At the luxurious INOX theatre in Sky City Mall, Borivali East, Mumbai, around seventy upper-middle-class viewers attended the 10:45 a.m. screening of Jolly LLB 3.
In the film’s concluding courtroom sequence, Arshad Warsi’s character asks the judge whether he would willingly surrender one of his own homes to the government for a development project in Delhi.
“Why not?” Warsi inquires.
The judge responds, “Because it’s my wish.”
Earlier in the narrative, Warsi poses similar questions to an industrialist seeking to acquire land from a village under the “Bikaner to Boston” project. When confronted with the image of his own opulent bungalow, the industrialist rips it apart in silence. When Warsi directs the same question to the industrialist’s lawyer, he too remains speechless.
Warsi then directly asks the judge, “If your own wish matters, why not that of the villagers?” The court subsequently orders that the farmers’ land be returned to them.
What stands out is that Akshay Kumar—who once, while acting as a “fake journalist,” asked Prime Minister Narendra Modi the trivial question, “Do you eat mangoes by slicing them or sucking them?”—now plays a lawyer fighting for farmers’ land rights. In doing so, he symbolically exposes the hollow rhetoric surrounding “development” often invoked by political leaders and industrialists in court.
Interestingly, Akshay Kumar’s character, initially the industrialist’s counsel, undergoes a moral transformation and later defends the farmers. When police forces arrive to evict villagers and bulldozers roll in, he teaches them the principles of nonviolence. The film ridicules the idea of “development” symbolized by projects such as the bullet train. Meanwhile, the District Magistrate—portrayed as complicit in the land acquisition process—appears in court on a stretcher to confess that he misused the Land Acquisition Act to benefit the industrialist, marking his own redemption.
One farmer, Rajaram, commits suicide after losing his land, and his widow, Janki, becomes a poignant symbol of suffering. The names themselves evoke irony in the current socio-political atmosphere dominated by aggressive invocations of “Jai Shri Ram.”
When the term “patriotism” is uttered in the film, it seems to puncture the prevailing façade of pseudo-nationalism. Akshay Kumar—once a self-professed admirer of Modi—now, through this role, implicitly questions the slogan “Sabka Saath, Sabka Vikas,” asking whose companionship, whose development, and whose destruction it truly represents. Symbolically, he tosses Modi’s “mango of development” into the trash bin without slicing or tasting it.
While the film contains moments of humor, its deeper critique of the developmental paradigm is incisive. It is not merely entertainment but a cinematic interrogation of hyper-developmental propaganda. That Akshay Kumar—once viewed as a propagandist of power—takes on such a role is itself revealing. The film compels viewers to confront a fundamental question: who bears the sacrifice demanded by “development”?
If such films continue to be made and audiences are still allowed the freedom to watch them, there may yet remain hope that, despite the sacrifices of countless individuals, democracy in India can endure.
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*Senior economist based in Ahmedabad
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