“All of Kashmir was, is and will remain a part of India,” says actor Kiran Karmarkar in a recent hit film on the government’s 2019 decision to revoke Indian-administered Kashmir’s autonomy.

A stocky man dressed in a starched white kurta, Karmarkar looks the part as Indian Home Minister Amit Shah in Article 370 – the film named after the constitutional provision that conferred special privileges on the Himalayan region, which is claimed by both India and Pakistan.

The scene is a real-to-reel depiction of Mr Shah’s speech in the parliament moments after his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led government announced it was doing away with the law.

When the film released in February, some critics called it “thinly veiled” propaganda which “justified many questionable actions” of the government.

But the film was endorsed by top BJP leaders, including Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Defence Minister Rajnath Singh.

Made on a budget of approximately 200m rupees ($2.39m, £1.9m), the film eventually grossed over 1.1bn rupees worldwide.

Since Mr Modi first came to power in 2014, the Hindi film industry has produced several films referencing government policies. But in the past four years, experts say a lot them have begun to explicitly steer towards propaganda – in 2019, a biopic of Mr Modi released just as polls closed.

Five years on, as the country heads to another election, a clutch of films – all centred around the BJP’s Hindu nationalist ideology – are in the pipeline or have been released.

Read Original Article