Beyond Satluj: The CBFC's Increasingly Contentious Record

Satluj (earlier titled Ghallughara and then Punjab '95) is Honey Trehan's biographical drama on human rights activist Jaswant Singh Khalra, played by Diljit Dosanjh. The film spent over three years battling the Central Board of Film Certification, which reportedly asked for as many as 127 cuts before it would grant clearance. The makers refused, skipped a theatrical release, and instead put the uncut film directly on ZEE5 on July 3. Less than 48 hours later, on July 5, it disappeared from the platform in India - though it remains available internationally.

Satluj has landed in the middle of what critics of CBFC increasingly call a pattern rather than a series of isolated incidents. Barely a month has gone by over the past two years without a fresh CBFC row, and 2025 alone produced a string of them.

Homebound (2025): India's official Oscar entry, produced by Dharma Productions with Martin Scorsese as executive producer, was ordered to make 11 changes and lost about 77 seconds of footage, with several cuts targeting caste-related references and dialogue. Crew members described the review process as unusually hostile, and lead actor Ishaan Khatter later said that films with a particular social point of view seem to face tougher scrutiny than others.

L2: Empuraan (2025): Mohanlal's Malayalam blockbuster made 24 cuts after right-wing backlash over scenes widely seen as referencing the 2002 Gujarat riots, trimming footage before the board could act on it - an example, critics say, of filmmakers now pre-censoring their own work to avoid a fight.

Phule (2025): Ananth Mahadevan's biopic on anti-caste reformers Jyotirao and Savitribai Phule had already been cleared with a U certificate when Brahmin community organisations objected to its trailer. The CBFC then asked the makers to drop caste-specific terms like "Mahar," "Mang" and "Peshvai," and to soften a line about "3,000 years of slavery" into a vague phrase. The film's release was pushed back by two weeks. Filmmaker Anurag Kashyap publicly accused the board of systemic bias, naming Phule alongside Punjab '95, Tees and Dhadak 2 as films he said were being blocked by what he called a "casteist, regionalist" approach, while Opposition politicians pointed out that films like The Kashmir Files and The Kerala Story had faced no such objections.

Dhadak 2 (2025): Another caste-themed film, loosely adapting the Tamil film Pariyerum Perumal, underwent 16 separate edits before the CBFC would certify it, in a process producers said dragged on for months.

Janaki vs State of Kerala (2025): A Malayalam film about a sexual-assault survivor was stalled by the CBFC over the lead character's name - Janaki being another name for the Hindu goddess Sita - with the board reportedly objecting to a survivor of assault carrying a name associated with a deity. Members from the Malayalam film industry staged protests outside CBFC's Thiruvananthapuram office over the decision.

Emergency (2024–25): Kangana Ranaut's political drama on Indira Gandhi and the 1975 Emergency was stuck with the CBFC for months after a Sikh body objected to the trailer's portrayal of the community. The producers eventually agreed to the board's cuts and disclaimers before the film got a U/A certificate and released in January 2025.

The Kerala Story 2 (2026): Even after clearing the CBFC with a U/A16+ certificate, the film's release was halted just a day before its premiere when the Kerala High Court found that the board appeared not to have properly applied its own guidelines on content that could affect public order. The stay was lifted on appeal within a day and the film released as scheduled, but the episode highlighted that CBFC clearance is no longer treated as final even by the courts.

Punjab '95 / Satluj (2022–2026): As above, over 100 requested cuts, three title changes and a four-year certification battle, followed by a post-release removal from ZEE5 under the IT Rules once the makers bypassed the CBFC altogether.

Santosh: A police drama exploring misogyny, caste discrimination and custodial violence, was the UK's official Oscar entry and picked up a BAFTA nomination, along with acting and directing honours at the Asian Film Awards. In India, though, the CBFC blocked its release outright, objecting to its portrayal of police brutality and its use of terms like "Dalit." The filmmakers said the board's list of required cuts was so extensive that implementing them would have gutted the film. Santosh eventually found an Indian audience nearly a year and a half later, streaming on Lionsgate Play in October 2025.

Even Hollywood releases haven't been spared the board's smaller-scale edits: a kiss between Superman and Lois Lane in Superman (2025) was trimmed for being "overly sensual," a raised middle finger became a closed fist in F1: The Movie, and Thunderbolts had a handful of mild expletives muted — changes critics call evidence of a board fixated on sanitising minor details rather than genuine classification.

Crisis within CBFC

CBFC Watch, an open-source data-journalism project that documents film censorship decisions made by CBFC, has catalogued over 100,000 modifications demanded across roughly 18,000 films between 2017 and 2025.

Their analysis on CBFC modification rates show that violence-related censorship has remained relatively stable over the years, whereas religious and political content has experienced large fluctuations, suggesting censorship priorities for cultural issues have been far less consistent.

Underlying all of this is a structural crisis inside the CBFC itself. Reporting has pointed out that the board hasn't held its legally mandated quarterly meetings since 2019, hasn't published an annual report since 2016-17, and has been operating years past its members' official three-year tenure, which technically lapsed in 2020.

Since the Film Certification Appellate Tribunal was scrapped in 2021, filmmakers who disagree with the board's decisions have only the High Courts left to turn to, a route that is slower and costlier than the tribunal it replaced.