(((An Indian peacenik poet explaining the Aamir Khan situation to English-speaking Pakistanis. I'm buying this pitch – this looks to me to be pretty much the story: means, motives, opportunity, it's all here.)))
http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2006%5C05%5C29%5Cstory_29-5-2006_pg3_2
The neighbors in Pakistan are always eager to discuss the rope in the house of the hanged man
Monday, May 29, 2006
VIEW: Far right’s war on a film — J Sri Raman
The religious garb of the far right never concealed its real aims. Behind its divisive communalism lay a design for destructive “development”, with no place for the people or peace. The BJP and the parivar may have acted as censors of anti-Hindutva films in the past, but they now seek a mob-imposed ban on films made by anyone who mocks the idea of “development”
This is not the first time the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has risen in furious revolt against a film. The party and the rest of the parivar (the far-right “family”) as well as its allies, have periodically sought to empower themselves by waging a war on the most popular products of mass entertainment. The offensive unleashed on Aamir Khan’s Fanaa, however, is different. It adds a new dimension, in fact, to the cultural crusade of India’s far right.
Before we come to that, a word about the victim of the current campaign. Aamir Khan, who perhaps needs no introduction to Pakistani readers, is an actor of proven and acknowledged calibre. I am no uncritical admirer of his films, especially the bunch produced in his activist phase of the past few years, and I am not alone. Many like myself have enjoyed his Lagaan, Mangal Pande and pre-Fanaa blockbuster Rang De Basanti, thought we still entertain reservations about each.
Lagaan is about a tribal community that scores a point over the colonial British by winning a cricket match. Not all would have agreed with the assumption that the White Sahibs played cricket when it came to empire building. Quite a few might have also found unacceptable the social comment of the scenes in which an untouchable finds a place in the tribal team solely for his handicap that makes him a tricky spinner.
Even more problematic is the sub-theme in Mangal Pandey — named after a hero of the Sepoy Mutiny or India’s First War of Independence (1857) — about a literally kicked-about untouchable joining the larger anti-colonial front.
Thematic, too, is the flaw in Rang De Basanti that marred it somewhat for many of us. The climax where a band of youth rouses a whole country (or at least its middle class) into an anti-establishment revolt might have been more rousing if the catalyst had been different. The youth and the larger public in the film were outraged not at any atrocity carried out against people but by the death of an air force pilot in a peace-time accident, described as his supreme sacrifice “for his country”.
None of this, however, ever bothered the BJP or the parivar. It is not Fanaa, a film with a Kashmiri backdrop, that has provoked the wrath of the far right. The film is being punished for Aamir’s support for the agitation for the rehabilitation of the people whose homes and livelihoods are threatened by a giant dam project. In the Gujarat of the infamous Narendra Modi, who is as proud of the pogrom of 2002 as of the multi-billion-rupee Narmada dam project, the film faces a virtual indefinite ban.
http://conconflicts.ssrc.org/gujarat/brass/
The Gujarat Pogrom of 2002, by no means a pretty story
Aamir, to his great credit, has refused to buckle under pressure. He has refused to apologise for “speaking for rehabilitation of the poor”. In the process, he has made a point more forcefully than any of his films.
The far right has taken on films before, but culture policing of this kind was, in every instance, is very much a part of its communal campaign. One of the ugliest examples was the fiercely violent prevention of the screening of courageous filmmaker Deepa Mehta’s Fire. The 1996 film about a lesbian couple was attacked not merely for offending a code of morality but even more for allegedly maligning the majority community of India. The common Indian names of Sita and Radha, given to the couple, were seen as proof of an anti-majority conspiracy.
Said Balasaheb Thackeray of the Shiv Sena, which provided muscle to the BJP campaign in Mumbai: “We would have no problem, if the names had been Shabana, Saira, or Najma.” His first two references were, respectively, to left-leaning actor-activist Shabana Azmi and to former star Saira Bano, wife of Dilip Kumar, a persona non grata with the parivar ever since he received an official award from Pakistan. We do not know whether the third could have been a reference to Najma Heptullah, formerly a Congress leader and a deputy chairperson of the Rajya Sabha (the Upper House of India’s parliament) who is now a largely-silent BJP luminary.
Deepa Mehta was in trouble again four years later over her Water — and her allegedly anti-Hindutva ways. Set in the 1930s, against the backdrop of India’s freedom struggle, the film portrayed the plight of a group of widows forced into poverty at a temple in the holy city of Varanasi. It told the tale of a relationship between a widow and a follower of Mahatma Gandhi. Thackeray must have just forgotten to ask why Deepa did not make her film about a widow of foreign origin!
The communal thrust of the far right’s cultural crusades has hardly ever been concealed. It has not been, for example, in the continuing campaign against MF Husain for painting female Hindu deities in violation of a dress code — one that devoutly adoring temple sculptors down the centuries knew nothing about. Similar is the thrust of the campaign against the Valentine’s Day, vilified as a baneful influence of the Christian West.
The anti-Aamir offensive is different because it does not target an allegedly anti-Hindutva force or film. It only carries forward the campaign against indomitable woman activist Medha Patkar and others who have raised their voice against the mass deprivation that Narmada-like “development” projects mean if implemented in a Modi-like manner. Some observers also mention the actor’s religion and his recent remarks about the latest round of riots in Gujarat’s Vadodara, but these do not figure in the slogans against Aamir.
Initially, the campaign was given a regional complexion. Aamir was accused of offending Gujarati asmita (pride), no less. The BJP is trying now, however, to make it an all-India campaign, with demonstrators protecting the endangered “pride” by burning the actor’s effigies and the film’s posters in cities of other states like Madhya Pradesh and Bihar as well.
The religious garb of the far right never concealed its real aims. Behind its divisive communalism lay a design for destructive “development”, one with nationalist pretensions but no place for the people or peace. The BJP and the parivar may have acted as censors of anti-Hindutva films in the past, but they now seek a mob-imposed ban on films made by anyone who mocks the idea of “development” through dams that drown people and demands that they sink without a trace or troublesome protest.
The writer is a journalist based in Chennai, India. A peace activist, he has contributed the main essay to “The Media Bomb,” a study of Indian media responses to India’s nuclear-weapon tests of 1998. He is also the author of a sheaf of poems under the title ‘At Gunpoint’
