UNDERSTANDING GANDHI
Mood:
amorous
Now Playing: Rang De Basanti versus Lage Raho Munnabhai
Topic: Debate competition
A few days ago I had been at the UICT for a student debate on: 'Is Rang De Basanti philosophy not better than Lage Raho Munnabhai's in today's age?' The debate was between the teams from UICT and IIT (Mumbai). The two groups made valiant efforts to peddle their point of view, but somehow both were pulling the punches. The UICT team who represented RDB said that they were not actually propounding violence, while IITians were guarded about going beyond Gandhian non-violence. That is why both teams were not worth the win. The movie RDB has youth protagonists murdering the defence minister because he is corrupt. Aamir Khan and his team in the movie went around the town to claim that they are not for violence although their movie brazenly propagates it. I could make a movie on a rape victim's plight and show elaborate sexual intercourse, hold press conferences after the release of the movie to claim that my movie does not glorify rape, it has been made only to effectively bring out the plight of the rape victim! Or better still, I could claim that it is a sex education movie!
First, I always wondered why Bollywood movies are so choosy. The Bofors scandal has shaken the country, even cost a sitting prime minister his job, but no attempt has been made to make a movie on it. But there have been so many movies made on the shortcomings of the six-year NDA rule.
Just as the Gujarat riots have been represented in several Hindi movies, including Parzania, and a movie in which Amitabh (no less) plays a cop who is eye-witness to the Best Bakery carnage. But the Godhra carnage where the Hindu karsevaks coming back from Ayodhya were burnt alive by a Muslim mob does not seem to elicit the same kind of outrage among this intellectual community like it does with common people. How many Hindi movies have been made on the Godhra carnage?
This is what Salman Rushdie calls 'manufactured outrage', simply because the community of victims and the community of the perpetrators of the crime decide the response.
The charges levelled against the Gujarat police is that (as shown in Parzania) they were mute onlookers to the riots. They did not take action even when the Hindu mobs unleashed mayhem just in front of their eyes. The police reportedly told the victims of the riots that they ''did not have orders to take action against the perpetrators''. Recently, there were similar riots in Mumbai where the dalits went on a rampage. They burnt down seven bogies of the Deccan Queen and then vandalised the whole city. Similar scenes of dalits rioters going berserk, yet the police standing by mutely were reported in many newspapers. No human rights organisation got hyper over the issue as it happened in Gujarat. The police went on record to say that they were given orders not to ''intervene if dalits were vandalising housing colonies''.
Surprisingly, the most common newspaper headline that day was 'Pent-up fury spills on the road'. These words 'pent-up anger' were used by so many English newspapers that day that one wonders why the same dailies in Gujarat did not use the same term for Hindu rioter: 'Pent-up fury'. What is so legitimate about Dalit anger and their riots and what is so sacrilege about Hindu anger and their action in Gujarat?!
The biggest hypocrisy of dalit movement is that they claim to be Buddhists by religion and not Hindus, yet their actions as much as their speech almost always edge on violence, foul language, bad mouthing. And all that is justified in the name of hundreds of years of repression. Holy cow! That is exactly what the Hindu leaders in RSS say about Hindus being repressed for hundreds of years by the Muslim rulers and the Christian missionaries. Have you ever heard of any dalit leader talk of peaceful means and negotiations. Their language is about 'we will make them (the opposition) bite the dust'.
Tomorrow I will talk about how phoney is the Lage Raho Munnabhai philosophy is.
Cheers!
Posted by Anil Nair
at 9:02 PM
Updated: Saturday, 7 April 2007 8:59 PM
chatty