Vishwaroopam row ends, Haasan agrees on 7 edits.
Barring the puns and play on words, that was the gist of theheadline on most front pages on Sunday. The uplifting, positive tone of theline ” as if meant to say ‘cheer up India, good news is upon us’ ” bothsoothing and frightening at the same time.
Yes, one felt good for Kamal Haasan, theactor-producer-filmmaker who invested crores in a flick that was seen asbrushing the minority community with the wrong end of the brush, purportedlypainting them in allegedly bad light, leading to its ban by the Tamil Nadugovernment. “We have agreed to mute the sound at certain places. This editedversion would be placed before the censors and released after their approval. Iwill announce the date of the film very soon,” Haasan said on Saturday, after ameeting with Muslim organisations taking umbrage at Haasan’s brush.
The meeting, which ran for over five hours, was moderated bythe state government’s representative.
After the Jayalalithaa government withdrew the ban onSunday, Haasan on Monday withdrew his petition before the Madras high courtchallenging the ban. He also announced that his film would hit the screen inTamil Nadu this Thursday, two weeks after the scheduled release, even astheatres on border areas of neighbouring Kerala are already doing briskbusiness, catering to the curious and faithfuls from Tamil Nadu.
So, now that the weekend will taste sweeter for Haasan, it’sall leading to a happy ending, like Bollywood flicks, right? Wrong. Unlike whatthe first line appears to mean at the outset, the row has not ended. It mightjust have begun, as the post-comma latter part of the line puts it. It justmeans extra-constitutional bodies have got almost-constitutional legitimacy tofirst hold up and then give the go-ahead to works of art that they might findpesky ” that, too, in meetings “moderated” by the state.
And with parts edited that they deem ought to have been done” an issue officially dealt with by the censor board of film certification, atoothless body that gives those obviously meaningless “U” or “U/A” or “A”certificates that bore you no end for nanoseconds that never seem to end beforethe real things gets under way.
Second, Haasan, understandably not willing to stretch thebattle any further and give more jolts to his personal accountants, might havewithdrawn the petition challenging the ban but it nevertheless remains a validquestion: why was the film banned? Especially after the censor board okayed it?
While the Tamil Nadu CM pooh-poohed information andbroadcasting minister Manish Tewari’s remark that the state government has nobusiness banning films cleared by the censor board with "I think he(Tewari) has not heard about Tamil Nadu Cinema's Regulation Act of 1955”, referringto the law that empowers the state to issue a ban if its public exhibition is"likely to cause a breach of peace", she did pass the onus on whollyto Haasan. “If Kamal Haasan had shown Muslim leaders the movie in thebeginning, all this could have been avoided,” Jayalalithaa told a crowded andnationally broadcast media conference in Chennai on January 31.
Really? Taking the same line of argument, shouldJayalalithaa not then have checked with the anti-nuke protestors before givingthe go-ahead to Koodankulam nuclear power project, which led to at least onedeath, several injuries, police firing and lathicharges, and hundreds of casesagainst protestors, who called themselves “peaceful” and were dubbed unrulymobs daring to defy prohibitory orders imposed under Section 144 of CrPC by theadministration?
One does not expect politicians to sit back and thinkwhether they have opened the proverbial Pandora’s box of issues ill-fittingwith the Republic ” of soft communal nature in this case ” or not to pander totheir vote-bank boroughs, but if Jayalalithaa presumes she should be delightednow that Haasan and the “Muslim leaders” have come to an agreement, and thatshe deserves to be patted for bringing good governance to fruition, she shouldin fact look at the bad rep she has given her own administration. If the threatto law and order was so “very real”, as Jayalalithaa put it, that hergovernment could not okay the release of a movie, one shudders to think whatshe would do/say when actually faced with “very real” issues.
Perhaps order her police to go on the rampage, using thebaton, teargas and firepower on protestors and locking up hundreds in villageafter village, like she did in the Koodankulam nuclear plant’s case. For now, around of applause for Kamal Haasan, who fought his battle in the only way suchbattles need to be fought: by sticking to one’s guns.
in association with Governance Now
