The Hindu : Censorship in the nuclear age

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Friday, Jul 19, 2002

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Censorship in the nuclear age

By M. V. Ramana

Censorship denies people alternatives to the propaganda put out by Governments and hawks.

SHORTLY AFTER the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the United States' strategic bombing survey hired a Japanese film unit to record the physical and medical effects of the bomb. They were then edited to produce a documentary entitled "The Effects of the Atomic Bombs Against Hiroshima and Nagasaki". The finished film was shipped to the U.S. in May 1946 with much publicity. It was declared `top secret' and locked in a vault, never to be shown to the American public. Only in the late 1960s was it returned to the Japanese.

Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell in their insightful book "Hiroshima in America: A Half Century of Denial" suggest why American officials were uncomfortable with the footage: "The Japanese newsreel team had gone into hospitals to document the burn and radiation effects. They not only photographed a burned-out trolley car, but the rows of bodies and bones that surrounded it. Even the footage of strictly physical phenomena featured troublesome imagery: radioactive sand clogging wells used for drinking water; dead stalks of rice seven miles from the hypocenter; the silhouette of a painter on a ladder, his brush outstretched, permanently etched onto the surface of a concrete wall by the flash of the bomb."

America's reluctance to deal with the human impact of the only cases of atomic bombing of civilian populations has persisted. In 1995, the Smithsonian museum in Washington had planned an exhibition featuring the "Enola Gay", the airplane that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima. The exhibition was to not only recall the events surrounding the bombing, but also examine the bomb's impact on people, and feature documents showing that high-ranking military leaders had doubts about dropping the bomb. In response, the American Air Force Association, supported by several right wing politicians, launched a major campaign attacking the exhibit as revisionist and defending America's use of the atomic bomb. The exhibition in its proposed form had to be cancelled.

It is poignant that Anand Patwardhan's epic documentary "Jang aur Aman" (War and Peace), which chronicles, inter alia, censorship at the Smithsonian museum, must itself run into trouble with the Censor Board. This when the film, like many of his other films, won awards at the Mumbai International Film Festival and the Earth Vision Global Environment Festival in Tokyo. Mr. Patwardhan, one of our most accomplished filmmakers, is no stranger to controversy. In the past he fought and won three court cases to get films of his — "Bombay Our City, In Memory of Friends and Ram Ke Naam" — shown on Doordarshan.

"Jang aur Aman" explores the many effects of the acquisition of nuclear weapons by India and Pakistan: the problems faced by people living near the Pokhran test site and the Jaduguda uranium mines, the human toll in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Sangh Parivar groups and their hate crusades, the Kargil war, and the global commerce of death offered by arms traders. But the film also offers hope by recording the growing peace movements, both in India and Pakistan.

That such a film offering rich fare for thought has been held up at the Censor Board is unfortunate. What is worse is that some of the Censor Board's objections are quite illogical. For example, it has called for deleting speeches by Dalits and neo-Buddhists attacking the upper-caste biases of the ruling elite, and visuals or dialogues about the Tehelka expose. These seem to suggest the influence of the Sangh Parivar and its agenda rather than anything particularly relevant to the nuclear issue.

Sangh Parivar groups have, of course, done their bits of censorship many times. In 1993, for example, the VHP attacked an exhibition on the Ramayana mounted by the Safdar Hashmi Trust (SAHMAT) and got it banned. (The Delhi High Court struck down the notification last year). Other examples in the last decade include the Shiv Sena's objections to an advertisement for shoes featuring two nude models and the destruction of several of M. F. Husain's paintings by members of the Bajrang Dal.

The Censor Board also objected to scenes involving pronouncements on nuclear matters. For one, it wanted Mr. Patwardhan to delete an interview with a leading nuclear scientist saying that China was a possible enemy against which nuclear weapons could be used. This is utterly absurd. Several political leaders, most notably the Defence Minister, George Fernandes, have publicly called China the chief threat requiring the development of nuclear weapons.

Indeed, the Chinese nuclear programme — and not Pakistan's — was the rationale that hawks originally offered to advocate nuclear weapons for India. (Arguing that countering Pakistan requires nuclear weapons would have been counterproductive since India held (and holds) a conventional military advantage that would be annulled by both India and Pakistan going nuclear.) So to ask Mr. Patwardhan to delete something that has been stated repeatedly by many policy-makers is disingenuous.

The Censor Board has also demanded the deletion of a much larger portion of Mr. Patwardhan's film by issuing the blanket diktat — "Delete the entire visuals and dialogues spoken by political leaders including Ministers and the Prime Minister". That much of this has appeared on Doordarshan and seen by crores of people — many times the number who can be expected to see Mr. Patwardhan's film — only underscores the Orwellian irony.

India is not alone in suppressing efforts at chronicling nuclear matters. In 1993, Israel's military censor banned the publication of an academic monograph by Avner Cohen, an Israeli citizen and then a research fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, on the early history (1949-67) of the Israeli nuclear programme. Not just parts of it, but the whole thing. And in 1999, a Russian military court convicted Grigory Pasko, a former naval captain and an environmental journalist, for passing film footage of the Russian navy illegally dumping nuclear wastes into the Sea of Japan to a Japanese TV station. He was amnestied, but the Federal Security Service (FSB) — the former KGB — asked for a re-evaluation and got him sentenced to four years hard labour.

Thankfully, circumstances in the subcontinent are better. Nevertheless, censoring Mr. Patwardhan's film would be unfortunate. Most Indians have not been exposed to images of Hiroshima or Nagasaki, of the accident at Chernobyl or the plight of uranium miners around the world that shed light on the dark underbelly of the nuclear age and allow people to make crucial decisions about their lives in an informed manner.

The Japanese historian, Seiji Imahori, once observed that by silencing the voice of the atomic bomb survivors "an important possibility to decisively influence the world situation was lost." Likewise the situation in South Asia, with nuclear war a possibility that cannot be ruled out, demands influences like Mr. Patwardhan's to positively change the situation towards peace and true security. Censorship denies people alternatives to the propaganda put out by Governments and hawks about the wickedness of the "other" and the need to be able to reduce them to radioactive rubble.

(The writer is research staff member, Program on Science and Global Security, Princeton University.)

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