When portfolios as inimical as home, under which the police department comes, and culture are in the same hands domain confusions and transgressions are bound to happen. It was not a surprise that the progressive chief minister of West Bengal is reported to have asked a state run cinema house to stop screening of a documentary film on a hangman. Yes, the kind of hangman who is used in India when the state decides to snuff out a life or two in the interests of civil order and law. I have not seen the film and that needs to be noted. The only logical reason that I think the chief minister, charged with the upkeep and promotion of culture and the maintenance of civil order, may have had is that the screening would lead to disaffection among the people, a riot perhaps, or may be, since it about capital punishment, even a storming of the jails. Our own Bastille!
Unless one believes that some kind of revolution is at hand for which Buddhababu’s own party has been preparing us all along, you would agree it is a little far-fetched. The average attendance at the film was about 20. The venue was Nandan. The film is supposed to be a psychological study of the hangman and it is likely that issues about the need and necessity of capital punishment would likely surface. Neither the subject nor the cinematic treatment, even if one thinks of a Potemkinesque montage of the hangman oiling the rope, caressing the neck, putting the mask, drinking the liquor and pulling the lever, could make the twenty odd go marching past Victoria Memorial, cross the khal, and break open the locks. The press reported that the chief minister’s directive, which may have been a suggestion or wish that became a command, had something to do with the film being a critique of capital punishment when the state government is all for it. Just the kind of political speech that needs to be vigorously protected in any democracy and most of all in a city that is quick to organize a march or a sit-in when civil liberties are under duress in Nicaragua or Venezuela or Gujarat.
Nothing happened. No michil. No protests. No dharna. A few newspaper leader writers took note. Neither a squeak nor a swear was heard from under a Trinamul or Congress breath. And barely a couple of weeks back they was much complaining and shouting about rigging of votes and capturing of booths.
But both rigging and the stopping of a film show are spun of the same cloth. What is rigging if not the smothering of an individual’s voice about who gets to be an elected leader? What is jamming of booths if not the gagging of public opinion about who they want to see holding a political office? And what is stopping a film about capital punishment if not the silencing of possible criticism about the way in which a society chooses to think and act about criminals or the penal system? When one allows one form of censorship to prevail, one provides for other forms of dissent to be put down.
What happened at Nandan is precisely that. The culture minister may have seen the poster. The police minister must have looked back at him. With an insidious jerk of his mane, the chief minister may have sorted the confusion. There was not even a bunch of party supporters tearing down posters who could be photographed. The film was dropped. Posters came down. Low attendance was the stated reason.
Civil liberties are never removed in one full sweep. They begin small. The encroachments are incremental. And before one knows the rights that we think as necessary have been done away. There is something amiss in our city where no leading lights, those who protest atrocities time zones away, have anything meaningful to say or do when a film is taken down in their backyard. There is something rotten when there is no political opposition to such an act. The next time they rampage cinema houses or burn books in distant cities, I wonder if we will have the face to say we are different.
