Netflix Charged Over A ‘Kissing Scene In Temple’

–Kakali Das |

There was an FIR registered by the Madhya Pradesh police against Netflix over a scene in the show A Suitable Boy which showed a couple kissing in the premises of a temple. The Home Minister of the concerned State, Dr. Narottam Mishra said that he had examined the matter and found prima facie the allegation of hurting sentiments to be true and an FIR was registered. BJP youth leader, Gaurav Tiwari filed the complaint against the makers of A Suitable Boy for shooting kissing scenes in between a Hindu girl and a Muslim Boy against the backdrop of a Hindu temple in that show. The FIR was registered under 295A of the IPC against two executives of Netflix India – the Vice President and the Director of Public Policy. Interestingly, according to an article written in The Print, The Superintendent of the Rewa District, Rakesh Singh told The Print that he had approached the district prosecution officer to seek on how to progress in that matter. It also turns out that, apparently, the particular scenes in the Maheshwar Temple was shot back in 2019 when the Congress government was in power. The Minister of Culture of the Kamal Nath government said that she was not aware of the content of the shoot when she inaugurated it.

The plot really thickens since we are extremely unaware of what the problem really is – if it is the location of the shoot, the depiction of what has happened on the show, the religion of the two characters indulging in the scene or the ‘kissing’ itself that’s particularly offensive. Should filmmakers, or Ad. makers be sensitive about these varied sentiments in a changing time? We are far more sensitive or regressive today than we were in the 90s when Vikram Seth wrote the particular novel. When he wrote the book, incidentally, the episode in question was not the most controversial part of it. So, should filmmakers, authors, advertising agencies be sensitive to these changing emotions? Is this a slippery slope since there are no guardrails, no rule book of any kind that has been written on what can and cannot be depicted and what is offensive and what is not. As a result, where does that leave the law, especially when the investigating agency doesn’t exactly know what to investigate in this particular matter?

This is an interview that the director, Mira Nayar gave the press on the 2rd of October before the show came out where she said interestingly enough and I quote, “A Suitable Boy is my response to India’s disappearing pluralism.”

How do people who are producing films, writing books, scripts for advertisements be careful about the changing human emotions and sentiments from time to time? What’s strange is when a creator makes a show for a channel or a platform, how does s/he know at which point in time people will take offense? We have had films with Hindu-Muslim marriage themes for a long period of time now, whether it was Bombay (1995), Earth (1999), Dil Se (1998), Veer Zara (2004) and many more. There are countless examples of such Cinema and stories which work on conflicts. We can hardly imagine a story without a dispute or viewers getting offended by it. These creativity and ideation very often is about conflict, resolution, goal, obstacle etc. “Many moons ago, I was hosting a show called ‘Public Demand’ and was in Aligarh and anchoring. I was in the premises of the University with a Mosque behind me. While I was talking about something on a countdown, a group of people arrived taking offense to the fact that I was standing and sharing a speech behind the Mosque. There were people who stood for me and some against me. People could take offense to anything, the colour of the shirt, the shoes that I was wearing and etc. It is just the matter of what the degree of offense was that they wanted to take and on what grounds”, Roshan Abbas, MD, Geometry Encompass said. Creatively trying to stifle people will have an even more adverse reaction going forward.

To examine the legal veracity of the FIR that has been filed, it’s exactly unclear what is offensive at this point. Section 295A is ‘deliberate and malicious acts intended to outrage religious feelings of any class by insulting its religion or religious beliefs’. This section was specifically put in way back in the 1930s after the incident called the Rangeela Rasool incident took place. It was a book published during a period of confrontation between Arya Samaj and Muslims in Punjab during the 1920s. This section or article is invoked in cases where somebody deliberately creates mischief, for instance, by throwing one kind of meat in one religious place and vice versa and provoke rights and sentiments of one another.

“The section has been misused and it’s the minister who decides this. This is an administration which is looking out for trouble and this particular minister in Madhya Pradesh, if one listens to the politics in that place, he has other ambitions. But why do they take away the essential comfort with which we all have been dealing with our religion and our interaction with each other! This is something which doesn’t make out a criminal offence and should be struck down by High Court as abuse of process” – Sanjay Hegde, Senior Advocate, SC said.

“If this wind up in court, the prosecutor will have to prove that this was a deliberate attempt and the people who were making the show and the author who wrote the book did it for the purpose of offending and hurting the sentiments of the people. The best response to this is to ridicule and laugh at them”, Sanjay Hegde further said.

The government is throttling every kind of freedom which this country actually stands for. The fundamental rights given to us by the constitution died a thousand death. Why can’t one kiss in a temple or show affection inside the premises of it? Many temples such as, Khajuraho Temple, Sun Temple, Virupaksha Temple etc. are filled with romance between men and women, erotic sculptures and completely nude human beings. People don’t get offended by the half-naked men and women on the walls of all our great temples but get irked if somebody puts an arm on his spouse’s shoulder inside the temple.

At one point in time, Maneka Gandhi said that one couldn’t show animals in the advertisements and thus people stopped making ads with animals in it. The advertising community then woke up and said that they wouldn’t use live animals anymore. Even today 90% of the animals that we see are generated on the computer.

There wasn’t any outrage on the movie The Accidental Prime Minister (2019) which was not only factually incorrect but insulted the former Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh. It feels like an intentional move to further the agenda to monitor selective content on OTT platforms. Keeping aside other films, we have movies like Satyam Shivam Sundaram (1978) or Utsaav (1984) in the past; the way the song of Satyam Shivam Sundaram was picturised, Zeenat Aman’s erotic look excited the audience in the past. If that song were to come out today, they would burn the theatres to ashes.

In October 2019, the RSS said that streaming platforms like Netflix are putting out anti India, anti-Hindu content and that it should actually be scrutinised cautiously. There would be people who argue that shows like Leila, for example, are anti Hindu and they shouldn’t be put out as it offends people. We live an age of outrage where it has become a profession now. Netflix is feeding the homes of thousands in the country – by creating an issue, making them tweet and eventually trend on Twitter. In the Chanakya Neeti there was an entire episode where the King asks Chanakya how to keep the people engaged. He replied ‘either give them a spectacle, or something to argue about’.

There was an another show that came out in 2018 called Ghoul on Netflix and Ghoul as a show showed a dystopic future and that was what many people had reacted against. The creative art very often shows us situations that don’t exist, conflicts that have heightened emotion and drama and these are the core aspects of the shows.

Delhi Crime has won an international Emmy Award this year and the series is based on the Nirbhaya case and follows the story in the aftermath of the gang rape. Now people in India would start outraging with the thought that it showed us in a poor light. People should acknowledge that cinema, television and pop culture are a reflection of the happenings in our society. We can’t run away from the fact that these evils exist around us in different communities, shape and status.

Moreover, Uttar Pradesh has passed a ‘love-jihad’ ordinance that says that offenders would land in jail for up to 5 years. We have already witnessed the horrors associated with it with our neighbouring countries – in Afghanistan when the Taliban took over, they went after the Barbers since people weren’t allowed to shave their beards; in Iraq, in the late 1970s we had women joining the protests with their hair open and multiple incidents of that kind.

Netflix would eventually pull out of India because of such excessive scrutiny, knowing that there isn’t any use of doing business in an extremist society as ours. This would indeed be a huge setback for the entertainment industry, also for technology and the rise of unemployment in the country. Netflix commissioning content in India is providing work and other employment opportunities to spot boys, makeup artists, directors, producers including others.