Security Vs. Censorship: India Blocks Film On Assassination
Kuam De Heere, or Diamonds of the Community, depicts the assassination of Indira Gandhi and focuses on the personal lives of her killers. Critics say it glorifies them. The film has been screened in the U.S., the U.K. and Australia, but its release has been blocked in India. Kaum de Heere hide caption
Kuam De Heere, or Diamonds of the Community, depicts the assassination of Indira Gandhi and focuses on the personal lives of her killers. Critics say it glorifies them. The film has been screened in the U.S., the U.K. and Australia, but its release has been blocked in India.
A new film projects a decidedly different perspective about one of the most convulsive episodes in India's modern age.
Kaum De Heere, or Diamonds of the Community, looks at the 1984 assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi through the lens of her assassins.
Producer Satish Katyal rejects the criticism that the film eulogizes Gandhi's killers. "It has a human angle," he says. "It's about their personal lives. Why did they suddenly commit this act?"
Gandi's assassins, Beant Singh and Satwant Singh, both Sikh, were also her bodyguards. The pair unloaded their weapons into the 66-year-old Indian leader on the morning of Oct. 31, 1984, to avenge an event a few months earlier an army storming of the Sikh's holiest shrine in a bid to flush out Sikh separatists hiding there.
Sociologist Surinder Singh Jodhka says the assault on the Golden Temple in June 1984 shocked the community. Gandhi's assassination in turn provoked riots, centered in New Delhi, in which Hindus hunted down and killed Sikhs. Estimates of the number dead "vary from 4,000 to 10,000-plus in the country," Jodkha says.
Thirty years on, Jodkha says, "what happened in either in the Golden Temple or in Delhi is not something that will be forgotten."
That's evidently what concerns the government.
India's Home Ministry, which oversees the country's security, stopped the release of the film last week, concluding it "was highly objectionable," according to the Press Trust of India. The film's producers have appealed for its release. It's already been screened in the U.S., the U.K. and Australia.
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Security Vs. Censorship: India Blocks Film On Assassination