Director Rahul Dholakia on Netflix’s Hum Hindustani, “It celebrates effort taken to find every Indian and make that person a voter”
How do you conduct a free and fair election in a country where millions of people cannot read, birth certificates and official records are scarce, communication infrastructure is limited, and the machinery required to organize a nationwide election has never existed before? That’s the crux of the story of filmmaker Rahul Dholakia’s upcoming Netflix film, Hum Hindustani.
Starring Saif Ali Khan, Pratik Gandhi and Deepak Dobriyal in lead roles, alongside Mimi Chakraborty, Sarika, and Shraddha Dangar, Hum Hindustani revisits a landmark chapter of Indian history: India’s first general election held between 1951 and 1952. Set in the fragile early years of Independence, the film centres on a group of officials tasked with overcoming extraordinary administrative, logistical and social challenges to bring an entire nation into the democratic process for the first time, at a scale never attempted before.
Speaking exclusively to Bollywood Hungama, Dholakia says the story began when he started reading extensively about elections while hunting for a new subject after the release of his Shah Rukh Khan-starrer Raees. Later in 2019, when the CAA protest erupted over the passing of the Citizenship Amendment Act, which allegedly undermines India’s secular principles by discriminating against Muslims in its provisions for granting citizenship to certain religious minorities from neighbouring countries, he began asking a basic question: how did Indian democracy actually begin? His research led him to the 1951-52 elections when India invented the machinery of the world’s largest democracy from almost nothing.
“I was wondering what the origin of democracy was in our country and how it started. And then I came across a very interesting story about the way our first election happened and also a parallel subplot, which is a very important plot in my film, about how the princely states did not want democracy to happen,” Dholakia revealed. That discovery became the foundation for Hum Hindustani.
How do you know you’re an Indian? The extraordinary challenge of India’s First Election
For Dholakia, the most fascinating aspect of the story is the monumental administrative undertaking behind the first general election. “Think about the context: In the 1950s, we were still in the telegram age. Communication systems were limited. There were no computers or modern databases to maintain and collect people’s records. Gandhi was no more; refugees were coming in, there was chaos all over the place, and communal riots were happening. It was a daunting task by every means. To overcome every challenge and to come out victorious and set an example for the rest of the world — that is the story,” explained the director, who has previously helmed films such as Parzania (2005), Lamha (2010), Raees (2017) and Agni (2024).
Dholakia highlighted the scale of the challenge in a country where nearly 80% of people were illiterate. The most basic questions presented extreme challenges. “We have never done this before. How do you have birth certificates? How do you know you are an Indian? How do you know you are not?” The Election Commission had to develop procedures, build infrastructure, and authorize the identities of citizens despite comprehensive documentation. We didn’t even know how to make the ballot papers and ballot boxes. We had to do it without pretty much help, without the help of the British Empire, because they were gone post-independence. There was no money. And we had to do a free and fair election,” Dholakia said.
The achievement therefore becomes even more significant when viewed against the social realities of the time. The general election successfully brought people from vastly different linguistic, religious, caste, and economic backgrounds into a common democratic process. By comparison, the United States still restricted African-American voting in many places into the 1960s, and parts of Europe lagged on women’s suffrage. India set out to do it all at once and largely succeeded.
“Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Brahmins, Dalits, name them, brotherhood, no matter caste, age, male, female, rich, poor, zamindar, kisan, all in one line to vote,” Dholakia said.
How creatively difficult it is to translate such a historically significant but complex episode into a compelling film? For Dholakia, it was turning record-keeping, voter listing, identity verification and ballot logistics into something visual and propulsive while retaining the historical authenticity of the events. “A lot of the detailing is actually clerical work which they do, and that makes it quite boring cinematically. So, it was a challenge trying to write it visually for the visual medium.”
Interestingly, Hum Hindostani was not always conceived to be a feature film. Given the breadth of the subject and the multiple strands of the narrative, Dholakia had also developed it as a limited series before eventually setting it in the feature film format. “Series was definitely on the cards because we had written a structural breakdown when I was supposed to do this for someone, but eventually that did not happen. I had worked out a series, a flow chart of a series. It’s a good subject to be explored as a limited series. But then I had also written this as a film, and I just think that sometimes what people agree to make becomes the material and becomes the medium,” revealed the filmmaker.
Why Hum Hindustani feels more relevant than ever amid the current Election Commission controversy
Hum Hindustani is expected to premiere in November 2026, though the date hasn’t been officially announced yet. The film arrives at a strikingly relevant moment. India’s electoral institutions themselves are facing intense public and political scrutiny, with Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar facing demands for his resignation amid controversy surrounding the Election Commission’s Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls. Allegedly, more than 130 million names have been removed from draft lists across dozens of states and territories, according to an investigative report by Indian Express. Youth-led Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) and leading opposition parties are seeking electoral reforms and the resignation of Kumar over allegations of manipulating voters’ lists.
Hum Hindustani, however, should not be mistaken for a direct commentary on the present-day Election Commission. It’s broadly a period film about how administrators of independent India had to create an electoral system almost from scratch, bringing millions of people into a democratic process despite limited resources and infrastructure. It revisits the birth of India’s electoral democracy and the extraordinary lengths to which the country’s first election administrators went to ensure that millions of citizens could participate.
“There’s a line in the film: Every Indian should be allowed to vote. Hum Hindustani celebrates the effort taken to find every Indian and make that person a voter,” Dholakia signed off.
Hum Hindustani was announced during its 2026 slate launch in February 2026. Produced by Nikkhil Advani’s Emmay Entertainment, the film was mainly shot in Rajasthan and Mumbai between March and June 2025. The film marks Saif Ali Khan’s third collaboration with Netflix following Sacred Games and Kartavya.
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