India blocks movie of Indira Gandhi assassination
Print Edition
INDIA has blocked the release of a movie about the assassination of former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, saying it glorifies her killers and could trigger violent protests.
The country’s film certification board said the film glorified the Sikh bodyguards who killed Gandhi to avenge her suppression of an insurgency that culminated in an army assault on the Golden Temple, Sikhism’s holiest shrine.
“Kaum De Heere,” or “Diamonds of the Community,” was scheduled to be released across northern India yesterday.
Certification board chief Leela Samson said panel members saw the film and decided it could not be released as it posed a threat to public order.
India’s Home Ministry had expressed concern about a clearance earlier given to the film and had asked the panel to review it, Samson said.
The ministry received intelligence reports that the film, in the Punjabi language, could trigger feelings of enmity between India’s Hindu and Sikh communities, she said.
“The film is double trouble. It glorifies Indira Gandhi’s assassins who took the law into their own hands and it glorifies the hanging of the two men,” Samson said.
The film is based on the lives of three Sikh men, including the two bodyguards who killed Gandhi, against the backdrop of an insurgency that gripped the northern state of Punjab in the late 1970s and early 1980s when Sikh militants demanded a separate Sikh nation.
Gandhi ordered the June 1984 army operation to flush out hundreds of Sikh separatists inside the Golden Temple. The attack outraged Sikhs and led to a breakdown in relations.
Later that year, Gandhi was assassinated and the country was swept by a wave of anti-Sikh rioting, in which more than 2,000 Sikhs were killed.
The leaders of India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party and the main opposition Congress Party have called for the banning of the film, saying it will offend people. Samson said the film has not been banned and could be reviewed after changes to the script and cuts were made.
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