A section of viewers led by a burly man suddenly took to sloganeering, shouting ‘Jai Shri Ram’ half an hour before Rakesh Sharma’s documentary on the 2002 Gujarat carnage, Final Solution , ended at a preview theatre in Mumbai.
It was the second week of October 2004, and the movers and shakers of Bollywood were in attendance to watch this unusual ‘trial show’ held at the request of some members of the censor board. The body had earlier banned the film, but fervent public outcry and guerrilla campaigns like ‘pirate and circulate’ had forced it to reverse the ban four months later.
“The sloganeering lasted for a few minutes and as I went to investigate, Madhur Bhandarkar identified the man in the lead as Pahlaj Nihalani,” says Sharma, grinning at the irony of having to submit his sequel to Final Solution before a board now chaired by Nihalani.
“I anticipate a great deal of warmth and affection from him when I take these films to him next year,” he says, his bearded face breaking into laughter. Final Solution Revisited , as the sequel is titled, is a bouquet of four long films shot from 2006 to the present, which resumes the political narrative and the personal tales of those linked to the carnage, both aggressors and victims, in a nuanced way. It is in the final stages of editing now.
Sharma doesn’t make films to preach to the choir. His films don’t have a strident activist tone nor do they pontificate. Shorn of clichés like ‘secular’, fascist’ and ‘communal’, they come across as purely objective, which they are anything but. “My skill as filmmaker is in the way I structure the film, and navigate my audience in a certain direction.” Instead of attempting to challenge, convert or debate with the fundamentalist, he draws him out and engages with him. The effect is telling.
If Final Solution documented the personal tale of tragedy, grief and victimology of the carnage survivors, inter-cut with a carefully-structured and starkly political narrative of the Hindutva juggernaut in the backdrop of the ‘hate mandate’ of 2002, the sequel that’s under production wraps up the chronicling of the 2007 and 2012 Gujarat Assembly elections.
“Besides other things, it’s a comprehensive archive of the rise and entrenchment of Narendra Modi and the political part of the film ends with his speech outside the BJP headquarters in Ahmedabad in 2012 where he announced his intention to go to Delhi. It was a defining chapter for Indian polity,” says Sharma. But the personal tales carry on. From 2006, Sharma made periodic visits to the pogrom’s victims and perpetrators (party foot soldiers, mostly) to capture the personal narratives through the stages of trauma, relief, rehabilitation and court cases. “There’s a great deal of human cost paid by those involved, and that includes the perpetrators as well, when such a cataclysmic event happens.”
Not surprisingly, a significant part of the sequel focuses on the perpetrators, who he says have also become victims over a period of time. “I’ve filmed a dozen Kar Sevak families five years and 10 years after the carnage, and also the foot soldiers who were part of the lynch mobs and arrested on lesser charges like looting and rioting, to know what they think of it now. Believe me, they had a startling story.”
But it was a booklet brought out by Gujarat’s Jati Nirmoolan Samiti (Society for the Eradication of Caste) that shed light on a more arresting dimension. “It contained a few tables on the caste composition of the detainees in Sabarmati Jail booked on 2002-related charges. There were just two Brahmins, four Banias, some 17 Patels and 27 or 37 from other upper castes — hardly 100 in all. On the other hand, there were 746 OBCs and 797 Dalits.”
“Clearly, the ringleaders who plotted and conducted the large-scale violence got away except for a few, like Maya Kodnani, Babu Bajrangi and Jaideep Patel. It’s the foot soldiers, the Dalits and the OBCs, who paid the price in the urban areas. The picture isn’t different in the tribal belt either.” The best of legal support was extended to the upper caste perpetrators. The rest got a raw deal. “They related a uniform story of being cynically used, exploited, and left to rot. They were left to fight for themselves. At each home I visited, I saw penury, hunger. The perpetrators had become victims.”
Halfway into making the sequel, Sharma made a short video of these interviews and circulated about 10,000 copies in predominantly Dalit areas of Gujarat. The question flung at each interviewee was what he would do if such a skirmish arose now. “The message from the erstwhile perpetrators was uniform: don’t get involved!”
Sharma listened from the sidelines when they talked about why riots never happen in posh areas and why tension always crystallises at the border of Muslim and Dalit localities. “They made larger political points. Both Muslims and Dalits are beef eaters, have a greater social cohesion, and constitute the same underclass.”
Around the time Sharma was working on the video, a disillusioned poet-writer wanted to assist him. It was Jignesh Mevani, who has now galvanised Dalits and Muslims to fight oppression in the wake of the Dalit killings in Una. “He was very dissatisfied with what he was doing and asked if he could be a part of the film,” recalls Sharma. “I had heard of him before and asked him to join me the very next week. I’m happy that he’s implementing his hypothesis.”
A keen chronicler of the evolution of Hindutva, Sharma is also making a film on the Malegaon blasts, tracking the long-term and short-term aftermath of the 2006 and 2008 terror attacks.
anandan.s@thehindu.co.in
