The Shrinking Freedom of Indian Cinema
In early 2024, filmmaker Honey Trehan confronted an ordeal emblematic of India’s fraught creative environment. His historical drama Panjab ’95—a searing retelling of human rights activist Jaswant Singh Khalra’s exposure of extrajudicial killings during Punjab’s militant insurgency of the 1980s and 1990s—became ensnared in the labyrinth of state censorship. Despite securing international acclaim and a planned global release, the film remains unreleased in India, its fate suspended between bureaucratic opacity and political coercion.
Originally titled Ghallughara (“massacre”), the film alarmed the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC), which demanded alterations ranging from the removal of Khalra’s name to the erasure of geographic identifiers such as “Punjab Police.” What began as a procedural review devolved into an exercise in state-imposed sanitization: successive revisions escalated from a handful of edits to an astonishing 127 mandated cuts. Trehan’s appeals through judicial channels collapsed under executive pressure, compelling him to denounce the mutilated version as a work “directed by the CBFC.” His dissent underscores a broader malaise—the systematic constriction of artistic expression under the pretext of preserving public order.
Since the Bharatiya Janata Party’s ascent in 2014, India’s cinematic industry—once lauded for pluralism and subversive vitality—has increasingly mirrored the tenor of Hindu nationalist orthodoxy. The state’s ideological guardianship manifests less through overt prohibitions than through anticipatory compliance: filmmakers now pre‑emptively excise political content, fearing reprisal, boycott, or fiscal retaliation. The disbandment of the Film Certification Appellate Tribunal in 2021 obliterated a crucial avenue of recourse, leaving judicial litigation as the lone—and prohibitively cumbersome—path to appeal. The CBFC’s evolving role from certifier to censor thus operationalizes cultural conformity through procedural exhaustion.
Recent cases illuminate the reach of this apparatus. Films scrutinizing caste inequities (Phule), communal polarization (Santosh), or state violence (Bheed) have faced arbitrary censorship or outright prohibition, their political dissonance deemed perilous to “law and order.” Meanwhile, agitprop films extolling nationalist narratives—The Kashmir Files, The Kerala Story, The Bengal Files—have enjoyed fiscal incentives and governmental endorsement. Such asymmetry reveals not administrative prudence but ideological engineering: a concerted effort to sculpt collective memory and delimit dissent.
As state and market converge in their aversion to controversy, even global streaming platforms have capitulated, substituting expurgated versions for directors’ cuts. Trehan’s thwarted attempt to release Panjab ’95 internationally, reportedly obstructed by political intermediaries invoking nationalist sensitivities, epitomizes the invisible embargo on inconvenient truths. Deprived of institutional remedy, a few directors now rely on transient private screenings—an act of quiet defiance increasingly curtailed by clandestine injunctions.
Thus, the saga of Panjab ’95 transcends one filmmaker’s frustration: it crystallizes the metamorphosis of India’s regulatory bodies into instruments of ideological discipline. In Trehan’s own mordant analogy, the CBFC has abducted Khalra once more—not from the streets of Amritsar, but from the annals of national consciousness.
VOCABULARY FROM THE PASSAGE
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Ordeal
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Meaning: A very difficult or painful experience.
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Example: Surviving the long court case was an ordeal for the family.
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Fraught (with)
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Meaning: Filled with something unpleasant or problematic (like danger, tension, or difficulty).
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Example: Their negotiations were fraught with misunderstandings.
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Retelling
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Meaning: A new version or narration of an existing story or event.
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Example: The film is a retelling of an old myth in a modern setting.
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Extrajudicial
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Meaning: Done outside the legal or judicial process; not authorized by law.
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Example: Human rights groups condemned the extrajudicial killings by security forces.
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Insurgency
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Meaning: A violent rebellion or uprising against a government or authority.
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Example: The government deployed the army to suppress the insurgency.
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Ensnares / Ensnared
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Meaning: To trap or catch, especially in a difficult situation.
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Example: Many investors were ensnared in the financial scam.
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Bureaucratic
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Meaning: Related to complex government or administrative procedures, often slow and rigid.
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Example: The project was delayed by bureaucratic red tape.
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Opacity
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Meaning: Lack of transparency; the state of being difficult to understand or see through.
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Example: The company was criticized for the opacity of its financial reports.
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Coercion
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Meaning: Forcing someone to do something by pressure, threats, or intimidation.
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Example: The confession was obtained under coercion, so it was ruled inadmissible.
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Sanitization (of history / content)
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Meaning: The act of removing or altering parts to make something less offensive, shocking, or critical.
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Example: Critics accused the textbook of sanitization of colonial history.
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Mandated
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Meaning: Ordered or required by authority.
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Example: The new rules mandated safety training for all employees.
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Mutilated (version / text)
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Meaning: Damaged or altered so badly that it is no longer complete or true to the original.
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Example: The censored manuscript was so mutilated that the author rejected it.
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Malaise
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Meaning: A general feeling of discomfort, unease, or dissatisfaction in a system or society.
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Example: There is a growing malaise about corruption in public life.
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Systematic
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Meaning: Done according to a fixed, organized plan or system; methodical.
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Example: The researcher conducted a systematic review of all available studies.
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