Ramayana, The Oscars And The Chief Minister As The New Publicist

Maharashtra chief minister Devendra Fadnavis has officially joined the film promotion business. At the inauguration of Namit Malhotra’s Prime Focus Studio on 6 August 2026, he declared he would be “very disappointed” if Nitesh Tiwari’s Ramayana, starring Ranbir Kapoor, Sai Pallavi and Yash, fails to win an Oscar. “It’s not a film of a decade,” he announced, “it’s a film of a millennium.” Earlier, at the Waves Summit, he had already been “amazed” by its scale. When a CM starts campaigning this openly, the marketing budget has just received a free government upgrade. This is no isolated outburst. It is the latest evidence of a larger shift: Politicians have become Bollywood’s most enthusiastic publicists. PM Narendra Modi has repeatedly endorsed films like The Kashmir Files, The Kerala Story and Article 370 as correctives to “fake narratives.” Amit Shah has praised select projects from special screenings. Yogi Adityanath has made multiple films tax-free and personally felicitated their teams. Across BJP ruled states, official blessings, tax waivers and photo-ops have become as routine as the interval. History offers precedents. MGR and NT Rama Rao built political careers on their screen images. Karunanidhi wrote scripts from the CM’s office. The difference today is the scale, the coordination, and the open fusion of mythology with nationalism as reliable box-office fuel. Ramayana sits perfectly at this intersection; big, mythological, technologically ambitious, and timed for maximum cultural resonance. By elevating it to a civilisational project, Fadnavis has given the film a halo no conventional campaign can buy. The politicians are no longer silent well-wishers. They are the new faces of the campaign, delivering the soundbites themselves. In today’s India, the red carpet increasingly leads straight to the corridors of power.