What if I told you that this lady had something to do with Sholay?
Can you crack it? No?
Let me explain.
But before that let me share with you a trivia.
We are all familiar with Sholay’s ending → Thakur and Gabbar fight, and at the very end (like it always happens in Hindi movies), the police come and arrest Gabbar.
However, this was not the ending that Sippy had originally created.
As per the original script by Sippy, Thakur fights with Gabbar. Thakur beats the hell out of Gabbar. Thakur sees a knife like thing protruding out of the pillar where he was tied and his hands were cut off. Thakur does a flying kick on Gabbar that pushes Gabbar to the pillar with the protruding knife. Gabbar gets pierced by the knife and dies.
You are probably thinking, “Hmmm… all fine, good trivia, but what the hell does this have to do with Indira Gandhi?”
Well, here comes the real trivia.
Madam Indira had declared the emergency on 25th Jun 1975. Sholay was launched about six weeks later on 15th Aug 1975.
And emergency being emergency, the censor board did not like the idea of vigilante justice, about people taking law into their own hands. Perhaps there was a lurking fear that censor board felt that this kind of ending might inspire people to disregard the police in particular and the government bodies in general.
The censor board forced Sippy to change the ending, where the police arrest Gabbar. That was their way of reiterating, that the “Police / Government bodies are the supreme at all times, what to speak of now during emergency”