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'Is the police asking me to ignore the heart-breaking fact that many officers looked away while blood flowed on the streets of Bombay?'

Mahesh Bhatt

Mahesh Bhatt

I feel that I owe it to the film industry to talk plainly. If I listened to my advisors, I would probably keep quiet. But I am not (to put it mildly), by nature, the kind of guy who keeps quiet. There are many others who do that. So I might as well speak out.

Questioning authority can hardly be called our national pastime. We even make a philosophy out of fear. Fatalism, destiny, karma... are the favourite cultural holes we hide in when authority flogs us. And what's our tragedy. We have brilliantly learned to cope with our fears. They don't shake and jiggle us out of the spiritual coma that we seem to have sunk into. We're too frightened to even acknowledge to ourselves that we're frightened.

"Now cops want a say in censoring films," announced a headline in The Indian Express on November 20. Bombay's commissioner of police, R Mendonca, requested Censor Board chairperson Asha Parekh to allow a clearance of films by the Maharashtra police before the board gives them the censor certificate.

She, in turn, has responded positively to this proposal. The writing is there on the wall: We could be entering a phase of 'cultural emergency'.

Never in my 25 years in the film industry have I felt the shadow of the police loom this large over my creative expression. Not even during the Emergency in 1975, which was said to be the darkest phase of democratic India. Is the police now going to white-wash the Hindi movie portrayal of its conduct during different phases of history? Has no crime ever been committed by the police in this country?

We all know that Hindi cinema dare not actually translate onto celluloid even a pale reflection of the events that really take place in our lives.

Will we, as a nation, spend a lifetime looking away from the hideous truth about what we are really capable of doing?

When will we face our own personal involvement in the 1993 riots which resulted in the deaths of several hundred Muslims, snowballing into the March 12 bomb blasts that killed several hundred Hindus?

Is the police asking me to ignore the heart-breaking fact that many officers looked away while blood flowed on the streets of Bombay?

There's a law in Germany, which makes it a crime to deny the existence of the Holocaust. Will we ever have a similar courage to bring the atrocities we commit out into the sunlight? Or will we hide, and lie, and let old wounds fester till they devour us completely?

Men who create power make an indispensable contribution to a nation's greatness. But, men who question power make a contribution just as indispensable. I question this move by the police force that would like the film industry to play the role of its PR department.

Hindi films can hardly be blamed for the recent breakdown of law and order in our city. The police force is simply joining in the party to flog that favourite dead horse, the film industry, blaming movies for its own failure to contain rising crime.

As a person who appreciates and applauds the efforts of the police to protect people, I sincerely want to ask them: Will a pretty, but false picture of the police in movies really contribute to altering the harsh reality of our daily lives? Won't the local boy of Madanpura know that the difference between the police on screen and the police in his everyday life is the difference between fiction and fact? Any way you look at it, movies are twice removed from real life, so why censor even that?

If the story-teller is to nourish the roots of his culture, society must set him free to follow his vision wherever it takes him. The American president, John F Kennedy had said, "In a democratic society, the highest duty of the writer, the composer, the artist is to remain true to himself and let the chips fall where they may. Today, at the age of 50, I, like Rabindranath Tagore, have outgrown the teaching that blind worship of one's nation is more important than reverence for humanity.

I believe that, at times, if some of us are almost too critical of our society, it's because our sensitivity and our concern for justice makes us aware that our nation falls terribly short of its highest potential.

Courtesy: Communalism Combat

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