The general rejoicing over Chiranjeevi, Andhra Pradesh’s most flamboyant star, getting into active politics takes us back to 1984 – the year when Amitabh Bachchan’s party won the elections. The more obsessive will probably see shades of similarity between Praja Rajyam and the apocryphal Garibon Ki Party. We hope the similarities end there, though.

This being a film column, we’d like to clarify that we are not alluding to Bachchan’s short lived stint as a Congress MP (which began in 1985) but to his role in the film Inquilaab that preceded his entry into active politics by a few months.

It’s fair to say that whatever shape Chiranjeevi’s politics assume, they will be no match for the time when Amar Nath (Amitabh Bachchan) almost became chief minister . Directed by T Rama Rao, Inquilaab is a decidedly odd choice of a role for a man on the verge of entering politics. As one of the last few ‘angry young man’ films, it stands taller than most of its peers for reasons other than its outrageous and controversial conclusion.

Amar Nath is an archetypal 1980s Hindi film hero. He’s forced to work below his station (he sells bhel puri) in spite of that theoretically most powerful of all qualifications: an MA. While some of the plot points like the inability to get a good job without influence seem hopelessly dated , there are copious fight sequences that keep things interesting.

Amar unwittingly becomes the protégé of the leader of the opposition, Shankar Narayan (Kadar Khan). Smarting after having been thrown out of the ruling party on corruption charges, Narayan uses Amar, helping him get a job as a police inspector, to further his own ends. Trapped by both Narayan and his father-in-law (Utpal Dutt), Amar becomes little more than a hired gun. After murdering the infamous smuggler Koya Koya Atachi (Shakti Kapoor), he resigns from the police force and cashes in his equity as encounter specialist to make a foray into politics.

What follows would strictly be getting into spoiler territory but it’s frankly one of the principal reasons to watch the film. On the day he’s supposed to be voted CM, Amar reviews his cabinet (which features a food adulterator in charge of the food portfolio and an illiterate in charge of education among others), whips out a machine gun and shoots every last one of his ministers dead.

It’s a scene of rare cathartic intensity; vastly superior to much smaller scale massacres in the likes of Shool and Rang De Basanti. It also got the film into considerable hot water with the censors around the time of release – the scene as it stands is rumoured to be a sanitised version of a more detailed bloodbath.

Inquilaab is driven by a very convincing performance from Bachchan at a time when he’d played similar roles so often; he could’ve just phoned it in for all anyone cared. Apart from a hilarious cabaret sequence where both Amar and Koya Koya Atachi groove to Disco 84, the other musical highlight is the song Abhimanyu which in spite of some very ham fisted symbolism is one of the most unusual songs in Hindi cinema both in terms lyrics and treatment.