Perpetrators Are Victims: We Are Seeing the Age of Sanitised History
With the CBFC recommending 12 changes and cuts to the film Phule , it seems we are not far from a future where Brahmins are portrayed as victims of the caste system.
The trend we are witnessing follows an Orwellian script: War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.
This aversion to truth serves a dangerous agenda. Historically, the untouchables suffered the most brutal oppression during the Peshwa rule. When Savitribai Phule walked the streets of Pune to teach young girls, she was met with hostility – stoned and shamed by the Brahmins and their supporters. Even Anandibai Joshi, often celebrated as India's first woman doctor, faced resistance from her own Brahmin community for seeking education.
So why this sudden attempt at historical denial? Why this newspeak ?
Consider a scene from the 2019 biopic Anandi Gopal : when Anandi chooses to pursue education, her Brahmin neighbours – Soman, Godse, and others – throw garbage into her home, accusing her of defiling society by stepping beyond prescribed norms. Interestingly, this portrayal didn't provoke objections (perhaps because it dealt with tensions within the same community, revealing volumes about the selective sensitivities of the CBFC).
So what has changed now? Why is the CBFC, along with sections of the Brahmin community, suddenly afraid of a scene showing a Brahmin boy throwing a stone at Savitribai?
The censor board causes harm to the society not just by what it allows, but by what it chooses to cut or conveniently 'reinterpret'.
When historical truths are sanitised to maintain comfort, censorship shifts from regulation to active collusion. It stops being neutral and becomes part of the problem. The CBFC should be a fair and independent body that supports free expression, not a tool used to protect dominant and powerful groups. Often, the most important art is the kind that makes us uncomfortable.
When Chaava depicted the undeniable fact of Mughal emperor Aurangzeb committing atrocities against Chhatrapati Sambhaji Maharaj, no one feared it would incite hatred toward Muslims today. Then why this anxiety around Phule ? Do they worry that showing a Brahmin child attacking Savitribai will provoke anger toward Brahmins today? The reaction to Chaava stoked Hindu-Muslim tensions – now the fear is that Phule might augment the Brahmin-Bahujan divide. Is that why history is being whitewashed? The intent here is not to juxtapose Chaava with Phule. As such Chaava offers a limited portrayal of Chhatrapati Sambhaji Maharaj—focusing heavily on his torture while sidelining his intellect, compassion, and depth. In doing so, it misses the opportunity to present a fuller historical picture. One possible source of anxiety around Phule might be that it disrupts the Hindus versus Muslims debate and poses a threat to the Hindu consolidation that was deliberately generated after the release of Chaava .
We must remember: when injustice against one group is normalised, it threatens justice for all. As Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said, 'Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.' Just as Chaava has been misappropriated in contemporary times to fuel anti-Muslim sentiment through communal interpretations, Phule too carries the potential to be instrumentalised in ways that generate anti-Brahmin sentiment by emphasising their role as historical oppressors. Selectively invoking or erasing history to serve contemporary politics is a perilous game. History is messy, uncomfortable, and rarely convenient – but it must be told honestly.
The Phule controversy has shattered the myth of castelessness in Indian society.
Also read: Anurag Kashyap is Right. Indians Need to Confront the Uncomfortable Truth About Caste
Filmmaker Anurag Kashyap recently called out this glaring hypocrisy. A case in point is Anant Mahadevan, the director of Phule , who, in an attempt to defuse backlash, stated: 'I'm a staunch Brahmin. Why would I malign my community?' But that statement only underscores the deeper problem. In a society where individuals proudly flaunt their 'Brahmin genes', they cannot then disown their community's historical wrongdoings. You can't cherry-pick pride and disavow guilt. If we only preserve flattering narratives, we are no longer historians – we become propagandists.
At its core, this controversy reveals a deep discomfort within the Brahmin community about confronting their past. Had there been genuine efforts at moral or spiritual reparations – if not material ones – since independence, such resistance to truth-telling wouldn't be this fierce. Acknowledging the persistence of caste-based prejudice and discrimination would be a powerful first step.
Activist Thenmozhi Soundararajan, in The Trauma of Caste , offers tools for this kind of reckoning – worksheets rooted in Equality Labs' Unlearning Caste Supremacy workshop. But unfortunately, such transformative tools remain confined to the marginalised. Had the reparation processes begun post-independence, perhaps today's truth-tellers wouldn't be met with censorship but with solidarity. But it is never too late!
Shweta Ahire teaches at a college in Thane. Views expressed are personal.
This piece was first published on The India Cable – a premium newsletter from The Wire & Galileo Ideas – and has been updated and republished here. To subscribe to The India Cable, click here.
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The Wire
29 minutes ago
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Are Election Malpractices Undermining India's Claims of Being ‘the World's Biggest Democracy'?
For the best experience, open on your mobile browser or Download our App. Next Support independent journalism. Donate Now Politics Santosh Mehrotra and Jagdeep Chhokar 8 minutes ago Several methods have emerged in which the will of the people can be dishonoured. Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty Real journalism holds power accountable Since 2015, The Wire has done just that. But we can continue only with your support. Contribute Now In recent years, the election process in India has been converted into one party's fiefdom. Two sets of methods have been weaponised to subvert the verdict of the people, which are adopted at each stage of the electoral voting system. They are used before voting day, or on the voting day, and after the voting day. We discuss each in turn. Before voting day There are at least three methods used to unfairly impact election results before voting day. First, through electoral rolls or voter lists, which see a selective deletion of voter names from a list. Reports essay the deletion of Yadavs or Muslims in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. In Delhi, the removal of jhuggi-jhopri (slum resident) voters' names was alleged to be a factor that is likely to have led to the defeat of Arvind Kejriwal's Aam Aadmi Party. Names from voter lists were allegedly deleted ahead of the Delhi elections, as well as Maharashtra state elections. Both occurred in quick succession after the Lok Sabha polls. This is an age-old method which has now been taken to new heights. The founders of Missing Voters, a smartphone app to track disenfranchised voters in India, estimated that nearly 120 million citizens were missing from voter lists in the 2019 national election. More than half of those disenfranchised citizens were Muslims or lower-caste Dalits – minorities who would, put together, normally constitute less than a third of the country's population. Women are also disproportionately affected: the political scientists Prannoy Roy and Dorab Sopariwala calculated in their book released in 2023 that, on average, approximately 40,000 female voters are missing from the electoral rolls in every constituency in India, a number often higher than the winning margin in many Lower House electoral contests. A National Register of Citizens (NRC) in Assam had declared 1.9 million people potentially stateless, and while Hindus in the list have been promised their paperwork through a new Citizenship Amendment Act, Muslims are left to face detention, and potentially even deportation. Members of the ruling party have promised to expand the NRC across India, sending some Muslims in big cities running to gather their documents lest they need to prove their citizenship to the government. A 2018 study published in the Economic and Political Weekly found that in the May state elections in Karnataka that year, an estimated 1.2 million Muslims were not able to vote – a number that suggested Muslims were disproportionately missing from the electoral rolls. The study was conducted by comparing single-voter households in the state with record population data. The root cause behind the voter registration manipulation is Rule 18 of the Registration of Electors Rules, 1960, which allows for deletion of voter data without notice or an opportunity to be heard by the affected citizen. At the EC's assurance, the Supreme Court also disposed of a PIL which challenged the constitutional validity of Rule 18. This has clearly contributed to what many allege are large-scale deletion or addition of votes just before the elections in Maharashtra. It is not difficult to see why Muslims, Christians, Dalits and Adivasis would be the main targets for this electoral roll purge. For the 2019 Lok Sabha election, India had nearly 900 million registered voters and there have been reports of mass deletion of names from voters' lists from Assam, Andhra Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Karnataka, Uttarakhand and Delhi. The ECI has denied this. The outcome of such disenfranchisement of minorities is already visible: The 18th Lok Sabha (2024) has the lowest share of Muslim MPs in six decades. Less than 5% of its members currently are Muslims despite people from the community forming over 15% of the country's population. In fact, the decline in the share of the Muslim MPs in the Lok Sabha, in the 1990s, coincided with the rise of the BJP, whose total MP tally crossed the 100 mark for the first time in the 10th Lok Sabha (1991-96). Across India's 28 states, Muslims hold roughly 6% of the seats in state legislatures, which is less than half of their national population percentage. The representation of Christians is no better. The second method is to pay voters cash – bribery on a large scale. Small sums have now increased. The ruling party's hold of funds accumulated through the electoral bonds scheme was enormous. The SC judgment came five years too late, when the money had already been collected, and when the judgment did come, it did not require forfeiture of funds collected over the five years that the scheme was in operation. The ECI says it seized nearly half a billion dollars of cash. As cited by NPR, the last available survey, conducted years ago by Association of Democratic Reforms, suggested it plays a role for nearly 40% of voters. The higher capacity to pay is with the biggest political party, of course. A third method has recently emerged: to insert travelling voters of one party from other states (with duplicate identity cards) to polling booths in a state where elections are taking place, by duplicating Electronic Photo Identity Card (EPIC) numbers across states. This method was used, allegedly in Maharashtra and Delhi, to general acceptance. In Bengal, there was political upheaval over this. The ECI's response was: 'In this regard, it is clarified that while EPIC numbers of some of the electors may be identical, the other details, including demographic details, Assembly Constituency, and polling booth, are different for the electors with the same EPIC number.' The matter has rested there. These methods supplement a long-standing method that has been to physically prevent anti-government voters from coming out to vote – using state police force. The Ramgarh case in Uttar Pradesh is a classic and prevented the popular leader of the Samajwadi Party, Azam Khan, from being elected. After voting day (but before counting day) We now turn to the king of the insidious deeds being committed in cahoots with the ECI. But before we do that it is important to establish how the appointments of ECI members have been 'used' by the ruling government. Originally, the three members were to be selected from a list finalised by three people: the prime minister, the leader of the opposition, and the Chief Justice of India (CJI). That rule was changed by the ruling dispensation. In doing so, the government ignored a November 2023 judgement of the Supreme Court and passed a law in contravention of the court's conclusions by removing the CJI from the appointments committee, and replacing it with a cabinet member nominated by the Union government. This tilted the balance irreversibly in favour of the political executive of the day. The importance of this development will be seen below. To understand how this second set of methods has been used to subvert the electoral verdict of the people, it is important to explain the EVM system. To make the EVM system auditable and voter-verifiable, the Supreme Court had, in 2013, ordered introduction of Voter-Verified-Paper Audit Trail (or VVPATs). But in violation of Supreme Court order, the ECI, in February 2018 directed State Chief Electoral Officers to mandatorily verify VVPAT slips in only one randomly selected polling station in each assembly constituency. There is no statistical basis for this choice. This 0.3% sample size defeated the objective of installing VVPATs in all EVMs. The ECI in later hearings before the same court has stuck to its guns, and days before the April-May 2024 Lok Sabha polls were to begin, the SC accepted, without any basis, the ECI's plea that this sample size is sufficient. There are hardly any countries in the world that have adopted EVMs on the scale on which they have been used in India, for all types of elections. EVMs are nowhere the norm, in the world, certainly not for national elections (though several countries use it for local elections, which have reliable means of auditing EVM vote, especially in the US). We believe that if the EVM is to be continued to be used in India, the only possible way it should be allowed to continue is if the vote is verified by a paper trail in 100% of cases. Now let us turn to the ECI's purported methods for subverting the voter's vote as cast. The absence of a paper trail has enabled the insertion of votes in various constituencies by the hiking of vote percentages in all phases of polling. ECI announces only percent of votes cast (from among the eligible voters in a constituency), not the number of votes cast – violating the Representation of the People Act, which requires numbers of votes cast to be made public; accordingly, if the number of eligible voters is also made known, anyone can estimate the percentage. ECI is then free to announce, before the day of counting of the votes, a much higher percentage of votes cast – which are bogus votes. A study by the Vote for Democracy after the Lok Sabha elections 2024, concluded that 79 seats were won by the now ruling party, largely, on the basis of this method. It happened in the Lok Sabha elections to the extent of 55 million votes – that turned the election in constituencies that were marginal (i.e. where the margin of victory in the last election was small). Another study by the Association of Democratic Rights came to a similar conclusion about the total number of votes first announced by ECI, and then later enhanced before counting day. That essentially implies that voter names loaded onto EVM are of voters that did not vote and after polls closed – with ECI officers in collusion. This is what Congress's Rahul Gandhi has alleged for Maharashtra, that there were 6.5 million new voters added between 5.30 pm and 7.30 pm. There are stunning increases (7 to 12%) between the figures of votes polled and made available immediately after polls and before counting in the 2024 Lok Sabha. The same meticulous game appear to have been played in the elections to the state assemblies of Haryana and Maharashtra in 2024, where there was little likelihood of the sitting government being re-elected back to power – so great was the anti-incumbency. In addition, the ECI has played yet another game. At the end of polling on election day the ECI is required to provide 17-C forms – which can enable a candidate (or anyone) to verify the actual votes polled. This is to be provided to all candidates and their agents and also made public, but the ECI has not done so of late, except in a minority of cases. Is the EVM reliable? 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Santosh Mehrotra was professor of Economics at JNU. Jagdeep Chhokhar was an IIM professor and is the founder of the Association of Democratic Rights. The Wire is now on WhatsApp. Follow our channel for sharp analysis and opinions on the latest developments. Politics 'Prove it': Rahul Gandhi Doubles Down on Rigging Allegations After ECI's Unsigned Rebuttal View More
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Indian Express
an hour ago
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