AA Edit | SC flags self-censorship scourge

The Supreme Court of India, while ordering a detailed probe into the allegations that a spy software was installed in the mobile phones of citizens, including politicians and journalists, had held that the knowledge that one is under the threat of being spied on would amount to censorship, particularly self-censorship, and the thought of being under watch would effectively curtail freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution.

It is true that there is no official censorship in India on what citizens speak and write or how they express themselves but the decision of the makers of the Malayalam film Empuran to self-edit certain parts as they fear it may hurt the sentiments of a section of people tells a different story. The plot of the movie has the Godhra arson and the riots that followed as background, and the makers have decided to excise certain parts, including those related to the Gujarat violence, after the RSS mouthpiece wrote a series articles against the film, calling it “anti-Hindu” and “anti-India”. Mohanlal, the lead actor, and Prithviraj, actor and the film’s director, had come under severe online attacks as well.

The revised version has 24 scenes deleted from it and it has renamed the main villain Baldev instead of the original, Bajrangi. It has also removed scenes that depicted violence against a pregnant woman. The duration of the film is now shorter by 2.08 minutes.

The right wing agenda is the elephant in the room which threatens anyone who raises their voice against it. It has come to such a pass that it need not use the tools of the state to get its job done; fear-gripped citizens would fall in line instantly instead of waiting for the Central agencies armed with draconian laws to come knocking on their doors. This self-censorship that the Supreme Court had indicated is worse than state censorship as it can’t be fought legally. It is politics, and politics alone, that can salvage freedoms under threat.