#DNAReaderEdit | Ban on Pakistani actors: Can Bollywood leave politics alone?

In Stephen King’s 1991 novel Needful Things, a novelty store called ‘Needful Things’ opens in the town of Castle Rock. People who buy various ‘needful things’ from the store do not realise the true cost of these items, and soon the town descends into chaos and violence. Among the first casualty of the mayhem is twelve-year-old Brian Rusk who, unable to bear the guilt of indirectly causing death of two women, kills himself. The police arrive only to find his mother Cora completely indifferent to the fact of her son’s death, playing with a pair of sunglasses bought from the same store that supposedly belonged to Elvis Presley. When asked about her feelings, she says:

‘Stop asking me all these stupid questions about Brian! Arrest him if he is in trouble, his father will fix it. Leave me alone! I have got a date with the King and I can’t keep him waiting!’

At a literal, horror novel level, this scene is about the malevolent hold that Mr. Gaunt, the store owner, is exercising on the town through the wares he sold to the townsfolks.  At a more subtle, parable level, this scene serves as a visceral reminder of how crass consumerism and the mindless pursuit of material pleasures desensitises people to the suffering around them.

As I watched various Bollywood celebrities rally behind their Pakistani counterparts working in the Indian film industry, the above scene flashed before my mind. The demand that these film artistes be left out of politics sounds very rational on the face of it and, therefore, both the argument and the motivations of people making it ask for a closer examination.

For the purpose of this article, I have chosen not to discuss whether Pakistani artistes should be allowed to work in India or not. That issue and the argument of “art is above politics” are essentially separate, and the purpose of this article is to concentrate on the later.

First of all, as Times Now anchor Arnab Goswami asked on his prime-time debate, what exactly constitutes an art? The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines art as “something that is created with imagination and skill and that is beautiful or that expresses important ideas or feelings.”

To put this definition in the proper context, we must remember that films or television shows are not mere art, but mass-distributed, commercialised art. These businesses are run by media savvy, ambitious business people with millions riding on their creations. It will be interesting to examine if the argument of art above politics holds true if we change the art under discussion.

In July 2000, the World Diamond Congress adopted a resolution known as the Kimberly Process Certification Scheme that increased the diamond industry’s ability to block the sale of conflicted (blood) diamond (a diamond mined in a war zone and sold to finance an insurgency). Now, imagine if Waris Ahulawalia, the New York City-based jewellery designer, had stood up and told the World Diamond Congress to leave his art of designing jewellery out of the politics of blood  diamonds. Would we, in such a case, have overlooked the brutality and bloodshed involved in the procurement of diamonds to focus on the beauty of Mr. Ahulwalia’s creation?

If art is one part of the argument, politics is another. It is interesting to see a highly politicised film industry demanding that they be kept away from politics. After all, nobody will deny the politics within the film industry. The concentrated attack on filmmaker Vivek Agnihotri earlier this year, when his Naxal insurgency drama Buddha in a Traffic Jam was released, comes to mind. In 2014, sixty film personalities including Saeed Mirza, Nandita Das and Mahesh Bhatt wrote an open letter asking people not to vote for Mr. Narendra Modi. Last year, film personalities like Mahesh Bhatt, Shatrughan Sinha, and Naseeruddin Shah signed a petition asking President Pranab Mukherjee to pardon Yakub Memon, one of the chief architects of the Mumbai blasts of 1993.For representatives of an industry that so desperately wishes to stay out of politics, these guys seem to go fishing  for political gains an awful lot.

I also find it interesting that when Salman Khan was pulled up by the National Commission for Women for his insensitive ‘rape’ remarks during the promotion of ‘Sultan’, those who defended him, did so on grounds of free speech. Nobody in my memory told the NCW to leave the actor out of its gender politics.

So, if the film industry is an industry like any other, and it gets involved in politics not only of its own but of others, then why are its representatives so utterly callous toward public opinion? Remember, when these people disagree with how a common citizen feels, they rarely stop at ‘agree to disagree’, but often accuse those they disagree with of bigotry, racism, sexism, casteism, and so on. For example, Mahesh Bhatt, who  described popular opinion against Sanjay Dutt in the TADA case, as “resentment, envy and sadistic pleasure in the failure of the famous.” 

Here, I would like to reproduce what American conservative Ben Shapiro has to say about Hollywood liberals in his book Primetime Propaganda:

Ben Shapiro, Primetime Propaganda

Hollywood is like the Beverly Hills Hotel writ large. It takes an exclusive ticket to get in. It’s filled with cloistered people who have little connection to the world around them. And those people revel in their wealth, even as they express sympathy for the plight of those who can’t live in such lush surroundings. At least in New York, the upper-crust liberals sometimes take the subway. In Hollywood, their private chauffeurs drive them to self-aggrandizing awards parties where they all get together to wear ribbons on behalf of the homeless. Even other liberals around the country know that those in Hollywood live in their own self-enclosed utopia—but those in Hollywood are blissfully unaware of that fact. They’re stuck in their bubble, and they can’t get out. That’s because if the leftists in Hollywood recognized their bubble, they wouldn’t be able to live with themselves. If limousine liberals knew they were limousine liberals, they’d either have to give up the limousine or the liberalism.

And they nominated Donald instead of you, Ben?

The parallels between Hollywood and Bollywood are inescapable.  To make matters worse, Bollywood has dynasties and nepotism on a much bigger scale than Hollywood.  Make a list of twenty prominent, active Bollywood actors that come to mind and see how many of those come from families not involved in show business. This is further compounded by the complete lack of accountability in approving projects and casting talent. We can compare professional athletes with film stars in terms of money and fame, but due to the competitive nature of all sports, nepotism can carry a mediocre athlete only so far. Imagine the Dhoom franchise as a professional international sports team: would Uday Chopra have played in the third installment? I doubt.

In short, here is a bunch of incredibly rich, incredibly famous people who run an industry built on nepotism and complete lack of accountability— people who call you sadist when you apply the law of the land to one of them; people whose sense of superiority is strong enough to preach you about politics when it suits them; and dismiss you when you attempt they show some accountability towards the society they live in. Like Cora Rusk in Needful Things, they are basically demanding that they be left alone. The fabulous life of luxury that they lead has desensitised them to the pain and suffering inflicted by the state-sponsored terrorism of Pakistan. To them, the choice between offending Fawad Khan by calling Pakistan a supporter of terrorism, and ignoring the anguish of the hundreds of families who have lost their loved ones to Islamic terrorism is no choice at all.

In 1981, American socialite and heiress Sunny Von Bulow’s husband Claus Von Bulow was convicted of attempting to murder her. Alan Dershowitz, the lawyer who helped to overturn the conviction on appeal, stated that the fact that the evidence used to convict Claus was gathered by private investigators employed by Sunny’s children was not acceptable. The rich should not be permitted to hire their own police and decide among themselves which evidence should be made public.  I dare say Mr. Dershowitz meant that it was one thing for the rich to build a bubble around themselves, and quite another to let them pull the criminal justice system inside it.

 Bollywood can choose to live inside the bubble if it chooses to. From time to time, we will indulge them by paying for the entertainment they provide us. We must, however, draw a line at these elites taking politics inside the bubble sometimes and leaving others outside.

Make no mistake. These are not free-spirited artistes fighting injustice. They are members of a cabal pissed that the society which bankrolls their lifestyle is demanding accountability from them.  If we wanted to seek their representation in popular culture, it would not be Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda riding Captain America choppers in Easy Rider, but pigs in Animal Farm saying, “All Animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others.”

Jai Hind!