L2 Empuraan: Eyesore For India's Right-Wing

The year is 2002. A young boy named Zayed Masood, his family and neighbours are fleeing the communal violence that has enveloped their neighbourhood, somewhere in North India. They are assured refuge at the haveli of Subhadra Ben, a local political activist. However, Subhadra is betrayed by her nephew Munna, who summons his brother, Balraj Patel aka Baba Bajrangi, to annihilate the group of Muslims taking shelter in their house. Bajrangi murders Subhadra for “betraying her religion” and proceeds towards the shed where the Muslims are hiding. While Zayed라이브 바카라 father Masood hides him and his little brother Zaheer, the rest of the family is brutally murdered by Bajrangi and his men.

During the massacre, Munna rapes a heavily pregnant woman and then kills her ruthlessly. While they set fire to the shed after the indiscriminate killing, Zayed escapes with Zaheer tied on his back. However, when he finally turns to check on him, Zaheer is dead too. The sole survivor of the massacre, Zayed screams in anguish.

Ever since its theatrical release on March 27, L2 Empuraan—the sequel to the 2019 political thriller Lucifer—has been in the eye of a storm of controversies. From Enforcement Directorate (ED) raids and parliamentary debates to calls for bans, censorship and a court case—the makers have now seen it all. Directed by Prithviraj Sukumaran, this Mohanlal starrer has become an eyesore for the Indian right wing. The reason? It has brought to the forefront a Muslim protagonist who survived one of the deadliest pogroms that the country has seen in its post-independence history. Through the character of Zayed (played by Prithviraj) and his family fleeing their homes to escape communal violence, the film라이브 바카라 opening sequence directly refers to the horrific Naroda Patiya massacre in Ahmedabad in 2002. Furthermore, the story라이브 바카라 primary antagonist is named Baba Bajrangi (Abhimanyu Singh)—a rather unsubtle play on Babu Bajrangi, the leader of Bajrang Dal who was a pivotal figure in the violence.

Owing to these references, L2 Empuraan has incessantly been courting the wrath of the Hindutva brigade. Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leaders like Suresh Gopi have refuted the allegations that it was due to political pressure that the makers decided to make 24 ‘voluntary’ cuts to the film, even after it was given Censor certification. Yet, it is conspicuous that hours after his statement, the ED raided producer Gokulam Gopalan라이브 바카라 offices in Kochi and Chennai. Sukumaran, who has both directed the film as well as acted in it, has received an Income Tax notice seeking clarifications on the earnings from earlier films he has co-produced. While it is being claimed that this is a routine assessment, the timing of the notice says otherwise.

L2 Empuraan is not a great film. In fact, in terms of its plot and form, the film is a terribly-made sequel to the much more sophisticated Lucifer. Its narrative overflows in multiple directions; foreign locations meander through its course for no significant reason; there are one too many slow-motion sequences glorifying every scene that has Mohanlal in it; and the editing of the film is lousy. But the film has managed to do something that most Indian films, especially the Bollywood produce, have been shying away from for years now. Even beyond popular culture, the facts and truths about the 2002 communal violence in Gujarat have lost reiteration in the public domain—given the increasing stronghold of the BJP-RSS regime with a third consecutive win in the Lok Sabha elections in 2024.

The whistleblowers who attempted to reveal the facts about the pogrom have either been discredited or jailed. In cases such as Zakia Jafri라이브 바카라—who filed a petition challenging the Special Investigation Team (SIT) report that gave a clean chit to Narendra Modi, then Gujarat Chief Minister, and other state officials regarding their alleged roles in the 2002 communal violence—the Supreme Court itself said that Jafri라이브 바카라 co-petitioner Teesta Setalvad, simply wanted to “keep the pot boiling,” before dismissing the petition. In such a scenario, when L2 Empuraan sets the premise for the antagonist of its story through a bone-chilling sequence based on 2002 Gujarat, it is exposing the blindfolds that other institutions have been hiding behind.

Naturally, as soon as the film saw the light of the day, the right-wing forces were incensed by its depiction. The RSS mouthpiece Organiser, which has furiously been churning out content against the film, says: “Do you think it is a coincidence that the name of the character is Masood Saeed, a portmanteau of the names of Jaish-e-Mohammed terrorist Masood Azhar and Lashkar-e-Taiba terrorist Hafiz Saeed?” This statement is factually incorrect—Prithviraj라이브 바카라 character is named Zayed Masood. But the larger concern here is something else—that it tries to establish the protagonist, and by extension, the actor and filmmaker, as a terror-sympathiser. The same article continues to question where the funding for the film was received and who its “silent backers” were. Statements like these, then, springboard into the ED raids and IT summons that the film crew has eventually been subjected to.

That an apology would arrive perhaps doesn’t come as a surprise, even as it dismayed fans on the other end of the political spectrum. But that the film managed to run in the theatres and make a steady box office collection is an intriguing turn in the history of recent films. L2 Empuraan comes at a time when the fringe has comfortably become the mainstream in Bollywood. It라이브 바카라 a time when propaganda films like The Sabarmati Report (2024), Article 370 (2024) and The Kashmir Files (2022) receive endorsement from the Prime Minister himself, as he talks about the potential of such cinema to provide “correct information” to the public. It라이브 바카라 a Malayalam film that competes at theatres across the country, with a blockbuster like Chhaava no less, which has directly instigated a political storm and communal unrest in Maharashtra over the tomb of the Aurangzeb. While the biggest Bollywood stars buckle under right-wing pressure, whether in fear or opportunism, it is commendable that a regional film is willingly bearing the consequences of representing one of the darkest phases of modern Indian history.

It is not as if the politics of L2 Empuraan is lucid. It has attempted its own balancing act through sequences where the character of Zayed strays over to “the other side” in the aftermath of the Gujarat violence, and is “saved” from becoming a terrorist in the nick of time by Stephen Nedumpally (Mohanlal). In fact, an integral section of the film—the opening credits—is dedicated to a dramatic recreation of the burning of the Sabarmati Express, which allegedly led to Gujarat라이브 바카라 communal violence. Yet, the sequence that shows the brutal violence that Muslims were subjected to by right-wing Hindutva forces in 2002 holds significance beyond the film라이브 바카라 text. It becomes an important cultural signifier to a watershed moment in politics, at a time when facts about that period are being erased, criminals are being whitewashed, and history is being rewritten to reverse the roles of the victim and the perpetrator.

In recent years, mainstream cinema has largely remained subservient to the broader political agenda of the right wing, which is two-pronged: firstly, that all accounts which have documented their role in historical instances of communal violence are erased and turned into fiction; and secondly, that a new version of the same instances is written, where they are either victimised or valorised.

A carefully curated media ecosystem—constituted by social media trolls and mainstream news channels—works towards cementing the authenticity of these versions. This has been a tendency that has steadily crept in across all domains, from history textbooks to policymaking. But nowhere has the attempt been as brazen as it is in cinema. Historically, the right has always been perceptive of the power of mass media like films. It is not a matter of chance that Lal Krishna Advani, a veteran BJP-RSS leader, was a film correspondent with Organiser in the early years of his career.

Therefore, when a film like L2 Empuraan, with mainstream Malayalam stars, attempts to reference Gujarat violence in its narrative, the potential of such an attempt, however flawed, is seen as a threat to the right-wing agenda. This is not just because of what narrative it represents, but because the film itself becomes an important text within popular culture that has recorded these historical events for posterity—a record that has evoked a forcefully silenced history of the violent marginalisation of Muslims.

Thus, no matter the cuts introduced or the apologies issued, L2 Empuraan and the controversy surrounding it will henceforth remain documented in public memory for this evocation, which cannot be easily erased by the forces in power. This is perhaps why the hate campaign against the film, despite its ‘voluntary’ cuts, continues unabated.

Apeksha Priyadarshini is Senior Copy Editor, 바카라. She writes on cinema, art, politics, gender & social justice.

This article is part of 바카라라이브 바카라 April 21, 2025 issue 'Adolescence' which looks at the forces shaping teenage boys today—online misogyny, incel forums, bullying, and the chaos of the manosphere. It appeared in print as 'Memory Is A Country'.