NOVEMBER seems like a very long time ago. The student protest at Jawaharlal Nehru University ( JNU), against the hike in hostel fees, had not yet taken root. Neither had the nationwide demonstrationsu2014 some more violent than othersu2014 following the Citizenship ( Amendment) Act, which then, was only a bill. The police were still friends. And the lathi, though brutal, was used with restraint and reason.
That month as undisturbed as it seemed, saw author- columnist Aatish Taseer being severed from his roots, when the Government of India revoked his Overseas Citizen of India ( OCI) card. The Ministry of Home Affairs ( MEA) had said that Taseer had, in his Person of Indian Origin application, concealed that his late, estranged father was of Pakistani origin. Itu2019s a claim that the journalist contested later, in his second piece for Time magazine, six months after his controversial cover story, where he criticised Prime Minister Narendra Modi, as u201c Indiau2019s divider in chiefu201d. Taseer brings this up again at the start of his new two- part documentary for Al Jazeera, In Search of Indiau2019s Soul. u201c Itu2019s a country I love, and will always call home.
But... political leaders attacked me as a foreigner, wrongly calling me a Muslim and Pakistani. I am neither.u201d While home continues to elude Taseer, the documentary that he worked on with Naples- based filmmaker Bruno Rosso, much before his status came to be questioned, attempts to understand the deeper, historical factors, of which, he says, u201c the present politics is a manifestationu201d. u201c The film has been 18 months in the making, but we began filming it in August [ 2019]. That was three months after the Time magazine article. But, I arrived in New Delhi quite easily. We were all around the northu2014 UP, Delhi and Haryana. And then, I took a break to go and see my husband [ Ryan Davis] in Greece. On the last day of my holiday, I received a letter from the home ministry [ about revoking the OCI],u201d says Taseer in a telephonic interview from New York. u201c My lawyers in Delhi were alarmed by the tone of the letter, and they felt that it might be dodgy for me to return, specifically if I was to return to do a film like this.
And so, it was literally in the last 12 hours before I was meant to fly to Delhi, that I decided to go to America.u201d Meanwhile, Rosso and his team went ahead and finished filming for the docu that aired this week on Al Jazeera. While the first part of the film offers a sweeping view of the turbulence, taking you through the religious lynchings and the aftermath, as well as the people who make up the Right- wing brigade, including the cow vigilantes and sword- wielding love jihad warriors, the second part, says Taseer, gives both sides of this historical confrontation. u201c It really does try to dramatise that Hindu sense of hurt and pain,u201d he says.
Having Rosso, a non- Indian, helped. u201c I wasnu2019t going with a prejudiced idea about one side or the other,u201d says the filmmaker, who uses a pseudonym. Rossou2019s interest in the project began accidentally, around four years ago, following an interview with an Indian professor, who was an expert on the Constitution. u201c He told me that he was very worried about the interview we had conducted, and that he could lose his job, because he would be seen as a secularist. That an academic working in a respected Indian university was concerned about being seen as secular in a country with a secular constitution [ in place], came as a shock. That got me thinking that there was something seriously amiss in India,u201d he shares. When he started work on the documentary, he realised that the professoru2019s anxieties were not his alone. u201c Many professional Indians [ we reached out to] were worried about being able to help with something like this, as they have to stay and work in India. We got sense that freedom of speech and critical journalism is very much under threat. Itu2019s an endangered species in India.u201d Though Taseer has lived through many riots, including the Babri Masjid demolition, he says there has never been a moment like the Jane Borges
