Express View on film about the Emergency: Let it play

Many excesses and horrors marked the 21-month-long interregnum when India’s robust democracy was put on hold by the Indira Gandhi regime. They included forced sterilisations, bulldozing of homes, mass arrests of political opponents and pliant compliance, with some notable exceptions, by institutions that were meant to be guardrails against executive transgression and overreach. At its core, the Emergency, 1975-77, was a violation of the social contract enshrined in the Constitution, that makes the rights to life, liberty and free speech inalienable. It is, therefore, a troubling irony that a film certification board constituted by a government whose leaders lay claim to the proud legacy of the arduous struggle that led to the Emergency being revoked should be blocking the release of a movie about that dark period.

Ever since its trailer was released last month, Emergency – directed and co-produced by BJP MP Kangana Ranaut who also plays Indira Gandhi in the film — has been at the centre of controversy. As a report in this newspaper revealed, the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) had cleared the film for UA (with parental guidance) certification subject to three cuts and a fact-check on disparaging comments about India and Indians by Richard Nixon and Winston Churchill. The producers agreed to comply except in the case of one cut. Subsequently, Sikh bodies, especially the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee (SGPC), objected to Emergency on the grounds that it misrepresents the Sikh community and its leaders, and can cause religious disharmony. A PIL has also been moved in the Punjab & Haryana High Court seeking a ban on the film. The quality of the movie is not the question here — it has not yet been released. The sensitivity of its subject matter, too, cannot be cited as a reason. Politically sensitive subjects have practically turned into a film genre recently, with movies like Uri: The Surgical Strike, The Kashmir Files and The Kerala Story. In fact, some of the aforementioned titles received de facto state support, even though they also invited criticism from other quarters that found their depictions to be flawed and/or in flagrant service of a particular political ideology. It is difficult, then, not to surmise that the CBFC is acting as a tool of a politics that selectively invokes the Emergency as a cautionary tale — this year, the government announced that June 25 would be marked as ‘Samvidhan Hatya Diwas’ — but has few qualms about wielding some of the same powers of censorship that ran amok in that period. MP Ranaut has recently run foul of her party over her loose statements about the farmers’ protests. The BJP is well within its rights to take disciplinary action against a member within and through party forums. But whether her film is good or bad, offensive to some or art to others — these are calls for the audience to take. The right to freedom of expression can, and must, include the right to make what many may think is offensive — art, by definition, is contested. Ranaut’s work as an actor is formidable but surely she knows that too often her party — and other parties, too, it must be said — conflate the artist, their art and their politics towards a disquieting silence.