‘Emergency’ review: A parodic Indira Gandhi biopic

Kangana Ranaut’s Emergency, which focuses on Indira Gandhi’s tryst with dictatorship, begins with a striking visual. As a girl, Indira is pricked by a rose thorn, suggesting that she will never escape the influence of her father, Jawaharlal Nehru, who always wore the red flower on his coat.

But she does. The daughter will do what the father did not, dialogue writer Ritesh Shah declares. For India’s first prime minister, the movie claims, the country is an abstraction. Nehru (Sanjay M Gurbaxani) does not get India. But Indira (Kangana Ranaut) does – in her own fashion.

She survives personal upheavals to become prime minister. She is dismissed by older members of the Indian National Congress as a “goongi gudiya”, a dumb doll. Her girly voice, darting eyes and constant lip-chewing do little to dispel the notion that she is a nepo baby, undeserving of the highest seat of power.

She nervously leads the campaign to create Bangladesh in 1971 but then begins to take too seriously a Congress sycophant’s “India is Indira and Indira is India” slogan. She ignores the advice of her friend Pupul Jaykar (Mahima Chaudhry), allowing her son Sanjay (Vishak Nair) and his posse to run riot over the party and the Indian Constitution.

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