How Rang De Basanti gave a generation its voice and why we need it now more than ever!

Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra’s Rang De Basanti was, and still is, more than just a film; it’s a call to action for the youth of the country to change the very system that frustrates them.

It was 2006, and the air was heavy with frustration, almost thick enough to make it hard to breathe. Every morning’s headlines exposed a new scam as corruption soared to unprecedented heights, and justice was barely alive. A model could be shot point-blank for refusing to pour a drink for a politician’s son, and he would walk away untouched. The level of unfairness we were willing to tolerate had reached its breaking point. The youth of the nation was angry and restless, they wanted to shout, fight, demand better but were largely directionless. That’s when Rang De Basanti released.

It didn’t come dressed like the patriotic films we’d grown up with - no thundering speeches in the Parliament, no soldier at the border raising the flag against the sunset. Instead, we got a bunch of college friends - Daljeet aka DJ (Aamir Khan), Karan (Siddharth), Sukhi (Sharman Joshi), Aslam (Kunal Kapoor) and Sonia (Soha Ali Khan) laughing their way through Delhi University canteens, pulling pranks, drifting from one carefree day to the next. They weren’t saints or nationalists; they weren’t even sure what they wanted from life which made them exactly like us. They weren’t mindless drifters, just a bunch of youngsters who were still figuring it out. Testing boundaries only to try to find their place in the world. And in a country where unemployment is equated with low IQ, they were exactly the kind of youngsters people love to dismiss as “wasting their time.” But sometimes, all it takes is one sharp turn, one unexpected encounter, to flip the lens you’ve been looking through.

That turn came in the form of Sue (Alice Patten), a young British filmmaker arriving with a story in her hands, pulled straight from her grandfather’s diary who was a British officer of the East India Company that had helped capture and hang Bhagat Singh, Rajguru, Ashfaqullah Khan - names we’d only memorised for history exams. Sue wanted to make a film about them. And she wanted these Delhi kids to play the revolutionaries. So they slipped into those roles. Karan became Bhagat Singh. DJ was Chandrashekhar Azad. Sukhi took on Rajguru. Aslam embodied Ashfaqullah Khan. Sonia became Durgavati Devi. And eventually, even Laxman Pandey (Atul Kulkarni), a staunch Hindu nationalist who’d didn't get along with the group, as he hated Aslam simply for being Muslim, stepped in as Ramprasad Bismil.

At first, it was just playing a role where lines had to be learned, costumes had to be worn, mustaches needed to be figured out. But the more they stepped into the shoes of these revolutionaries, the more those shoes began to fit, as the history of the krantikaris wasn’t just staying on the film set but slowly seeping into them. Suddenly, Bhagat Singh wasn’t just a face, he was a boy their age who gave up his whole future without blinking and chose to hang to death. Ashfaqullah Khan and Ramprasad Bismil weren’t just dusty paragraphs; they were best friends willing to die alongside each other. The questions got louder in their heads as well as in ours - What does it take to turn an ordinary person into a krantikari? What would make us pick up that fight?

Also Read: Jallianwala Bagh Massacre: History, cinema, and a legacy of loss in Rang De Basanti and Sardar Udham

And just like that, the parallels between then and now became impossible to ignore. Because the youth of the 1920s weren’t born waving pistols. And the understanding towards what drove young men and women to leave their families, pick up arms, and choose death for the sake of the nation came through. The youth of the freedom struggle were not so different from this group, they too had been ordinary people, until circumstance and conviction turned them into revolutionaries because silence felt like complicity. While the group was aware of their country’s problems they were still reluctant to take responsibility. That’s exactly what Flight Lt. Ajay Rathod (R Madhavan), Sonia’s fiancé, their friend tried to tell them one night. In what is still one of the most cutting moments of this film, Ajay points out the group’s hypocrisy. It’s easy, he says, to sit on the sidelines, beer in hand, and complain that the system is broken. It’s far harder to roll up your sleeves, get your hands dirty and fix it from the inside. He mentions how if you want to change things, you have to be a part of where change happens - the army, IAS, politics. Otherwise, all you’re doing is shouting into the void.

Ajay’s words became hauntingly prophetic when he died in an MiG crash caused by a faulty plane, procured through a corrupt defence deal. His death was not the noble sacrifice of a soldier but a preventable tragedy caused by greed and negligence. At that moment, the British villains of Sue’s film stopped being distant historical foreign oppressors. They became anyone in power willing to crush the innocent for personal gain. The parallel was impossible to ignore as the person sitting in the capital, in a starched white kurta, grinning for the cameras, didn’t look that different from GeneralDyer asking to open fire at Jallianwalla Bagh. From there, the film’s heartbeat changes as the group protests peacefully for Ajay’s death, something that is twisted into a mob and shut down bylathicharge. Watching innocents get hurt and the grief of losing their friend runs deep in their veins, and they decide to kill the defence minister. 

On paper, it was absurd to hear college kids plotting to kill a senior government official. But emotionally, it felt inevitable. They weren’t just actors anymore; they had become the revolutionaries they once played. Like Bhagat Singh and Azad, they knew they wouldn’t survive. They still went ahead, killing the minister and hijacking a radio station, not to escape justice but to confess. They weren’t criminals. They were citizens who had reached the limits of their patience in a country where injustice had become the default. Their final act carried Ajay’s message forward that if you want change, be the change. Join the army, become an IAS officer, enter politics, do the work from within.

Rang De Basanti reimagined patriotism. It wasn’t about waving a flag or chanting “Mera Bharat Mahan”,  rather it asked us to lift the weight behind it. It was about building a Bharat that truly could be called great, something that resonated in its songs by A R Rahman that weren’t just background numbers. Masti Ki Paathshala and Khalbali reminded us that youth is about energy not recklessness. Rang De Basanti drenched the frame in a raw, unpolished lens of the country. And Khoon Chala became an anthem of resistance, whispering to the young to rise up, again and again, no matter how many times the candle flames are blown out. Because the truth is, building a nation is never done. Every generation gets its own freedom struggle, sometimes it’s against armies at the border, sometimes it’s against the rot within. But the fight is always there. Which is why freedom fighters aren’t just born once but are needed in every era! 

And that’s why Rang De Basanti wasn’t just a film. It was and still is a voice that told us that the biggest act of rebellion isn’t tearing the system down, but stepping inside it, changing it piece by piece, until the corrupt can’t breathe in it anymore. The bitter irony though is that this film that cut through the line of art mirroring society or vice versa could even be made today. And if it could, would it pass the CBFC without being cut down? Could it survive in the climate where even questioning power is seen as an act of war? How would showing a corrupt defence minister survive even in fiction today?

Maybe that’s exactly why we need it again! Because the truth is, the country is still calling on its youth to be freedom fighters. Only this time, the freedom we’re fighting for is well embedded within our own borders. 

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