When the Indian government declared that it was banning the documentary India’s Daughter , and asking the BBC as well as online sites like YouTube to take it down, those with long memories found the situation depressingly familiar.
My own mind went back to 1991, when the First Gulf War had broken out. CNN, then a relatively unheard of channel for Indians, was beaming live footage of the fighting in Iraq which was reaching television sets all over the world. In India, some five star hotels had set up satellites that picked up this non-stop coverage which their guests could see in their hotel rooms. Many Indians, including journalists, booked rooms to see for themselves what foreign live television looked liked. For those of us who had only seen Doordarshan till then, it was very exciting indeed.
Just a few months later, an unheard of company from Hong Kong, Star TV announced it would be beaming not just news but also music and entertainment into all of Asia, India included. When the programmes started, they were a hit. Indians tuned into the BBC as well as began enjoying American soap operas such as Bold and the Beautiful , a long running saga of jealousy, intrigue and not a little kissing, set among owners of fashion brands — it was very glossy and glamorous. And it angered the Indian establishment.
Not only was this direct broadcast breaking hoary old Indian laws which prohibited digging of roads to lay cables to carry the programmes, the programmes were against Indian culture. Local entrepreneurs had anticipated that and were running cables over roofs, thus avoiding digging — as for Indian morality being in danger, the audiences seemed to love it, even if there was grumbling about how families could no longer see TV shows together, because of the embarrassment of what was on the screen.
That is when Indian babus came up with what they thought was a great idea. Why not jam the signals being beamed into India from satellite? Then these programmes would just not reach Indian homes? Nothing came of it in the end, because it was found impractical and technically unfeasible and cable television spread all over the country.
The reason for this somewhat long introduction is to show how the more things change the more they remain the same. The current Indian government’s diktat to YouTube and BBC to take down the film was met with compliance, since neither of them wanted to offend Indian authorities, but within hours, if not minutes, the film was available on mirror sites. Anyone in India can see it or download it and pass it around. We are of course not even talking of the rest of the world, which can and will see the film, more so since it has been in the news.
Like King Canute, who tried to order the waves on the sea to roll back, it is futile to ‘ban’ anything in today’s world. The online universe does not respect national boundaries or government orders and the more one tries to suppress something, the more it springs up and spreads.
Gone are the days when India could suppress novels and films. From Nine Hours to Rama , a book and then a film about Gandhi’s assassination to Satanic Verses , Salman Rushdie’s novel that angered Muslims, India has a long record of banning creative works. James Laine’s seminal work on Shivaji was banned in Maharashtra in 2003, till the courts lifted the ban. A biography of Gandhi by Joseph Lelyveld is banned in Gujarat. Wendy Doniger’s book on Hinduism was not banned — the publisher, Penguin, just withdrew it and decided to pulp it. All of them are now available online, for easy and sometimes even free download. Governments have to wake up to this fact.
But will they? Not a day passes without some new ‘ban’ or the other. Pahlaj Nihalani, the new chief of the Central Board of Film Certification, which classifies films for viewing, enthusiastically came up with a list of words that could not be now used in the movies. The list was a virtual compendium of obscenities, but also included the word Bombay, which now would have to be changed to Mumbai. His own colleagues in the CBFC protested and soon, the government quietly told him to withdraw the circular.
It is clear that in this day and age bans are not going to work. A younger India will not tolerate attempts to control what they see, what they hear and even what they eat, especially if this is done in the name of Indian culture. The clash of the conservative older guard with a younger generation which is more liberal and open-minded is an ongoing one, but where such edicts were followed without much resistance, today they get ridiculed on the raucous social media.
The state should stop playing nanny and trying to protect the morals of its citizens. Governments have much more important things to attend to, instead of imposing their conservative and antediluvian agenda.
One can argue about the merits and demerits of the documentary on rape, but by trying to suppress it — unsuccessfully — the government turned it into a freedom of expression issue. Democratic India is now perceived as a country that does not want to hear any inconvenient truth about itself.
