Five Weeks After Rang De Basanti Opened, an Anonymous Text Message Brought 2,500 People to India Gate With Candles

On the evening of Saturday 4 March 2006, staff of the Delhi news weekly Tehelka set up a table and two chairs on the lawns at India Gate, with one battery-operated loudspeaker and a lot of candles. “We kept it simple,” Shoma Chaudhury of Tehelka wrote two weeks later, and close to 2,500 people came. A text message from an unknown sender had called them there.

When the microphone went round, Chaudhury reported, “Several people who took the mike that day referred to Rang De Basanti: at times it seemed more than the injustice itself, the film was their inspiration.” Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra’s film had opened on 26 January, five weeks earlier, and has its own characters hold a candlelight vigil at India Gate. It turned 20 on 26 January 2026.

Nine acquitted, and a text message from nobody

Jessica Lal, a 34-year-old model who was serving drinks at a party at a restaurant in Qutub Colonnade, south Delhi, was shot dead on the night of 29 to 30 April 1999. The BBC reported that the man convicted of the killing, Manu Sharma, son of the Congress politician Venod Sharma, shot her after she refused to serve him a drink. Recording of evidence began in 2001, and The Hindu’s chronology records three eyewitnesses turning hostile, meaning they went back on their earlier statements, in the space of two weeks that May.

On 21 February 2006 the trial court acquitted all nine accused for lack of evidence. The Swarthmore College database of nonviolent campaigns gives the reasoning as the police’s failure to find the weapon, a confession Sharma had retracted, and witnesses who changed their stories. The Swarthmore database adds that the news channel NDTV collected more than 200,000 text messages petitioning for a retrial.

Tehelka’s editors wanted to know whether people would do more than text. “Delhi’s middle class is infamously apathetic and insular,” Chaudhury wrote, and the editors wondered whether anyone would “take its outrage to the street.” They sent an anonymous message of their own: “If the Jessica case has upset you, show you care. There is a protest gathering at India Gate next Saturday, March 4 at 5.30pm. Be there. Help keep up the pressure. Demand justice.”

Counts of the crowd differ. Chaudhury put it at close to 2,500. Rediff’s report that night spoke of “thousands” who lit candles and shouted “We want Justice for Jessica.” The Swarthmore database says the vigil “was inspired by a movie.” The researcher Ritesh Mehta, writing in Transformative Works and Cultures, adds a caution: it is not clear whether Tehelka chose India Gate on purpose to echo the film. He notes that candlelight vigils were unusual in 2006, and that the Times of India called them “a novel idea.” In the film, the friends hold a vigil at India Gate for a dead comrade, and the police break it up, as the film scholar Pavitra Sundar describes it.

The courts moved faster after that. Delhi Police filed an appeal on 13 March 2006, the High Court heard it day by day from 3 October, and on 18 December it convicted Sharma, Vikas Yadav and Amardeep Singh Gill. Sharma received a life term on 20 December, the other two four years each, and the Supreme Court upheld the sentences on 19 April 2010 (The Hindu). The BBC wrote that the acquittals “sparked public outrage, with protest rallies and a sustained media campaign” and that the police then appealed. It does not single out the vigil.

Nobody in Bombay or Delhi wanted a Bhagat Singh film

Mehra did not set out to make a film about students. He and the writer Kamlesh Pandey first wrote a straight historical script, he told Ankur Pathak of HuffPost India in 2020, covering Jallianwala Bagh, the Kakori train robbery and the Assembly bombing on the way to the hangings. They hired a banquet hall in Parel, in Bombay, and talked it over with 20 or 25 college students.

“They were more about Nike and Nokia,” Mehra recalled. “They didn’t give two hoots about history.” In Delhi, he said, students told him other Bhagat Singh films were already being made. The Tribune counts three that came out in 2002 alone. Mehra’s answer was to put those students into the script. Pandey suggested a filmmaker struggling to make a film about freedom fighters, and that became the character of Sue.

Sue is British, and Mehra has defended that choice. “Why should the British not feel that they were the oppressors?” he told Pathak. “Why shouldn’t one of them turn around and say that they indeed were the oppressors and do something about it?” Pathak notes the standing criticism, that the film uses a white outsider to wake Indian youth.

A British diary and five Delhi students

In Sundar’s account, Sue McKinley is a young London filmmaker who finds her grandfather’s diary, written while he was a colonial prison official in Lahore. She travels to Delhi to make a docudrama about the revolutionaries of the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association and casts a group of university friends. The historical scenes are in sepia and the present day in colour.

The same actors play both sides. Aamir Khan is DJ in 2006 and Chandrashekhar Azad in Sue’s film. Siddharth is Karan and Bhagat Singh, Sharman Joshi is Sukhi and Rajguru, Kunal Kapoor is Aslam and Ashfaqulla Khan, Atul Kulkarni is Laxman Pandey and Ram Prasad Bismil, and Soha Ali Khan is Sonia and Durgawati Devi, according to the writer Uttaran Das Gupta in Business Standard. Alice Patten plays Sue, and R. Madhavan plays Ajay, an Air Force pilot.

Laxman is an invention. Mehra told Hollywood Reporter India that he created him as a young man swayed by an ideology that feels like empowerment, intolerant towards Muslims at the start. Playing Bismil changes something in him, Mehra said, and he ends up apologising to Aslam, who plays Ashfaqulla Khan.

Sue’s film covers, by Sundar’s list, the Jallianwala Bagh massacre of 1919, the Kakori robbery of 1925, the Simon Commission boycott of 1928, the beating that preceded Lala Lajpat Rai’s death, the killing of the police officer John Saunders, the Assembly bombing of 1929, the torture of prisoners, and the hanging of Bhagat Singh, Rajguru and Sukhdev in 1931. tuput’s pieces on Bhagat Singh and on Jallianwala Bagh cover that ground.

The Air Force asked for the word MiG to go

The film was due out on 19 January 2006 and slipped a week, Mehra told Hollywood Reporter India, because of censor trouble. The Central Board of Film Certification asked for a no-objection certificate from the Defence Ministry. Mehra said officials stonewalled him and advised him to drop references to MiG aircraft and not to call the minister by his post. His team refused.

Mehra gave Pathak a fuller account. The Air Force and the Defence Secretary had watched the film at Raksha Bhavan and wanted the names replaced. “Do I call the MiG plane an Atlas Cycle?” Mehra asked his team. The producer, Ronnie Screwvala, told the Air Force in writing that nothing would change, and the team was ready to go to court even if that delayed the release by six months.

The censor board’s chief, the actor Sharmila Tagore, suggested a screening for the Defence Minister, Pranab Mukherjee. The chiefs of the army, navy and air force came too. By Mehra’s recollection, Mukherjee said: “I’m the Defence Minister of the country. My job is to defend the country, not to censor films.” The Air Force chief still hesitated, Mehra said, because a pilot’s mother might ask why her son flew a MiG-21. The service agreed to the release on one condition, a title card on MiG crashes, which the team had already planned.

The Tribune’s UNI report of 12 January noted earlier reports that the Air Force had objected to a “distorted portrayal” of its personnel before giving its seal of approval. The same report said Maneka Gandhi, chairing the Animal Welfare Board of India, had sent the censors a notice over animals used in shooting without permission. Pathak also notes a scene in which the Defence Minister’s face is merged with that of General Reginald Dyer, who ordered the firing at Jallianwala Bagh.

A title card, and an ending shot in eight cities

The title card said 206 MiG planes had crashed and 78 pilots had died between 1990 and 2005, according to Pathak. In Mehra’s telling, the Air Force’s public relations officer said more MiGs had crashed than the card showed. Mehra said the idea of tying the history to the present came from an NDTV documentary, Coffins in Tricolour, about faulty MiGs that the press called “flying coffins,” and from the then Defence Minister, George Fernandes, taking a “joyride” in one to prove they were safe. The sight made Mehra angry enough, he said, that he put a minister in the film and had him shot.

Days before release he scrapped his ending. By his account the original finale showed some 4,000 Delhi University students carrying the dead through the streets, the most expensive scene in the film, and it was not working. He rang NDTV’s co-founder Radhika Roy, flew to Bengaluru and filmed engineering students reacting to the film’s events, with an NDTV crew. His assistant covered Kolkata, Guwahati and Lucknow, and the crew shot in eight cities in four days. “Nobody, absolutely nobody other than my core team, knew that I was doing this,” Mehra told Pathak.

A song older than the film, and the score Rahman built

The title comes from a song. “Mera Rang De Basanti Chola” is attributed to Bismil, according to Business Standard. The Tribune places its writing at Lucknow Central jail in 1927, in Basant, the spring season of yellow, while Outlook says Gorakhpur jail. The Tribune reports that the first film to put it on screen as a song was Shaheed Bhagat Singh (1963), sung by Mohammed Rafi, and that the best-known version came in Manoj Kumar’s Shaheed (1965).

A. R. Rahman composed the score and Prasoon Joshi wrote the lyrics. Pathak reports that the dialogue was first written in English by Rensil D’Silva and translated into Hindi by Joshi. Mehra made 23 trips to Chennai in 50 days to work with Rahman, who prefers to record at night, Pathak writes. Outlook’s Rini Dasgupta says Rahman has described “Luka Chuppi,” with Lata Mangeshkar as the mother and Rahman as her son, as inspired by Bob Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.” She adds that the song concerns the cost of war machinery, which she says the film otherwise ignores in its glorification of the army. The Arabic refrain in “Khalbali” grew from a voice Rahman heard in a London nightclub, according to Outlook. The title track was sung by Daler Mehndi and K. S. Chithra.

₹96.47 crore and four National Awards

Bollywood Hungama lists the film’s India net collection at ₹53.08 crore (530.8 million rupees) and its worldwide gross at ₹96.47 crore (964.7 million rupees), with the verdict “Hit.” Pathak’s profile says the film earned over ₹50 crore at the box office.

The National Film Awards for 2005 were announced in August 2007 after what the Daily Star called a delay of nearly a year due to court cases. Rang De Basanti took the prize for best popular film providing wholesome entertainment, and Naresh Iyer won best male playback singer for “Roobaroo.” Outlook’s reunion report counts four National Awards in all. At the 52nd Filmfare Awards in Mumbai, the Associated Press reported, it won best film, best director for Mehra and best music for Rahman. Mehta records a nomination for the BAFTA for best foreign-language film. Business Standard says the Indian government chose it as its entry for the 79th Academy Awards.

What the film did to people, and what it left out

Sundar writes that the film “spurred middle class urbanites” into political debate and action “in a way that few Hindi films previously had,” and that for a brief while candlelight vigils became “de rigeur.” The engineer and activist Ankit Lal wrote in 2016 that the film inspired him to join the India Against Corruption movement in 2011, Das Gupta reports. Mehta calls the Jessica Lal mobilisation “flash activism,” a temporary burst of protest, and Sundar, citing him, calls it fleeting.

Sundar also argues that the same film emboldened upper-caste students at elite engineering, management and medical colleges to form Youth for Equality, which campaigned against caste reservations. She counts that among the effects that ought to give pause. She faults the film for what it dropped from the history. It “diminishes” Bhagat Singh’s and his comrades’ “internationalist, socialist political commitments,” in her words, and she adds that some critics found it sidelined its female characters and saw only an elite point of view. Das Gupta himself argues that rewatching it now perhaps evokes only nostalgia.

Twenty years on

“We borrowed from real life and then real life borrowed from us,” Mehra told Hollywood Reporter India in February 2026. “The candlelight vigil became a nationwide idiom for protesting peacefully all over the country.” Outlook reported on 8 February 2026 that Aamir Khan, Sharman Joshi, Siddharth, Kunal Kapoor and Atul Kulkarni attended a 20th anniversary screening in Mumbai with Mehra and the producers Ronnie Screwvala and Sidharth Roy Kapur. Madhavan, Waheeda Rehman and Kirron Kher did not.

India retired its last MiG-21s on 26 September 2025, and the Associated Press report that day said the crashes that earned the MiGs the nickname “flying coffins” inspired the film. The Defence Ministry had signed a contract the day before for 97 more Tejas fighters, with deliveries due from 2027. The AP gave the reported count of MiG crashes between 1971 and April 2012: 482, killing 171 pilots, 39 civilians, 8 service personnel and 1 aircrew. The crash data has not been updated since.