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.
|
AP
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.
Printer friendly
page
Send this article to Friends by
E-Mail
Magazine
