Vishwaroopam row ends, Haasan agrees on 7 edits
Barring the puns and play on words, that was the gist of the headline on most front pages on Sunday. The uplifting, positive tone of the line — as if meant to say ‘cheer up India, good news is upon us’ — both soothing and frightening at the same time.

Yes, one felt good for Kamal Haasan, the actor-producer-filmmaker who invested crores in a flick that was seen as brushing the minority community with the wrong end of the brush, purportedly painting them in allegedly bad light, leading to its ban by the Tamil Nadu government. "We have agreed to mute the sound at certain places. This edited version would be placed before the censors and released after their approval. I will announce the date of the film very soon," Haasan said on Saturday, after a meeting with Muslim organisations taking umbrage at Haasan’s brush.

The meeting, which ran for over five hours, was moderated by the state government’s representative.

After the Jayalalithaa government withdrew the ban on Sunday, Haasan on Monday withdrew his petition before the Madras high court challenging the ban. He also announced that his film would hit the screen in Tamil Nadu this Thursday, two weeks after the scheduled release, even as theatres on border areas of neighbouring Kerala are already doing brisk business, catering to the curious and faithfuls from Tamil Nadu. According to a report in TOI, “Dhanalakshmi theatre, a six-decade-old C-class theatre in Palakkad, has been screening the film since last week, including another late night show at 1 am to accommodate the additional rush from TN. Though the official rate printed on the ticket is Rs 30, it is being sold for rates as high as Rs 100 and Rs 120 depending on the crowds.”

So, now that the weekend will taste sweeter for Haasan, it’s all leading to a happy ending, like Bollywood flicks, right? Wrong. Unlike what the first line appears to mean at the outset, the row has not ended. It might just have begun, as the post-comma latter part of the line puts it. It just means extra-constitutional bodies have got almost-constitutional legitimacy to first hold up and then give the go-ahead to works of art that they might find pesky — that, too, in meetings “moderated” by the state.

And with parts edited that they deem ought to have been done — an issue officially dealt with by the censor board of film certification, a toothless body that gives those obviously meaningless “U” or “U/A” or “A” certificates that bore you no end for nanoseconds that never seem to end before the real things gets under way.

Second, Haasan, understandably not willing to stretch the battle any further and give more jolts to his personal accountants, might have withdrawn the petition challenging the ban but it nevertheless remains a valid question: why was the film banned? Especially after the censor board okayed it?

While the Tamil Nadu CM pooh-poohed information and broadcasting minister Manish Tewari’s remark that the state government has no business banning films cleared by the censor board with "I think he (Tewari) has not heard about Tamil Nadu Cinema's Regulation Act of 1955”, referring to the law that empowers the state to issue a ban if its public exhibition is "likely to cause a breach of peace", she did pass the onus on wholly to Haasan. “If Kamal Haasan had shown Muslim leaders the movie in the beginning, all this could have been avoided,” Jayalalithaa told a crowded and nationally broadcast media conference in Chennai on January 31.

Really? Taking the same line of argument, should Jayalalithaa not then have checked with the anti-nuke protestors before giving the go-ahead to Koodankulam nuclear power project, which led to at least one death, several injuries, police firing and lathicharges, and hundreds of cases against protestors, who called themselves “peaceful” and were dubbed unruly mobs daring to defy prohibitory orders imposed under Section 144 of CrPC by the administration?

One does not expect politicians to sit back and think whether they have opened the proverbial Pandora’s box of issues ill-fitting with the Republic — of soft communal nature in this case — or not to pander to their vote-bank boroughs, but if Jayalalithaa presumes she should be delighted now that Haasan and the “Muslim leaders” have come to an agreement, and that she deserves to be patted for bringing good governance to fruition, she should in fact look at the bad rep she has given her own administration. If the threat to law and order was so “very real”, as Jayalalithaa put it, that her government could not okay the release of a movie, one shudders to think what she would do/say when actually faced with “very real” issues.

Perhaps order her police to go on the rampage, using the baton, teargas and firepower on protestors and locking up hundreds in village after village, like she did in the Koodankulam nuclear plant’s case. For now, a round of applause for Kamal Haasan, who fought his battle in the only way such battles need to be fought: by sticking to one’s guns.