[IMC-Editorial] [India Thinkers Net]Censorship: Unofficial might

[India Thinkers Net at Zinester.com]

Magazine Section / The Hindu
Dec 07, 2003

Censorship: Unofficial might

The recent experiences of some independent
documentary filmmakers, who chose to look at the
events in Gujarat, post-Godhra, illustrate a
disturbing reality - the contradictions between
the opinions and ideas of the unofficial censors
and those of the official ones, says KALPANA
SHARMA. Here, she looks at the larger issue of
the freedom of expression.

IF the official censor does not get you, the
unofficial one will. And this can happen in a
country that guarantees freedom of expression.
The recent experiences of over half a dozen
independent documentary filmmakers, who chose to
look at the events in Gujarat, post-Godhra,
vividly illustrate this contradictory reality.

Every single one of these filmmakers has faced an
uphill battle - either to obtain a censorship
certificate, or to find people willing to take
the risk to organise screenings without the
official stamp of approval or to persuade a
television channel to telecast their films. As a
result, very few people have seen the
over-half-a-dozen films that have recorded the
terrible events in Gujarat of last year.
Ironically, more people outside India have
probably seen these films than people within the
country. And hardly anyone in Gujarat has viewed
these documentaries.

These experiences raise a number of important
questions about the freedom of information, about
documenting contemporary history and about the
right of people to know all sides of a story as
complex as the Gujarat communal carnage. If
official and commercial media does not
investigate such political events, is it not the
responsibility of independent journalists and
filmmakers to do this job? Yet for doing
something that is important for us as a society,
these same people are literally made to walk on
hot coals. Apart from the perennial problems of
finding funds and filming in areas where they
often encounter hostile political groups, these
filmmakers are confronted with at least three
immediate hurdles.

The first is the official censor board. For
public showings of any film, a certificate from
the Board of Film Certification has to be
obtained. If you make films on birds and bees,
there is no problem. But talk about war,
communalism, sexuality, exploitation, even
poverty, and you have to encounter the entire
might of the political establishment even though,
on paper, the board is supposed to be free of
politics.

The filmmaker has the option of not approaching
the Censor Board at all and restricting
screenings of the film to private shows. But
there is always a risk that these screenings will
either be disrupted, or that the police will
decide that they are public and therefore require
a censor certificate. In the absence of a
certificate, the police are within their rights
to confiscate copies of your film. Or, as
happened in Mumbai last year, a private showing
of Anand Patwardhan's award-winning documentary
"War and Peace" had to be cancelled at the last
minute because the regional head of the censor
board decided to be pro-active and inform the
police that the film had not yet got an all-clear.

Another option now available to filmmakers is
television. No longer is Doordarshan the only
channel. And for telecasts, the censor board does
not come into the picture. Yet private channels
do not take risks with political films. Unlike
television channels in the West, which often buy
the rights to telecast documentaries by
independent filmmakers, no Indian TV channel has
done this. Thus commercial interests act as the
third check to the dissemination of these films.

Of course, the 24-hour private news channels did
play a role in informing the country about the
carnage in Gujarat. We saw the arson, we heard
the cries of the wounded and the survivors of the
carnage, we saw their wounds, and we were
repelled at the sight of the death and the
destruction. We heard the militant and crazed
voices of those who justified their actions in
the name of religion.

Yet, all these images came and went. They did not
remain to remind us, say a year later, that what
happened then could happen again, that there has
not been a closure on those events, that justice
has failed the majority of the victims of the
violence and that the ideology that fuelled the
killings continues to reign supreme - and
unrepentant.

This is precisely what some of these documentary
filmmakers have tried to do. They have
painstakingly researched the reasons for the
Gujarat violence, they have recorded the voices
of many of those whom the media overlooked, they
have tried to place these events within the
larger issues of economics and politics and they
have attempted to explain the consequences for
the rest of India if no one is held accountable
for such a carnage.

Yet, the tragedy is that the majority of these
films will never be seen, particularly in
Gujarat. The few attempts that have been made to
show these films have resulted in disruption and
forced the filmmakers to grab their prints and
run out of the State.

The latest such event took place on October 20
when journalist-turned-filmmaker Shubhradeep
Chakravorty tried to arrange a private viewing of
his film, "Godhra Tak - the terror trail" in
Ahmedabad. He had to change the venue at the last
minute because of threats, and at the end of the
screening at the new location he was surrounded
by members of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) who
demanded that he apologise for making the film.
Later, the crime branch of the police came asking
for the filmmaker and wanted a copy of his film.
Chakravorty picked up his prints of the film and
fled the city.

This film investigates the Godhra train fire of
February 27, 2002, and in which 59 people died.
It is in the genre of an investigative
journalistic film. Chakravorty covers many angles
that the print and electronic media have
overlooked. For instance, he managed to locate
four passengers who were on the train and who are
not kar sevaks. They describe the behaviour of
the kar sevaks on the train. Chakravorty also
located people in Rudauli village in Faizabad
district, who were roughed up by the kar sevaks
at the station as they made their way to Ayodhya.

Even more telling is the evidence presented by
the former director of the Central Forensic
Laboratory, Dr. V.N. Sehgal, who studied the
report of the Ahmedabad-based Forensic
Laboratory, checked the burnt out carriage and
vestibule and said on camera that there was no
way that the inflammable liquid could have been
poured from the outside.

Chakravorty's is the kind of film some television
channels in the West would produce to investigate
an incident like Godhra. In India, despite the
growth of such 24-hour news channels, nothing of
this kind is telecast. The channels do their own
investigations but the formats restrict the depth
of such stories. None of the channels has a
dedicated team that is given the time and the
space to follow an issue in detail and come up
with a film that sheds new light.


IMAGES FROM SABRANG, GAUHAR and ANAND PATWARDHAN



"Godhra Tak" has been preceded by a number of
other films. One of the first off the block was
"Aakrosh", a 20-minute film by Geeta Chawda and
Ramesh Pimple of the People's Media Initiative,
Mumbai. The film was submitted to the censor
board in February this year. Within a week, the
application was rejected on the grounds that "the
film depicts violence and reminds the people
about Gujarat riots last year. It shows the
government and the police in a bad light ..." The
film was banned. An appeal to the revising
committee did not yield positive results, nor to
the Appellate Tribunal. Pimple says that they
have been left with no option but to turn to the
Bombay High Court where he is filing an appeal.
In the meantime, he plans to show the film to as
many people as he can through private showings.

Gauhar Raza, Delhi-based activist and scientist
with the Council for Scientific and Industrial
Research, is not interested in battling with the
censors. He has made two films on Gujarat,
"Zulmaton ke daur mein (In Dark Times"), which
was on the 1998 elections and "Junoon Ke Badte
Kadam (Evil stalks the land") which was on the
recent communal violence in the State. The first
one was made for television, for the now defunct
TVI Company. It was telecast just once and then
abandoned. Both films, he says, are part of his
battle against the spread of communalism. He
plans to use them in ways that generate
discussion, especially among young people. But
even this has not been easy. Screenings of his
films were stopped in Goa during the elections
last year and at the end of the year, a showing
in a Mumbai college was stopped when the Shiv
Sena raised objections. The police confiscated
the tapes on the grounds that Raza did not have a
censor certificate, something that is not
required for a private showing.

Award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker Suma
Josson's film "Gujarat - A laboratory of Hindu
Rashtra" was shot in three days just before the
2002 State assembly elections when Narendra Modi
and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) were
returned to power. She concentrated on 14
villages in Anand district that had been affected
by the violence. But Josson has had hardly any
showings of the film in India. A few showings in
other States, particularly Uttar Pradesh, have
often elicited a hostile response from audiences
which refuse to believe that the scale of
violence was as great as shown in the film. She
says these audiences questioned the authenticity
of the film going so far as to accuse her of
shooting the entire film in one room!

Josson has not submitted this film for
censorship. Her previous film on the Mumbai riots
of 1992-93 - "Bombay's Blood Yatra" - took two
years before it was finally cleared without any
cuts by the appellate tribunal.

For battling the censors there are few
documentary filmmakers who can match Anand
Patwardhan's record. This Mumbai-based filmmaker,
who has collected dozens of awards in India and
around the world for his impressive array of
films, has fought to get a censor certificate for
every single film that he has made. This has
often meant years in court.

Patwardhan feels that a censor certificate is a
kind of insurance policy for political filmmakers
because it denies the police the right to disrupt
showings or confiscate the films. Also, State
television is left with no excuse to telecast
films like his that have won national awards.
Yet, despite his record of struggle with the
censor, and the plethora of precedents set by
successive court judgments, every time he
approaches the censor with a new film, he goes
through an almost identical battle. His latest
victory is getting a censor certificate for his
epic three-hour film "War and Peace". The censor
had demanded 22 cuts. Patwardhan succeeded in
getting it passed without a single cut. He says,
"It is my constitutional right to make films. Why
should the censor board behave like a communal
body?" He holds that other filmmakers should also
submit their films for censorship and fight the
system. "If you don't fight it out legally here
at home, you are left with no option but to show
your film abroad," he says. "This would defeat
the very purpose of making the film."

Another filmmaker who is following in
Patwardhan's footsteps is Rakesh Sharma. His film
on the Gujarat earthquake of January 2001,
"Aftershocks" created a stir because it revealed
the other agendas at work under the guise of
relief and rehabilitation. Sharma managed to get
that through the censors, but he is apprehensive
about his new three-part film on Gujarat. But
Sharma too is prepared to fight it out because
ultimately, he believes, the censorship laws must
be challenged.

Stalin K., an Ahmedabad-based activist and
filmmaker, whose film on Gujarat is "a work in
progress", says that the censorship rules only
apply to those making films that question
dominant politics. Thus, the VHP, he points out,
has made many short films on the Gujarat
incidents of last year, and on Godhra. These are
readily available on CD at any VHP office and are
being shown all over the place. There has neither
been any disruption of these showings, nor has
the police asked whether the showings can be
deemed as public showings and therefore demanded
a censorship certificate from the VHP. On the
other hand, in Gujarat today even films that have
censorship certificates, such as Patwardhan's
"War and Peace" have a problem finding a sponsor.

The experiences of these filmmakers raise issues
that need to be debated more widely. They
illustrate the growing intolerance of dissent, of
independent documentation, and of creativity that
does not fall within the dominant norms. More
than the workings of the official censor board,
it is the actions of the unofficial censors that
should worry anyone who is concerned about
guarding rights such as the right to freedom of
expression.


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