Rahul Gandhi has always been vocal about the supremacy of freedom of speech and expression. He had repeatedly asserted that Prime Minister Modi doesn’t believe in the tenets of the constitutions and is someone who would muzzle the constitutional rights of freedom of expression at the first given opportunity.
Right before the Punjab elections, in fact, a movie that showed Punjab as a drug-addled cesspool found massive support from Rahul.
Punjab has a crippling drug problem. Censoring #UdtaPunjab will not fix it. The government must accept the reality and find solutions.
— Rahul Gandhi (@RahulGandhi) June 7, 2016
आज यहाँ पर पिक्चर बेन हो रही है, #UdtaPunjab को बेन किया जा रहा है, आज भी सुखबीर बादल जी सच्चाई मानने को तैयार नहीं है I
— Rahul Gandhi (@RahulGandhi) June 13, 2016
Right before the election, Congress party and its lackeys promoted the movie to the hilt. Many believed that the movie exaggerated the problem in Punjab, however, that did not stop Congress from using it to political ends. Surprisingly, there has not been a peep out of Rahul about Punjab’s drug problem after the state was won by the party. It later emerged that the numbers touted at the time about Punjab’s drug problems might have not been completely accurate.
Then, movie Mersel which supposedly spread canards about demonetisation was also upheld as a beacon of freedom of speech by Rahul Gandhi. He asserted that Modi was interfering in the film.
Mr. Modi, Cinema is a deep expression of Tamil culture and language. Don’t try to demon-etise Tamil pride by interfering in Mersal
— Rahul Gandhi (@RahulGandhi) October 21, 2017
Now, however, Congress is up in arms about a movie called ‘The Accidental Prime Minister’. The movie is based on Sanjaya Baru’s book and shows how the then Congress government was remotely controlled by Sonia Gandhi.
Youth Congress has demanded that the movie is censored. The trailer of the movie was released on Youtube, and it seems the youth Congress is not happy with the portrayal of various characters movie. They have written that ‘facts have been played with and presented in an incorrect manner’. They also say that the way Manmohan Singh, Sonia Gandhi and Congress party is shown in the movie is not acceptable to them.
While the Madhya Pradesh government has denied banning the movie, Congress seems to be more than happy to let their party goons threaten, create a ruckus and disrupt movies that go against the party or the “image” of the Family.
Congress had shown its hypocrisy similarly during the release of the movie Indu Sarkar. They had resorted to violence and a distraught Madhur Bhandarkar had called Rahul Gandhi out on his hypocritical stand on freedom of expression.
The film Indu Sarkar was a fiction based on the 19-month long Emergency imposed by former Prime Minister and Rahul Gandhi’s grandmother Indira Gandhi in 1970s. Despite Bhandarkar’s assurances that the film was not a biopic on Gandhi’s life, Congress workers and leaders came down heavily on him. Outraged by this, Madhur Bhandarkar had then taken on Twitter to call out Rahul Gandhi’s hypocrisy.
Then, miffed at the portrayal of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in the Netflix series ‘Sacred Games’ as ‘fattu’ (coward), a Congress leader from Kolkata filed a complaint against the makers of the show.
Through it all, Rahul Gandhi had mostly maintained a stoic silence, all the while, supporting the ones who said ‘bharat tere tukde honge, Inshallah Inshallah” and more recently, the urban Naxals who had been arrested for their role in Koregaon Bhima violence and their involvement in a plot to assassinate the Prime Minister.
It seems evident that Congress is more than happy to muzzle the voices of those who don’t serve their agenda while glorifying the ones who do even if it means encouraging sedition or Naxalism.
Their most favoured excuse seems to be that the expression that doesn’t suit their agenda somehow “distorts” history. This coming from the very people who distorted history for decades is rather peachy. To the ones who thought that it was alright to glamorize a tyrant like Aurangzeb for the sake of secularism all the while, demonising Hindu greats like Maharana Pratap and Chhatrapati Shivaji, history is what suits their larger narrative. For the Congress party, it has always been evident that any event that can act as an ode to the Gandhi family is deemed to be called “history”, while any event, however accurate, should be trashed as “propaganda” because absolutely nothing should compromise on the illusion of greatness that sympathetic elements created around the Gandhi family.
When the Modi government wanted to convert the Teen Murti Marg as an ode to all Prime Ministers of the country and not just Nehru, Congress cried fascism. They said that BJP wanted to dilute “Heritage”. They talked tall on Heritage while their wily lawyers went to court and denied the existence of Lord Ram.
For the Congress, any fact that interfered with their carefully crafted lie is a “distortion” of History and perhaps, that is the reason why this movie is being opposed vociferously. As for the Congress’ stand on Freedom of Expression, a party that imposed the Emergency and has hundreds of instances of muzzling freedom of speech to their credit, hypocrisy seems like a word that cannot truly encompass their duplicitous stand on the matter.
