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En Dino Muzaffarnagar”, a documentary by Shubhradeep Chakravorty and Meera Chaudhary on the riots that engulfed the Uttar Pradesh district in 2013, considers whether the riots were premeditated, and executed for political gain. The Central Board of Film Certification has refused to allow it for public screening. With the Delhi Court directing the Board to give “detailed reasons” for its opposition next week, our writer examines the documentary’s message and the fate of some of its predecessors.
On 11 November, the Delhi High Court held out a glimmer of hope to “En Dino Muzaffarnagar” (“Muzaffarnagar These Days”), a documentary analyzing the factors and processes at play behind the riots that engulfed the Uttar Pradesh district in 2013. Commenting on the Central Board of Film Certification’s (CBFC) refusal to allow it for public screening, Justice Vibhu Bhakru said, “It can’t be true that an entire two hours and twenty minutes of the movie is violating the guidelines or is objectionable. The CBFC should have given detailed reasons on which part of the movie violated which guideline.”
On June 20, Shubhradeep Chakravorty and Meera Chaudhary, the makers of the documentary, applied for a certificate to the CBFC’s Regional Office in Calcutta. The refusal came within 10 days. The censors “reasoned” that the documentary was in breach of Guidelines 2 (xii) and 2 (xiii) of the Guidelines of Certification of Films. Both these provisions are part of the charter that is used to determine what spectators, audiences and viewers in India shall be allowed to see. While the former provision seeks to bar the presentation of any visuals or words which are “contemptuous of racial, religious or other groups”, the latter prohibits the depiction of anything “promoting communal, obscurantist, anti-scientific and anti-national attitudes”. Nothing was mentioned about which specific scene(s) in the documentary had fallen foul of the law or had the potential to instigate communal hatred – mind you, it was not a film that leaned on creative licence, but on interviews with survivors and perpetrators.
Undeterred, they appealed to the Film Certification Appellate Tribunal (FCAT). On 19 August, the FCAT delivered its order, finding nothing amiss in the CBFC’s action. It went on to accuse “En Dino Muzaffarnagar” of being “openly critical of one political party (BJP) and its top leadership by name and tends to give an impression of the said party’s involvement in communal disturbances.” The next date of hearing is December 5, when the CBFC has to reply to the High Court.
Why they want to censor the film
Chaudhary and Chakravorty (who died in August after a brain haemorrhage) refused to believe that the Muzaffarnagar riots were a sudden communal conflagration, and suspected that there could well be a master-narrative, a premediated design behind them. This idea is not without foundation, for political scientists and sociologists have postulated how raking up, indeed creating, communal violence can reap substantial electoral results.
Paul Brass has argued that there are “institutionalized riot systems” in which “riot production” is carried out in three phases: first – the preparation and rehearsal phase which is never-ending; the second, the activation and enactment phase, which requires a certain situation or climate, for instance, an upcoming election; and the last phase is the battle for control of the explanation for what actually happened – whether it was a spontaneous riot or well-planned political mobilization. “En Dino Muzaffarnagar” seeks to see if, and how, Brass’ theory played out in Muzaffarnagar on the eve of the 2014 general elections, especially since Uttar Pradesh was one of the key battlegrounds of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Not only did the filmmaker duo stumble upon the truth of Brass’ hypothesis, the pattern they documented also seems to be playing out in the immediate present – such as the recent riots in East Delhi’s Trilokpuri and the communal incidents in Delhi’s suburb of Bawana.
Shooting entirely on location, Chakravorty and Chaudhary traced the events in Muzaffarnagar’s Kawal village from August 27, 2013 onwards. The violence began with rumours of a Muslim boy having molested a Jat girl from the same village, in retaliation for which the girl’s uncle and brother thrashed the alleged culprit, who succumbed to his injuries. A Muslim mob reportedly vowed revenge and lynched two Jat boys. Sangeet Som, the local BJP MLA, widely circulated what was supposedly a video of the lynching, and goaded the Jats and Hindus to wreak vengeance. This video was like a lit match to a powder keg. But it was a fake one – it was established later on that Som, feted by the ex-BJP president Rajnath Singh for his “contribution” to the electoral results in Uttar Pradesh, used the video of a lynching that took place in Pakistan’s Sialkot two years ago. The mob, however, had no patience for factual niceties – even something as ubiquitous and conspicuous as the attire of the victims. The boys in the video were clad in shalwars, which the Muslims of Muzaffarnagar do not wear.
Members of the Sangh Parivar instigated the Jats to convene a mahapanchayat, where a crowd of more than five thousand, armed with spears, scythes, sickles, country-made guns, and other agricultural implements, bayed for Muslims’ blood. What followed subsequently was a spree of killings, rape, and destruction, all carried out with chilling precision.
The Vishwa Hindu Parishad’s (VHP) Ashok Singhal came out with a robust justification – the “love and lust jehad” being carried out by Muslims was a valid and grave provocation to hit out at them and defend the “community honour”. In fact, much before things took an ugly turn, Indresh Kumar and Sadhvi Prachi, prominent members of the RSS and Bajrang Dal respectively, were organising and speaking at Bahu Beti Mahapanchayats, where speaker after speaker indulged in vicious anti-Muslim invective. The documentary shows Indresh Kumar telling the transfixed audience that using force and violence on a massive scale was the only way to teach the “love jihadis” and their community a lesson they could ill afford to forget.
All these mahapanchayats concluded with cries of “Narenda Modi zindabaad!” and “Mussalmanon ke do hi sthaan – Pakistan ya kabristaan!(Muslims have only two destinations – Pakistan or the grave!)”renting the air.
And how macabre was the modus operandi of sending Muslims to where they belonged. The documentary shows some villagers recounting how, in the summer of 2013, Amit Shah had toured the area, where he counselled the Jats on how to kill effectively. Learn from the lessons of 1992 Bombay and 2002 Gujarat – don’t douse with kerosene or gasoline and set them afire, for the charred remains help investigators trace with DNA evidence, he apparently said. Rather, hack them into pieces first and then burn, because with the pathetic quality of forensic investigation in India identification of victims becomes an onerous, and often impossible task.
Some sections of the media also contributed to the scaremongering. For instance, as an independent fact-finding commission’s report revealed, the local edition of Dainik Jagran ran an incendiary headline – “Muzaffarnagar mein Mussalmanon ka aatank, Hinduon mein khauf” (Hindus in Muzaffarnagar cower in fear of terror unleashed by Muslims) – painting Muslims as the villains, whereas the same newspaper’s other editions ran a much more innocuous “Panchayat se laute do logon ki hatya” (Two people killed while returning from a panchayat).
It’s not the first time, it’s not the last time
This isn’t the first time the Censors have tried to scuttle documentaries exposing the atrocities of the Hindutva footsoldiers.It also isn’t the first time Chakravorty has incurred their wrath. On 20 October 2003 in Ahmedabad he was heckled and threatened to such an extent, including by the state police, that he had to flee the city. The reason was the screening of “Godhra Tak – The Terror Trial”, his previous documentary that showed how the torching of coach number S8 of the Sabarmati Express, and the subsequent violence, were not spontaneous but carefully pre-planned.
The politics of intimidation and censorship are not new to the BJP, especially when there is a clear danger of high party functionaries appearing to be colluding in planning and executing riots. In 2002, the Narendra Modi–led Gujarat government pulled out all stops to muzzle Star News, Zee News, CNN and Aaj Tak by coercing cable-television operators to take them off the air, ostensibly because their broadcasts could instigate riots.
Rakesh Sharma’s “Final Solution” (2003) remains perhaps the most “celebrated” documentary that has faced the NDA government’s hostility. It carried footage of eyewitnesses and survivors of the 2002 Gujarat pogrom recounting, in graphic detail, incidents and events establishing the state police and administration’s unstinted support to those who went on a Muslim-slaughter spree. Anupam Kher, who headed the CBFC from 16 October 2003 to 13 October 2004 when the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance coalition government was in power, vehemently denied he had any hand in refusing to grant the certificate. But the fact remains that the censors did label it as having incendiary potential, and it was only after a sustained campaign in both national and international media that they finally had no option but to relent.
Ramesh Pimple’s “Aakrosh” (2003) was a documentary in which, through a series of interviews with the survivors of the Gujarat pogrom, he tried to tell a story about the hardships faced by people at the hands of communal zealots. But the censors, led by Arvind Trivedi, a former actor and then BJP legislator, contended that not only did Aakrosh show the government and police in a bad light but also that if the public viewed it, old wounds would be reopened and this posed a grave threat to communal harmony. Unlike Sharma who could rally around a spectacular number of intellectuals, activists, film-makers and actors to his cause, Pimple chose to go to court. The legal route remains the strongest to combat the censor’s censorship. The pressure of public opinion has limited use, since only court orders can compel the censors to step back.
There is no way of remotely understanding the CBFC’s predilection of picking upon only certain scenes, taking them out of context of the film as a whole, and then raising some paranoid assertions. This has almost become its pattern by now. For instance, in 2009, the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government decided that four scenes of Shabnam Virmani’s “Had Anhad”– a documentary which sought to promote Kabir’s message of love and amity, were unsuitable for public viewing because of their allegedly inflammatory potential (it included some scenes of the Babri Masjid demolition). The Delhi High Court intervened, and ruled that such cherrrypicking censorship was unconstitutional and illegal.
“En Dino Muzaffarnagar” does more than just mount a challenge to the present government’s commitment to upholding freedom of expression. By alarming the public to the strategy of electioneering by riots, it assails the legitimacy of any BJP-led government that could come to power in the upcoming state elections. All the more reason for the present government at the Centre not to recreate the censorship regime that was unleashed in Gujarat.
December 5 is the next date of hearing on En Dino Muzaffarnagar in the Delhi High Court, and the CBFC has two options. One, it stops giving obfuscatory “reasons” to deny the documentary a certificate and comes clean on what exactly it finds problematic. That would set the stage for another legal battle against censorship, because the motivations of the censors are not too difficult to gauge. Two, it draws a salutary lesson from the Bombay High Court’s ruling in Pimple’s favour:
“But we are unable to share the views of the Tribunal that the riots are now history, and therefore be forgotten by the public to avoid the repetition of such cruel acts. When the hour of conflict is over, it may be necessary to understand and analyse the reasons for strife. We should not forget that the present state of things is a consequence of the past and it is natural to enquire about the sources of the good we enjoy or the evils we suffer.”
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