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Might and right

In all the hullabaloo over the screening or otherwise of Deepa Mehta's Fire, the question that is being missed out on is not whether it offends sensibilities, is untrue to Indian culture or is an abuse of the freedom of expression. It is not even a man-woman question anymore. In my mind, the issue that has been thrown up by the plebian act of a handful of miscreants ransacking cinema houses is that the majority's concurrence, acquiescence in a patently illegal act has once again been presumed and formalised. The Shiv Sena now talks on behalf of millions of Hindus like me who have no agreement whatsoever with its version of what a society must be.

For me personally, the Shiv Sena's opposition, and the manner in which it has been conveyed, to a creative work has been extremely disappointing. Till not so long ago, whenever a comparison was sought between this party and the National Socialists of Germany, mine was a dissenting voice, since I believed firmly that this was a party that had a clear notion of what it was about, and also that the laws of the land were too stringent to allow extra-judicial action on its part.

That belief took a beating when Shiv Sainiks marched into the residence of M F Husain and wreaked havoc, to protest against one of his paintings, and remain unpunished for it till this day. And the misgivings engendered by this action have now been confirmed. The Sena is no better than what it had begun as, a bunch of lumpen elements. Decades later, it may have expanded its canvass from fighting for Maharashtrian interests to covering all Hindu grievances, but that does not confer any legitimacy on its modus operandi.

If the Sena's actions flew in the face of convention, by which the Hindu faith had remained all-encompassing and all-permissive -- truly, which other religion can boast of a ganja-smoking, dreadlocked, deity roaming the icy Himalayan heights clad in animal skin, to pick out just one from a legion -- no one really bothered at first, or noticed later. Thanks to this indifference, we are landed today with a bunch of anpads enforcing their will on the population.

It is a tragedy of no mean proportion. Here is a *political* party, not a social/cultural organisation, elected to provide able governance to one of the premier states in the Union, and which, in the three and a half years that it has been in power, has shown itself to be utterly incapable of breaking out of the opposition party mode.

Political parties have two faces, one to serve them while in the Opposition, and another to wear while in government. As an Opposition party the options are wide, and get reined in once the responsibility of office is assumed. The Bharatiya Janata Party had shown that in the initial stages of its stint at the Centre, it was struggling to come to terms with the reality of office, that its office-bearers and even ministers were yet to come out of the chrysalis of an opposition party. So we had rash statements of the kind of 'name the time and place, we will fight there'. Today, even a Uma Bharati, once the BJP's battering ram, has mellowed on donning the trappings of office, and has admitted as much in a recent interview with Rediff.

But the Sena has been unable to break with its past, and an incident from the past is quite illuminating. It is the convention for the government to host a tea-party on the eve of the start of the assembly session. At one such session held soon after the Sena-BJP formed the government in Maharashtra, the new chief minister actually made room for Sharad Pawar, his predecessor in the CM's chair. A similar confusion seems to exist even today, among the rank and file of the Shiv Sena, and it is no help for them to have as party chief one who has eschewed political office.

The Sena's bluff and bravado, while enough to enthuse its cadre, will not be of much use when it comes to winning the next election, which is not all that far away. In fact, Sharad Pawar willing, the state could go to polls much earlier than when the Sena anticipates it. The BJP has shown the inefficacy of its pet electoral themes in taking it past the winning post on its own, and with a rejuvenated Congress getting its powder dry, the need of the hour for the Sena, one would have thought, was to highlight bread and butter issues. But no, the Sena believes that Fire is the issue that the electorate will be swayed by.

The other aspect to the controversy is that the Sena has successfully taken on the might of the Indian State, helped in this no doubt by the desperation of the ruling coalition at the Centre to keep its wafer-thin majority in the Lok Sabha intact. Deepa Mehta's film had been duly seen and certified by the Central Board for Film Certification, the legal authority alone empowered to decide which films can be screened and which cannot. The Sena, through the use of muscle power, has done nothing short of challenging the State's authority, and got away with it.

In the bargain, it is the BJP government, whose duty it is to ensure that its authority is not challenged or in anyway compromised, that has been shown up to be pusillanimous. When the Sena went on the rampage, any self-respecting administration would have read the riot act to it, ensured that the film was screened without hindrance, and told the protestors, the plaintiffs in a sense, to turn to the courts for redressal. Instead, here we have the strange spectacle of the director, whose film had already been declared for public exhibition by the competent authority, turning to the judiciary for enforcing the Censor Board's ruling.

Since the BJP government is the one really on the mat over this controversy, there is an escape route for it: it could simply abolish the CBFC, redesignate Bal Thackeray as its new censor with jurisdiction over every art form, not just films. That way, the government needn't bother about criticism from eternal carpers like me.

Saisuresh Sivaswamy