Can Katrina Kaif look even half as appealing if she is forced to curb her natural vivacity for a screen role that appears to demand a vastly different persona? Did director Prakash Jha choose to cast her in order to compensate for the character she plays in Rajneeti? Unfortunately, that is not what the fuss is all about in the run-up to the release of the film.

It emerges that the Congress party muscled its way into playing a super censor and mutilated the director's work by ordering several cuts. This, even before the censor board had got down to work. And the reason: the Congress party felt uncomfortable about Katrina Kaif's part, which it felt was modelled after Sonia Gandhi. The director kept denying the charge but there were apparently too many similarities to be ignored by the party's self-appointed censor board.

Prakash Jha's denials notwithstanding, the question arises whether the Congress party had any business viewing the film before its release and ordering cuts as it did. Isn't all art modelled after life? Who is to decide whether similarities between a fictional character and a real person transgress the freedom of expression by embarrassing or harming the real person? Don't we still have a censor board, howsoever dysfunctional, to decide on the second question and intervene if required?

Should political parties, then, be allowed to censor movies?