Vivek Agnihotri: Man on a Mission

Vivek Agnihotri is never afraid to say the unsayable and do the undoable. It sometimes lands him on the right side of history, and sometimes not. But having realised after struggling to fit into the Hindi film industry that it would be smarter and better to create a niche of his own, he has chosen to tell stories that he wants to tell. “The audience loves me and blesses me. Why should I care for the industry? Anyway, what is it except for three or four big stars?” he asks.

The decision to voluntarily choose the periphery has served him well. After the emotional and commercial success of The Kashmir Files (2022), a film that most Kashmiri Pandits felt validated their exile, he decided to film the story of India’s vaccine success, and especially the men and women behind it. It is a story that has not been celebrated enough, and it is also one marred by controversy. The work of the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) on the vaccine, Covaxin, in collaboration with Bharat Biotech, broke several records in terms of speed and outlay. But there were always questions around its efficacy, which Agnihotri’s film insists was a deliberate conspiracy on the part of Western vaccine suppliers and a handful of ‘anti-national journalists’, in what is the weakest link in the film, but one strongly articulated allegedly by all the scientists Agnihotri spoke to.

The film targets China, calling the “SARS virus a lab leak”, a product of reverse engineering rather than natural mutation. It also suggests that the World Health Organisation was somewhat gul­lible in accepting China’s version of the events leading to the Covid-19 outbreak.

What made Agnihotri choose this story to tell and how did he go about it? After all, Covishield, the vaccine produced by Serum Institute of India in partnership with AstraZeneca and Oxford University, is the better-known story of Indian ingenuity. Of the two billion vaccines administered to Indians till September 2022, 1.6 billion were Covishield. “There were many ways to enter the story. The Prime Minister, the task force he created, the IAS officers, the frontline workers. I chose this,” he says. “While the collective consciousness of the world and India was obsessed with death during the first lockdown in March 2020, I started reading everything about Covid-19 on the dark web. While I was researching the virus, I came across ICMR Director-General Dr Balram Bhargava’s Going Viral: Making of Covax­in, The Inside Story and realised I had no clue about their role in initiating and collaborating on the vaccine,” he adds.

Two things stood out for him: that they had started their research into the vaccine in the first week of February, a few days after the first case in India, and that there were so many ICMR and National Institute of Virology (NIV) scientists behind difficult tasks, such as the evac­uation of Indian Shia pilgrims stranded in Iran in February and getting monkeys from the wild for testing, he says.

More than that was the realisation that 70 per cent of the scientists behind the vaccine were women. These are not rocket scientists, and as the character based on Dr Priya Abraham, director, National Institute of Virology (NIV) says in the movie, virologists are always seen as the bearer of bad news. More than that, as Girija Oak Godbole’s character, Nivedita Gupta, says, their work is not visible—there is no rocket launch to justify their existence. “Whichever scientific institute I went to I found photos only of CV Raman, JC Bose, Abdul Kalam, even Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru looking through a microscope, but no women among those who were honoured,” says Agnihotri. This is despite the successes of astronaut Kalpana Chawla, the space scientists at the Indian Space Research Organisation, and a fact not publicised often—that 43 per cent of the graduates in India study­ing science, technology, engineering and mathematics are women.

The highlighting of the women is the best part of the movie, and its most moving. These are ordinary women, balancing work and home, sometimes with adverse effects on their children. This “Indic feminism,” as Agnihotri calls it, is as independent, but more collective and family-oriented than Western feminism.

Agnihotri’s movie captures the un­der-appreciation that follows the careers of most government scientists. The sto­ry begins with a virologist’s badge being rudely torn from him by the police and being made to sit by the roadside as pun­ishment for breaking lockdown rules. That is a running theme in the film, the lack of recognition, the double burden on the women scientists at home and at work, the scepticism that surrounds their achievements, which are hard to understand for the layperson.

Agnihotri was planning to make The Delhi Files after The Kashmir Files, but decided to film The Vaccine War instead, as a detox, as a movie with a positive message. The total budget, including promotions, is `12.5 crore, which is likely what a big budget Hindi movie spends on a day of promotions.

The right-wing ecosystem has embraced the movie, for several reasons. Its social media associates are already trending the request to make it tax free. Its message of self-reliance is in congruence with what the government espouses. Its demonisation of China for its role in inflicting the pandemic on the world comes at a convenient time. And it celebrates Prime Minister Narendra Modi as a man of science—his message to Dr Balram Bhargava is “only science can win this war”.

But more than anything else, it is its calling out of so-called “anti-India science journalists” (amalgamated into the character of Rohini Singh Dhulia, played by Raima Sen) who are in the pay of unnamed foreign vaccine manufacturers that has attracted attention. Every hero needs a villain, but Agnihotri’s choice here is executed with complete lack of subtlety. In one scene, the “anti-national” science writer actually instructs her senior to burn the toolkit. Agnihotri says his conscience is clear. “Every single scientist told me that some journalists had weaponised their journalism to run a campaign against their work,” he says, adding that the defamation cases filed against a website provide ample evidence.

The Indian Institute of Mass Com­munication graduate’s initial films showed no signs of what was to come. Chocolate: Deep Dark Secrets (2005), Dhan Dhana Dhan Goal (2007), and Hate Story (2012) were stories he thought people wanted to see. Buddha in a Traffic Jam (2016), set on a campus, not unlike Jawaharlal Nehru University, changed the game. It was followed by The Tashkent Files (2019), about the mystery behind late Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri’s death; and the latest and most successful The Kashmir Files, which he made on a budget of `15 crore.

Agnihotri sees India as a country where silence has been rife about leaders other than those belonging to the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty, where the academic and intellectual elite are only too ready to dismiss indigenous ideas and embrace Western ways because of Macaulay’s education model, and where “genocide deniers” have erased from public memory the trauma of Kashmiri Pandits and their forced exile from their homeland, the subject of The Kashmir Files, which made `340 crore at the box office. He thinks it is vulgar to talk num­bers and believes the box office figures are a “scam”.

He is aware he is called a propagan­dist and a pamphleteer for the govern­ment but insists he is misunderstood. “We are genuinely trying to make impactful cinema,” he says.

The Delhi Files is next, about the Direct-Action Day riots before Partition. “We’ve seen Partition usually from the Punjab angle, but the truth is Bengal had a bigger role to play. It is all about the right to life,” he says. He made The Tashkent Files for truth, The Kashmir Files for justice, and The Delhi Files will complete the trilogy. Work on it began even while promotions of The Vaccine War were on. He is also announcing a big epic film on dharma.

BollywoodcinemafilmmakerThe Kashmir FilesThe Vaccine WarVivek Agnihotri