Unofficial film bans only serve to avoid questions of the past

There is an understandable unwillingness among the notables who habitually sign petitions and participate in candlelight protests to get involved in the escalating controversy over the West Bengal govt’s unofficial ban on the screening of ‘The

Bengal Files

’. Since the filmmaker has a history of pillorying the Left-liberal ecosystem — he coined the evocative term ‘urban naxals’ — and exposing its strategic silences, as on the ethnic cleansing of

Kashmiri Pandits

, it is unlikely that denial of his freedom of expression will agitate those who otherwise claim proprietorship over ‘constitutional morality.’
What is intriguing is why a film centred on the horrific pre-Partition riots in Kolkata and Noakhali in 1946 should evoke such a hostile reaction from a political party that is avowedly committed to the preservation and promotion of the Bengali asmita. The five-day butchery in Kolkata that followed the

Muslim League

’s (ML)Direct Action Day on Aug 16, 1946, was not a case of a political programme that unwittingly spun out of control. It was choreographed by M A Jinnah to inform the tottering British Raj and the Congress that his patience was running thin, and that he was going to force their hand to achieve a sovereign Pakistan. Once an unwavering constitutionalist who detested Mahatma Gandhi’s flirtation with mass politics, Jinnah was now determined to show that it was either Pakistan or civil war. As the fires spread from Kolkata to the interiors of Muslim-majority eastern Bengal, there was a horrific massacre of Hindus in Noakhali that began on Lakshmi Puja day, Oct 10, 1946, and continued till Dec. The ‘Great Calcutta Killings’ and the Noakhali pogrom have been firmly etched in the collective imagination of Bengali Hindus. In both cases, ML leaders have been identified as the chief villains: the dapper H S Suhrawardy in Kolkata and the rustic Ghulam Sarwar in Noakhali. In the Kolkata killings case, both the perpetrators and the victims were by and large nameless. However, the graphic description of the horrific massacre of the local zamindar, Rajendra Lal Chowdhury, and his family in Noakhali was a key feature of a sublimated Hindu victimhood narrative that resurfaced recently.