This is how double standards look like

There is nothing called selective liberalism. Mamata Banerjee’s West Bengal government on Monday announced a ban on Sudipto Sen’s film, The Kerala Story, with the chief minister explaining that this was to ‘avoid any incident of hatred and violence, and to maintain peace in the state’. This is quite surprising from someone who, in 2017, described attempts to ban the Sanjay Leela Bhansali film Padmavati (later changed to Padmaavat) — which wasn’t banned but released with changes and disclaimers — as ‘a calculated plan of a political party to destroy the freedom to express ourselves’.

If she could rightly stand up to those threatening ‘consequences’ when a film upset sections for portraying a Rajput queen ‘in a bad light’ — a smaller group of Muslim leaders, ironically, wanted it banned for portraying Alauddin Khilji in a bad light —having her administration actually ban a feature film about a group of women from Kerala converting to Islam and then joining the Islamic State (IS) showcases double standards of Technicolor proportions. Calls for banning films have developed into a veritable industry. But it bears repeating that once the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC), a state apparatus, passes a movie, it becomes the state’s duty to see the film’s release, not its stoppage, is facilitated. It’s unfortunate enough that theatres in Tamil Nadu have pulled the film fearing ‘consequences’ that the state government seems to have no power to dissuade. The Kerala High Court has, thankfully, not fallen to such disrepair, and refused to issue a stay order on the release of The Kerala Story. Other states and courts should learn from this. Selective bans in the name of ‘law and order’ only confirm double standards, and politicised appeasement.