5. Pahlaj Nihalani
Indians are used to having a quasi-Soviet state, bossy and overbearing, which tries to control every aspect of their life. Most countries have done away with stuff like censor boards but India, in 2015, actually made its own even stronger and even nosier.
The Modi government appointed film producer Pahlaj Nihalani to head the Central Board of Film Certification of India in January 2015. The first thing he did was to ban from the movies, thirteen English swear words, eleven Hindi cuss words, the word “Bombay” and, to quote from the Censor Board circular, the rather broad if puzzling category of “double meaning any kind of words”. Nihalani made it clear that had he been Censor Board chief at the time, iconic films such as Omkara or Gangs of Wasseypur wouldn’t have made the cut.
Later on in the year, Nihalani did the impossible and cut James Bond down to size by reducing the time he took to kiss women in Spectre. When asked why he did that by Anil Thakraney, Pahlani replied mystifyingly, “This means you want to do sex in your house with your door open. And show to people the way you are doing sex”.
In spite of these gaffes, how is Nihalani still holding onto his job as we head into 2016? His cringe-worthy propaganda videos of Narendra Modi might hold the answer to that – here’s one that played before the 2015 film Prem Ratan Dhan Payo.
4. Mahesh Sharma
A medical doctor and long time member of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, Mahesh Sharma shot into the limelight in 2015 only a year after winning his first parliamentary election. Appointed the Minister of State ( with independent charge) for Culture and Tourism, Sharma led the government response on the Dadri lynching.
For most people, Dadri would have been an open-and-shut case. A man’s head was smashed in allegedly for having had some curry – how can this be defended? Sharma, though, decided to take a contrarian opinion and attempted to use the incident to stir the pot before the Bihar Assembly elections. He announced that the mob lynching was simply an “accident” and that “there was no premeditated conspiracy”. The Union minister also played forensic pathologist and, after a quick survey of injuries, concluded the intention of the mob that lynched Mohammed Akhlaq “was not to lynch". He also minutely described the act of slaughtering a cow and declared that beef makes “our people’s soul shake from inside”.
Sharma ended his year on a high and was rewarded by the government with APJ Abdul Kalam’s former bungalow. As per a report in the Bangalore Mirror, being a first time member of Parliament, Sharma wasn’t entitled to such a fancy house but he got it all the same, sending out a clear signal of his standing in the government post-Dadri.
3. Hardik Patel
In 2015, the top challenger to Narendra Modi’s claim of a highly successful Gujarat model of economic development was a rather unlikely candidate – Hardik Patel. All of 22, the baby-faced Patel stormed Indian politics in 2015. He held his first public rally as late as July of this year but so impactful was his cause and so powerful his oratorical skills that he was soon drawing millions of people.
His cause might have been popular, but it was a bit dodgy in moral terms. Hardik Patel wants backward class status for his own community, the Patels or Patidars. Of course, the Patel community is land-owning and is heavily represented both in industry and commerce, which makes it an unlikely candidate for affirmative action.
So impactful was Patel’s agitation that the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party pulled every trick in the book to stop him. The Gujarat Police attacked Patel neighborhoods, tapped Hardik’s phone (showing how fragile civil liberties are in India), arrested him for sedition and even tried to postpone the panchayat elections to minimise the impact of Patidar anger on the BJP’s prospects.
Right now Hardik is in jail under sedition charges.
2. Sheena Bora
Sheena Bora was a 24-year old woman who was murdered in 2012. As it so happened, her stepfather was former television bigwig, Peter Mukherjea. This, coupled with the fact that one of the prime suspects for the murder is Bora’s mother Indrani Mukerjea, made the case prime-time news.
As India woke up to this case, various theories started to fly thick and fast, while the media turned into one giant vicious gossip machine. One theory was that Indira has murdered Sheena with the help of her ex-husband. The motive: Indrani feared that Sheena would expose the fact that she was her mother and they weren’t sisters as Indrani had gone around telling everyone. As Peter Mukerjea was arrested in November, theories of a financial motive were floated. As per this, part of the proceeds from the News X channel, owned by Peter, was deposited in an overseas bank in Sheena’s account, which had then been partly withdrawn by Sheena. In all of this, dramatically, the Commissioner of Mumbai Police, celebrated cop Rakesh Maria, was transferred. “Mr Maria was probing money laundering worth Rs. 500-600 crore or more. There are corporate powers and influential people from Delhi who do not want this to be unearthed. This is the reason for his transfer,” NCP spokesperson Nawab Malik said.
While we may never know the full truth behind the murder, one thing is quite certain: India is a nation of voyeurs and gossipmongers. 2015 was a break out year for gossip as news, as the entire country discussed this one scandal via the media.
1. Cow
The cow is not an unknown animal in India. Considered holy by many Hindus and a vital part of the agricultural economy of rural India, bovines have always been a popular animal, particularly for foreign publications fond of photographing them on city roads. But 2015 saw these divine bovines' importance shoot through the roof.
The cow kicked off the year by getting the Bharatiya Janata Party government in Maharashtra to ban anyone from consuming beef. So harsh was the Maharashtra law than anyone even in possess of beef, like say cocaine, could be sent to prison.
The frenzied environment around cow protection had its repercussions as a number of Muslims around the country were murdered for allegedly either eating beef or transporting it, the most prominent such incident being the one at Dadri, Uttar Pradesh. Things went so far that the Delhi Police raided the premises of Kerala House, when it was tipped off that the kitchen was making beef, a staple in Malayali cuisine.
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Indians are used to having a quasi-Soviet state, bossy and overbearing, which tries to control every aspect of their life. Most countries have done away with stuff like censor boards but India, in 2015, actually made its own even stronger and even nosier.
The Modi government appointed film producer Pahlaj Nihalani to head the Central Board of Film Certification of India in January 2015. The first thing he did was to ban from the movies, thirteen English swear words, eleven Hindi cuss words, the word “Bombay” and, to quote from the Censor Board circular, the rather broad if puzzling category of “double meaning any kind of words”. Nihalani made it clear that had he been Censor Board chief at the time, iconic films such as Omkara or Gangs of Wasseypur wouldn’t have made the cut.
Later on in the year, Nihalani did the impossible and cut James Bond down to size by reducing the time he took to kiss women in Spectre. When asked why he did that by Anil Thakraney, Pahlani replied mystifyingly, “This means you want to do sex in your house with your door open. And show to people the way you are doing sex”.
In spite of these gaffes, how is Nihalani still holding onto his job as we head into 2016? His cringe-worthy propaganda videos of Narendra Modi might hold the answer to that – here’s one that played before the 2015 film Prem Ratan Dhan Payo.
4. Mahesh Sharma
A medical doctor and long time member of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, Mahesh Sharma shot into the limelight in 2015 only a year after winning his first parliamentary election. Appointed the Minister of State ( with independent charge) for Culture and Tourism, Sharma led the government response on the Dadri lynching.
For most people, Dadri would have been an open-and-shut case. A man’s head was smashed in allegedly for having had some curry – how can this be defended? Sharma, though, decided to take a contrarian opinion and attempted to use the incident to stir the pot before the Bihar Assembly elections. He announced that the mob lynching was simply an “accident” and that “there was no premeditated conspiracy”. The Union minister also played forensic pathologist and, after a quick survey of injuries, concluded the intention of the mob that lynched Mohammed Akhlaq “was not to lynch". He also minutely described the act of slaughtering a cow and declared that beef makes “our people’s soul shake from inside”.
Sharma ended his year on a high and was rewarded by the government with APJ Abdul Kalam’s former bungalow. As per a report in the Bangalore Mirror, being a first time member of Parliament, Sharma wasn’t entitled to such a fancy house but he got it all the same, sending out a clear signal of his standing in the government post-Dadri.
3. Hardik Patel
In 2015, the top challenger to Narendra Modi’s claim of a highly successful Gujarat model of economic development was a rather unlikely candidate – Hardik Patel. All of 22, the baby-faced Patel stormed Indian politics in 2015. He held his first public rally as late as July of this year but so impactful was his cause and so powerful his oratorical skills that he was soon drawing millions of people.
His cause might have been popular, but it was a bit dodgy in moral terms. Hardik Patel wants backward class status for his own community, the Patels or Patidars. Of course, the Patel community is land-owning and is heavily represented both in industry and commerce, which makes it an unlikely candidate for affirmative action.
So impactful was Patel’s agitation that the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party pulled every trick in the book to stop him. The Gujarat Police attacked Patel neighborhoods, tapped Hardik’s phone (showing how fragile civil liberties are in India), arrested him for sedition and even tried to postpone the panchayat elections to minimise the impact of Patidar anger on the BJP’s prospects.
Right now Hardik is in jail under sedition charges.
2. Sheena Bora
Sheena Bora was a 24-year old woman who was murdered in 2012. As it so happened, her stepfather was former television bigwig, Peter Mukherjea. This, coupled with the fact that one of the prime suspects for the murder is Bora’s mother Indrani Mukerjea, made the case prime-time news.
As India woke up to this case, various theories started to fly thick and fast, while the media turned into one giant vicious gossip machine. One theory was that Indira has murdered Sheena with the help of her ex-husband. The motive: Indrani feared that Sheena would expose the fact that she was her mother and they weren’t sisters as Indrani had gone around telling everyone. As Peter Mukerjea was arrested in November, theories of a financial motive were floated. As per this, part of the proceeds from the News X channel, owned by Peter, was deposited in an overseas bank in Sheena’s account, which had then been partly withdrawn by Sheena. In all of this, dramatically, the Commissioner of Mumbai Police, celebrated cop Rakesh Maria, was transferred. “Mr Maria was probing money laundering worth Rs. 500-600 crore or more. There are corporate powers and influential people from Delhi who do not want this to be unearthed. This is the reason for his transfer,” NCP spokesperson Nawab Malik said.
While we may never know the full truth behind the murder, one thing is quite certain: India is a nation of voyeurs and gossipmongers. 2015 was a break out year for gossip as news, as the entire country discussed this one scandal via the media.
1. Cow
The cow is not an unknown animal in India. Considered holy by many Hindus and a vital part of the agricultural economy of rural India, bovines have always been a popular animal, particularly for foreign publications fond of photographing them on city roads. But 2015 saw these divine bovines' importance shoot through the roof.
The cow kicked off the year by getting the Bharatiya Janata Party government in Maharashtra to ban anyone from consuming beef. So harsh was the Maharashtra law than anyone even in possess of beef, like say cocaine, could be sent to prison.
The frenzied environment around cow protection had its repercussions as a number of Muslims around the country were murdered for allegedly either eating beef or transporting it, the most prominent such incident being the one at Dadri, Uttar Pradesh. Things went so far that the Delhi Police raided the premises of Kerala House, when it was tipped off that the kitchen was making beef, a staple in Malayali cuisine.
