In recent years, Indian movies have dealt with issues such as narcotics (Udta Punjab), sex, women’s freedom (Lipstick Under My Burkha), and organ transplants (Ship of Theseus). Tumhari Sullu peered into the life of a housewife, while Gurgaon pointed out the perils of rapid urbanization and the uncontrolled rise of the new moneyed class. Newton – India’s 2017 nominee for the Oscars – followed a government official trying to supervise the electoral process in rural, Maoist-infested areas and pondered the conditions of Indian democracy and governance. And that’s just a random, sketchy list.

Among recent documentaries was An Insignificant Man, a film that covered the first years of the meteoric rise of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) – “The Party of the Common Man.”

AAP’s success was nothing short of spectacular. The party was created by relatively unknown people; it had no backing from any major party or powerful company (as far as it is known); and it strongly focused on curbing corruption, threatening to shake the entire establishment. The party was created in 2012 and in 2013 it gained the second-biggest voting result in the Delhi Assembly election and managed to form a short-lived coalition government.

An Insignificant Man tells the story of the first year of the party’s existence (particularly in the run up to the 2013 elections). The movie was completed thanks to crowdfunding, just as the party largely depended on the donations of common people. It was directed by Vinay Shukla and Khusboo Ranka, and produced with Anand Gandhi (who also made the aforementioned Ship of Theseus).

The camera shows us how the party members talked to people, how they addressed rallies, how they held intra-party talks, and what elections look like in India – to me, these aspects are the film's strongest. Yet, despite its strong message and straightforward narration, An Insignificant Man also has its weaknesses.

The image that emerges from the documentary is that of a society troubled with corruption, challenged by bullying, and handicapped by weak governance. The ones who have more money have the power to convince, corrupt, or coerce. In one scene, party members tell the police how a female member of AAP was threatened with physical violence, intimidation aimed at stopping her social and political activities. In another scene, people from a village tell party workers that they used to vote for the party that arranged for vehicles to take them to the polling booth.

“Take their cars [but vote for us],” Arvind Kejriwal, the leader of AAP, tells them. He says it jokingly, but other developments (not shown in the documentary) show that such things were said only half-jokingly, as Kejriwal was to later tell the people to accept money from other parties but vote for his party. In areas so poor and remote that people count on parties to get them to the polling station, how can a new, starved-for-funds party ever hope to make a dent? No wonder that AAP has so far achieved its biggest successes in urban areas. Party members are also shown pledging to never give or accept a bribe. Yet, the movie also reminds us that Shazia Ilmi, a party member, could have been involved in accepting money to obtain certain favors. In a world where money rules, how can you hope to rule without being corrupted by money?

The film nevertheless vibrates with a strong feeling of hope and peoples’ readiness to support change. We witness the common inhabitants of Delhi being attracted not only to the AAP’s message of fighting corruption but also its promise of dealing with the issue of water and electricity charges. We see that the party is a crowd-puller; we see how AAP’s leader, Arvind Kejriwal, an ordinary-looking man in nondescript clothes, turns out to be a charismatic speaker with a strong character, both on stage as well as in the party war room. I think in a way An Insignificant Man, like a good documentary, does capture a part of the AAP phenomenon without trying to describe it in its entirety: the insignificant people, tired of the old parties and their forgotten promises, decided to vote for Kejriwal, an insignificant man with an important message.

The film has its gaps, however. The movie is candid when it comes to intra-party debates and differences of opinion, but once the lens of the camera take us out of the party and the microphone gives voice to other parties, the balance is gone and a bias sets in. The words spoken by the members of two big Delhi parties and AAP’s towering rivals, the Indian National Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), were so carefully chosen that even their criticism reinforces the positive image of AAP in the movie. A BJP member is shown confronting AAP by saying that when he was young he used to be a revolutionary himself, but then he understood that the system cannot be changed so easily. This is establishment talk at its best, and the movie narrative makes it work for AAP’s benefit.

But the documentary is much less biased when it comes to the inner workings of the party. AAP rode the wave of popular sentiment by endorsing participatory governance and direct democracy. In one scene, Kejriwal promises that the party volunteers will choose their candidates for election. In another, however, the party leader alleges that some party members formed lobbying groups to push through their candidates, and is shown suggesting that he may strike down some of the candidatures. Apart from Kejriwal, the movie focuses on Professor Yogendra Yadav, India’s leading academic expert on elections who went on to join the Aam Aadmi Party and lend the party his expertise. The movie shows Yadav and Kejriwal drifting apart during the election campaign; at least one scene suggests that Yadav was displeased with Kejriwal’s growing populist appeals.

The movie – which had to fight political censorship to reach the screen – focused mostly on events in 2013 but came out in November 2017. Four years can be a lifetime in the dynamic world of politics. So much has happened to AAP since then that is it is possible that even the makers of the documentary changed their opinion on Kejriwal. Nobody can expect a documentary to update itself and yet the creators of An Insignificant Man added written comments before the movie credits and these updated the viewer in a balanced way. Thus, while the film ends with the moment Kejriwal became the chief minister of Delhi in 2013, the comments inform the viewer that Kejriwal later dissolved his government when his coalition partner did not support him on a vote on establishing an anti-corruption institution. It goes on to note that AAP was routed in the 2014 national elections but staged a comeback in 2015 by winning a complete majority in the Delhi Assembly. The comments also mention that Yadav was expelled from AAP for “anti-party activities.”

Yet while An Insignificant Man tries to briefly address events that came after filming was completed, it fails to mention events that had taken place earlier.

Arvind Kejriwal did not spring out of nowhere. He was a part of the India Against Corruption campaign of 2011-2012, a movement that demanded harsher anti-corruption laws in India and saw powerful crowds bursting out onto Indian streets. It was Anna Hazare, and not Arvind Kejriwal, who was the leader and the moving spirit of India Against Corruption. When Kejriwal, one of Hazare’s trusted lieutenants, decided to create a political party, Hazare and Kejriwal parted ways.

The movie, however, seems to barely notice Hazare’s importance. This is simply unfair: without Hazare’s movement and without cooperation with Hazare, Kejriwal possibly would have never achieved any kind of political success. Moreover, both India Against Corruption and Hazare, as well as Kejriwal and his Aam Aadmi Party, took to the streets to demand the creation of a Lokpal, an ombudsman who would look into corruption charges against even the highest government officials. This was a central demand of AAP and yet it finds very scant mention in the documentary. While this is obvious for the Indian viewer, the non-Indian viewer should have been informed more about these aspects.