There is a particular kind of courage that does not make the evening news. It does not arrive with a victory speech or a garland of marigolds. It is the courage of showing up, day after day, to a fight you are almost certainly going to lose and refusing to stop anyway. That is the argument at the heart of Ruke Na Jo (Unstoppable), Prateek Shekhar's documentary screened at the Press Club of India recently.
Part of the larger Election Diaries series, the film follows CPI(ML) candidate Sandeep Saurabh during his 2024 Lok Sabha campaign in Nalanda, Bihar, Nitish Kumar's home turf, where the sitting MP had been winning by margins of three to four lakh votes. Saurabh challenged that fortress with volunteers, 20-rupee citizen donations, and a will to fight against a powerful government with clout and corporate backing.
The film opens with Saurabh on his way to a rally in a moving car, recounting his political journey, the flat agrarian expanse of Bihar rolling past -- a man in motion, a landscape indifferent to his ambitions.
The fields do not care about his manifesto. Bihar simply continues vast, unhurried, ancient in its indifference while this one man talks into the middle distance about why he is doing this, and why he will not stop.
Political contributions, commitments
It is an image that could read as futility. Shekhar frames it as something closer to faith. When the film closes with the identical shot, the effect is quietly devastating. He is still moving. The landscape has not changed and yet everything has.
Consider what twenty rupees means as a political act. Less than the cost of a chai. It cannot buy airtime, fund a booth agent, or move a single WhatsApp broadcast. And yet CPI(ML) built its Nalanda campaign on exactly these contributions not as a romantic gesture, but because it had no alternative. "Elections have become a very expensive exercise for parties," Shekhar said. "So if you don't have the means, how can you fight the elections?" For a party without corporate backing, democratic participation is effectively crowdfunded from people who themselves have almost nothing.
Shekhar's interest in Saurabh stretches back four years. "The conviction he was talking with, the clarity, that was very inspiring to me." The choice of subject was also ideologically deliberate - he was drawn to CPIML's remarkable 2020 performance, winning 12 out of 19 Bihar assembly seats at a time when Left parties were losing ground nationally. "There was a certain resurgence which was something I wanted to look at." And then there was the electoral bonds question. CPIML's opposition to the scheme was not merely moral, it was a practical move.
Parties that accepted bond money gained sophisticated data infrastructure: voter profiling, micro-targeted messaging, algorithmically optimised WhatsApp campaigns. CPIML knocked on doors instead. "In the last ten years, politics is less on the ground and more on the newsroom, social media and WhatsApp," Shekhar observed. In 2024, opting out of that economy means fighting a digital air war with an infantry that runs on chai and conviction.
A campaign without frills
Shot with a two-person crew over 17 to 18 days, the camera is close, observational and unhurried, documenting not just Saurabh's campaign but also the concerns, frustrations and aspirations of the communities he seeks to represent . Long takes convey the grind - Saurabh on the road ten to eleven hours a day, sixty to seventy days straight. No reconstructions, no narration. Just the campaign as it actually was.
A standout sequence places CPIML's Deepankar Bhattacharya and RJD's Manoj Jha in direct conversation about direct benefit schemes Bhattacharya dismissing them as a distraction from structural justice, Jha framing them as an inalienable right. The film lets that tension breathe. "Two different parties, five parties sitting together and voting in itself, this is a very unique scenario," Shekhar noted.
Saurabh lost by 1.7 lakh votes but cut the opposition's winning margin by over two lakh from previous elections. "Even when he lost, there was grace in his loss. He was ready to bounce back the next second," Shekhar said. "Stories of win are short-lived. Stories of fighting back is what everyday existence is about."
What the film indicts is not any single opponent but the infrastructure of modern Indian elections; an ecosystem where money buys not just advertising but organisational capacity, data, and reach. A campaign running on twenty-rupee donations cannot buy that. It can only refuse to need it, and build something slower and more fragile in its place.
The final image, Saurabh back in that car, Bihar scrolling behind him, refuses closure. The road continues. So does he.