When fiction becomes reality

A couple of weeks ago, IBN-live ran a report stating that the producer of a Gujarati play titled 'Aa NaMo Bahu Nade Chhey' (This NaMo creates obstacles) was told by the Gujarat state cultural board to change its title as the word NaMo was associated with the State’s CM Narendra Modi and, in their opinion, the title could create trouble.

Upon reading this report, I was deeply disturbed for two reasons: first, when did any state’s cultural board get blanket power to ban or change a play’s title based on their opinions; and secondly, on a related note, I thought that the Bombay High Court judgment on the ‘Nathuram Godse’ play had settled the idea that freedom of expression cannot simply be curbed by the State without giving reasonable grounds under the following sections of the Penal Code: Sections 124-A (sedition); Section 153-A (promoting enmity on grounds of religion, race, place of birth, residence, language, etc. and for the maintenance of harmony); Section 153-B (to protect national integration); Section 292 (against obscene books); Section 293  (obscene objects); and Section 295-A (acts meant to outrage religious feelings of any class by insulting its religion or religious beliefs.)

Seeking some clarity, I contacted the Gujarat State cultural board using the phone numbers on their website, and also a few lawyers practicing in Gujarat. The cultural board proved to be entirely unhelpful, clamping up at the mere mention of the play. One of the lawyers I spoke with defended the intervention by citing Section 95 (1) of the Code of Criminal Procedure, and further promised that they would provide me with a copy of an order that they were certain had been rightly passed by the State. I never heard from the lawyer after this conversation. This became entirely understandable when I later discovered that no order under any provision was passed by the State government.

Finally I decided to speak with the producer and lead actor of the concerned play, Mr. Sanjay Goradiya. During our conversation, he cleared up my first query regarding the state cultural board. Mr. Goradiya told me that as per guidelines, scripts have to be submitted to each state’s censor board and they are cleared once the censor board decides that the script doesn’t touch any of the grounds I mentioned above (i.e. sedition, obscenity, and incitement.)

Accordingly, his play was also sent to the Maharashtra and Gujarat censor boards, and while it was cleared in Maharashtra, it was the Gujarat censor board that approached him and said that while the script was not objectionable, the title was a cause for concern. They told him that they would ban it unless he changed the title.

For perspective, here’s a synopsis of Mr. Goradiya’s play: The ghost of a man whose name is Narottam Morbiwala (hence the NaMo) takes over his grandson’s body at 6p.m. every day. NaMo, in this case the deceased man, is an ill-tempered character who uses the time he’s taken over his grandson’s body to create trouble for his son. Troubled by these events, the son’s wife takes to doing pooja in all the temples of Gujarat asking for the ghost to calm down and not fight. An official in the Modi government hears of these poojas and mistakes the family for supporters of the opposition party praying that Modi himself not win the next elections. A comedy of errors that loosely resembles Oscar Wilde’s ‘Importance of being Earnest’ ensues.

So, let’s go through the list of constitutional grounds to ban a work of art once again: Does this synopsis sound like sedition? Not to my mind. Does it sound like it’s trying to incite hatred between different religious or ethnic groups? Again, I’d opine in the negative. Are we to call this obscene? Doesn’t sound like it, does it? I think the censor board might agree with me on these points since they’ve not changed a single word, not one dialogue of the script itself. As far as Goradiya knows, their only issue is with the word NaMo in the title. Goradiya tells me that his play indirectly praises the Gujarat Chief Minister rather than degrades him or the State government.

Is it that NaMo has become synonymous with Modi to the extent that it’s now worthy of state protection? As far as I know, Namo can’t be trademarked by Modi any more than Li-Lo can be trademarked by Lindsey Lohan. Nor can its use be curbed carte blanche on the basis that the acronym can only refer to Narendra Modi. In fact, if it does solely refer to Narendra Modi, shouldn’t political discourse in the form of art be encouraged rather than stopped in a democrasy?

Goradiya tells me that he doesn’t even think Modi knows about this move by agents in his government. According to him, “The people under Modi think that the issue may blow up, may cause trouble and then they’ll come under fire from Modi later. To avoid getting into trouble with Modi later, they’ve asked me to change the name of the title.”

The play’s title has been changed now to a title that was suggested by the censor board itself. Roughly translated the new title means ‘This NaMo doesn’t want to fight.’ When I asked if he agrees with the title change, Goradiya replied, “What can one man do? This is how I make a living. If I object they’ll ban my play stating law and order issues. If I was a bigger name, had more money I might have fought the change but I don’t have the money to go to court on this issue. I’d rather just release my play.” Sound like blackmail to you? Sounds like blackmail to me.

What’s worse is that this isn’t even the first time the Gujarat Censor board has jumped the proverbial gun in order to protect their revered CM. Back in 2004, a documentary titled Final Solution, which followed 2002 riots in Gujarat, was also banned. The censor board justified that ban by saying it was “highly provocative and may trigger off unrest and communal violence". This begs the obvious question- any more than the unrest that was availing in the State already? The ban was lifted in October 2004 after a sustained campaign

Both these bans have come in after the 2001 Bombay High Court judgment in the case of Anand Chintamani Dighe & Anr. vs State Of Maharashtra And Ors, where the court quoted Justice Krishna Iyer in laying out the guidelines for exercising a State’s power to ban works of art under Section 95(1) of the CrPc, “A drastic restriction on the right of a citizen when imposed by statute, calls for a strict construction. Explicitly, the section compels the government to consider it a clear and present danger in the shape of promoting feelings of enmity and hatred between different segments of citizens or as to its strong tendency or intendment to outrage the religious feelings of such segments.”

 The court has clearly said that the state MUST give grounds for their opinions as to why the work of art (in this case it was the play I am Nathuram Godse speaking) falls under the purview of section 95 (1) of the Code of Criminal Procedure. The Gujarat censor board’s only reason seems to be that the title contains the word ‘NaMo’, which is a common acronym for Narendra Modi.

I’ve given you a synopsis, the Gujarat censor board has proved by itself that there’s no clear and present danger since they haven’t changed the script at all. What worries me now is the idea that Modi’s underlings are so interested in protecting their CM that they’ve lost all interest in protecting their citizens’ right to freedom of expression; they’ve lost interest in the idea of democracy; they’ve simply lost faith in the Gujarati citizens’ power to focus on the content of a play rather than just a headline, or even their ability to understand satire. Is this what we can look forward to when and if Modi is elected into power in 2014?  

Oh no they didn't!

So I read a news story in the L.A. Times a few weeks ago that really pissed me off. Basically it said that Muslims were the new untouchables of India. It detailed the bigotry an average Muslim citizen of India encounters within the confines of his ‘motherland’. It detailed how while the investigation of the Mumbai bomb blasts was concluded in less than four years, the events preceding it, the Hindu riots against the Muslim community in Mumbai are still undergoing investigation; while most of the top political figures and their right hand men, men who are responsible for hundreds of killings continue to rule the roost in Mumbai. 

The article made my blood boil: As an Indian, I’ve never been so angry before. All I could think was, this could not be true because I’m an Indian and this is not what I've been raised to believe, not what I've been taught in school.


Remember school? Where they told us about Nehru and Sardar Patel and the Indian dream? Where we were told that our country’s greatest claim to honor was that we decided to look above the petty confines that religion puts on a man. That in doing so we declared ourselves to be the world’s largest secular democracy and that this feeling of unanimity is deeply embedded in the Indian spirit. 

Seriously, I got really mad! I was poised and ready to write a scathing comment under the article to let this reporter know what I thought of him and his horrible lies about my country; and then I remembered- it was the school that had lied! 


Nothing that the reporter pointed out was untrue. Not a thing. In fact, he was almost being nice by not drawing attention to a million other examples that go much further in embarrassing any Indian who dares to proclaim that our country is in fact a secular nation. Lets just face it- It is not. 

It is a country where great artists who are also Muslim are forced to die in exile because their paintings happen to upset the religious sentiments of self proclaimed Hindutva zealots like the Shiv Sena. 

It is a country where the then ruling BJP party encouraged and endorsed a re-write of historical textbooks to suit their pro-Hindu core philosophy, making Muslims invaders and promoting Hindus as indigenous people of the Indian subcontinent. 

It is a country that provides around the clock protection for Bal Thackerey, a man who holds no official office in the nation’s government and whose famous words 'Islamic terrorism is growing and Hindu terrorism is the only way to counter it.' are quoted in Wikipedia for all the world to see.

and today it has the distinction of being a country whose highest court of law staged a cop out of such wginormous proportions, I don’t think I’ve seen anything like it since Clinton’s drama of ‘I did not have sexual relations with that woman... define sexual relations to me please’ 

The Supreme court order in the Gujarat riots case against Narendra Modi can’t be called anything more than what it is- a giant, giant exercise in wanking off. 


To take years to charge the man. To allow the man to run for office while he's being investigated for communal agitation. To order an Special Investigation Team. And then after years of passing the buck back and forth with the SIT that you appointed, to refuse to pass an order? say it with me- WANKING OFF!


and where is this case to go in the absence of any orders from the Supreme court- back to the local magistrate. In Ahmedabad. 


Ahmedabad, the capital of the State where Modi is the Chief Minister. A state where he is for all accounts and purposes, the most powerful man and pretty much reigns supreme. Where the Muslims are so scared that they're basically voting for him just to stay under his radar. (Sadly this wouldn't be the first time, think back to the post-riot elections in Mumbai where Shiv Sena actually got more Muslim votes than ever before)


It's such an obvious cop out that I’m just going to go all out and assume that the much spoken about sealed SIT report told the Supreme Court judges something that the last (almost) decade did not make clear to the rest of us. 

Perhaps it tells them that the testimony of senior IPS officer Sanjiv Bhatt, who filed an affidavit detailing how Modi asked the local police to let ‘the Hindus vent’ and be indifferent to calls for help from victims during the riots, is actually false.

Perhaps it explains the mysterious murder of  BJP MLA Haren Pandya only a few months after he disclosed that Modi asked police not to come in the way of a Hindu backlash after Godra. 

Perhaps it explains also what Modi meant when he said ‘every action has an equal and opposite reaction,’ no more than two days after the Godra incident and only a few weeks before the outbreak of riots in Gujarat.

Perhaps they’ve decided that since the rest of us are convinced the man is guilty, the only place that Mr. Modi can get a fair trial is in the heart of a land which he not only rules with an iron fist but where he is actually known as the ‘Iron Man’. (thereby forever sullying the term which was once synonymous with one of the founding fathers of what was meant to be a secular India - Sardar Patel)

Perhaps reports of the Gujarat government’s active attempts to suppress evidence in the Riots case have not reached the ears of our highest of high courts.

Perhaps they do not care to ask why after officer Bhat basically blew the whistle on the Gujarat CM in this highly controversial case and despite their instructions to keep him under a security coverage of 11 men, the Gujarat government - more specifically the State’s Director General of Police- unceremoniously downsized the security assigned to officer Bhatt to only one man.

Perhaps the Supreme court did not see anything gained by attaching importance to this much publicised by Tehelka extract from the SIT reports: ‘The Modi government appointed Vishwa Hindu Parishad and Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh-affiliated advocates as public prosecutors in the riots cases. The government did not stop the illegal bandh called by the VHP on February 28, 2002. Police officers who took a neutral stand during the riots and prevented massacres were transferred’

So this is the state that the SC thinks is the ideal place for the fair and adequate trial of Narendra Modi? A state that he effectively has by the throat and where he controls virtually all spheres of life and branches of governance- including the judiciary and officers of the law. 


I'm also going to go ahead and assume that it's not the love he gets from Big Business that's making the Courts read into the evidence more (or less?) than the rest of us seem to have read- because I know that the judiciary of ALL people remember their history. Big Business love tyrants; investment in Germany shot through the roof during Hitler's reign as well. 


And also going to go ahead and assume that this has nothing to do with the fact that the Congress isn't looking good for the 2014 election which means chances are that the BJP might be in power once again (with their poster boy for progress: Narendra Modi as the strongest candidate)


So in another nine years, when the details of the SIT report are eventually 'considered' in the magistrates' court, we're all going to see that the Supreme court of India did not just refuse to exercise their Apex powers in favour of passing the buck on, in a case that could not demonstrate more EXACTLY why they were conferred with extraordinary jurisdiction in the first place; just to keep their own asses in comfortable leather seats for a few more years. 


Hopefully that's what's going to happen later. 


It's only been a few hours since the (non) order but the BJP is already calling it a complete vindication (they're probably right!) and Modi is tweeting about the greatness of God. 


And me? I'm Indian, a Hindu and deeply, deeply ashamed of both right now.