Best of Luck to Jag mohan Mundhra for the Movie.

I am baffled that with these credentials, he is making a biopic of Sonia! What is he going to depict – the privileged grandson of India’s first and most famous prime minster being seduced by an average looking au pair in England? No wonder Sonia recoiled. In many ways it was fitting that a B-grade soft porn director decided to cast the biopic of a B-grade uneducated Italian au pair. Alas, it is being banned.

I couldn’t have said it better than that. Thanks. Personally, they must take the prize for the most corrupt party in India’s brief history. Though the competition is fierce.

I’d love to go and see for myself how much things have changed. Of course this change mainly applies to roughly half or less than half the population.

I think your intent was good. All i am saying is that there is no need to have a knee jerk tendency to include BJP in every story.

As a note, i think India is not ready for unlimited free speech, especially when political parties use these for their own purposes to cause mayhem. E.g. Danish Cartoons and MF Hussein paitings. I guess we have to live with banning these type of speeches untill both the left and the right can come to an understanding that no speech should be censored regardless of the hurt it causes to a section of people. Ain’t happening anytime soon.

That was my point too. I only inserted the BJP to provide balance.

The fact that Congress is censoring something is not really news.

No, it’s not new. But I think as Indian values have changed in the last 10-15 years, we’ve seen a growing gap between ordinary people’s standards and the government’s standards for freedom of expression. Most of the media landscape is now pretty open, so when you see these eruptions of censorship it does seem like “news.”

I think the sentence would read better if it was stated thus: And it’s not just a BJP thing; the Congress Party were no slouches when it came to censoring views they weren’t happy about.

Ofcourse it would not make sense for this post but generally Congress is thought of as a progressive party in the English media – In India and abroad (except perhaps for The Pioneer newspaper) whereas BJP is said to have all the qualities which are inmical to a democratic state. It is strange that you had to insert BJP’s name even here when the post is about Sonia. Maybe you did it subconsciously. If some of the American bloggers stayed in hinterland of India, they would know that this secular/communal debate has reached to state of utter rubbishness. Each party now simply targets a religious or cast votebank – and this includes the left. Case in point – a CPI(M) leader while addressing a Muslim organization suspects Shiv Sena’s hand in the blast.

From Hindustan Times (7/19): Senior CPI(M) leader on Wednesday suggested a probe to ascertain if Mumbai train blasts were set off by Hindu fundamentalists as BJP and Shiv Sena were fast losing their base in Maharashtra. “There is a need to probe this angle,” CPI(M) politburo member and West Bengal’s ruling Left Front chairman Biman Bose said in Kolkata.

Maybe this post does not belong here. My main point is that no Indian political party is unscathed when it comes to taking retrograde actions in context of a progressive democratic state. The fact that Congress is censoring something is not really news. They have been in power for about 45 of the 55 years since the British left and most undemocratic actions have been taken by them including the Emergency.

while i don’t condone censorship, this might turn out to be one of this lame congress government’s most inspired policies. the cult of sonia gandhi is already weird and dangerous enough.:)

That’s not true. There is no society in which censorship does not exist. What we find troubling is an excess of it, what Amardeep calls “knee-jerk censoriousness.”

Without censors, there would be hardcore on the after-school special, and even the best newspapers would be overrun by Nazi nutters.