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Cauldron of hate

Why is Bollywood erasing mild-mannered shikarawalas of Kashmir from public memory, asks Nandita Haksar, lawyer and human rights activist

SEEING ISN'T BELIEVING Nandita Haksar: `With so many TV channels and magazines today, we have a false sense of choice'

The day after Syed Abdul Rehman Geelani was shot at in front of his lawyer Nandita Haksar's house, a leading newspaper published articles "stating" that the lawyer had wiped out blood and tampered with evidence. The first word a reporter covering court or crime is ever taught — alleged — was mysteriously missing from all the copies.

The charismatic Supreme Court lawyer and well-known human rights activist, says: "There was no blood in the car in which he was carried to the hospital. So, the reporter assumed I must have wiped it out. He didn't call me to ask my side of the story. In fact, any doctor could have told him there was no blood because there was no exit wound!" How did such a report based singularly on the police version get into print, asks Nandita, who worked briefly as a reporter in the Seventies. "Back then, I would have been pulled up by my chief reporter or my news editor for not getting the other side of the story."

Hidden truths

Nandita says that several aspects of the Geelani case — in which the Delhi college professor, who was sentenced to death on the charge of being part of Parliament attack conspiracy by the Special POTA court and later acquitted by the higher courts — were simply ignored or misrepresented by the media. Just one sampler: no report stated the crucial fact that Geelani, from the very beginning, had asked the court to put all the evidence on record and the persecution had refused to do so. In what she terms a "willing suspension of disbelief", the media simply published whatever the investing agencies put out. "Media trials vilified Geelani long before he was offered a fair trial." This, she says, is a pointer to what extent shallow nationalist arguments can cloud better judgment and even create an atmosphere in which all questions are quickly dubbed "anti-national".

This, Nandita would argue, is far insidious than the more open censorship that existed during the Emergency. "With so many TV channels and magazines today, we have a false sense of choice. But do we get to hear of what is actually happening in our country?" she asks. "There is greater control over the media by private corporate companies. What we know in elaborate detail is who's dating whom in Bollywood circles."

So what does one do to be heard when media spaces thus shrink for some kinds of news? In this particular case, those intent on ensuring a fair judicial trial for Geelani formed All India Committee for the Defence of S.A.R. Geelani and came out with other modes to reach their side of the story to people. They set up a website, came up with a travelling poster exhibition, did massive signature campaigns and so on. Nandita takes this argument a step further to say that what's getting drowned in high-pitched jingoism is not just some "unpalatable truths", but even a broad, humane perception of people.

"Take, for instance, Jab Jab Phool Khile, a Shashi Kapoor starrer. It was about a Kashmiri boatman, Raja, who falls in love with a rich Bombay heiress. This film was a mega-hit and, remember, it was in the same year as films like Guide. Many years later the producer asked the scriptwriter to what religion Raja belonged and the scriptwriter answered: `I don't know.' Everyone knows that there are no Hindu Shikarawalas in Dal Lake of Srinagar. We need to ask ourselves how we then accepted Raja and his Bombay girlfriend's relationship. And now all the Bollywood films portray the Kashmiri as a terrorist. Why has Bollywood buried Raja and other shikarawalas?" She reminds us that Muslims in Hindi films were once always dignified characters. "Remember the Imam in Sholay? He is the conscience keeper of the village and the most dignified character. Today Muslims are systematically demonised by Bollywood. I want to ask what has happened to my country that it has become such a cauldron of hate and prejudice."

Not in fiction alone

These prejudices do not fall into watertight compartments. That's how fact and fiction often get all mixed up. In an article in Seminar, Nandita talks of several commonsensical perceptions that fed into vilification of Geelani. "He was a Kashmiri Muslim and taught Arabic. What more proof could anyone want of his complicity in the conspiracy?" Nandita quotes the great Sufi poet Jelaluddin Rumi: "You want proof that the sun exists, so you stay up/ All night talking about it. Finally you sleep/ As the sun comes up."

BAGESHREE S.

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