THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Filmmaker Rakesh Sharma, who made the influential ‘Final Solution’ about the communal riots in Gujarat, said that it was high time the counter narrative in arts and culture looked out for new domains to carry on their fight. “I am extremely active on Facebook and Twitter,” Mr Sharma said on Monday at the Open Forum organised as part of IFFK. He said that the opponent had already invaded the social media. “Silence is not a choice anymore,” Mr Sharma said. He said that during the run up to the 2014 elections he had found that Narendra Modi’s highly provocative speeches, those made in 2002 and 2007, had vanished.
“The attempt to whitewash the butcher of Godhra was on,” he said. He mined his own collection and uploaded these speeches back on YouTube. He said that in the next two to three years the epitaph of free-to-air TV would be written. “Sports and news will be consumed more on handheld devices,” Mr Sharma said. Therefore, he said it was important to push the counter narrative through the new domains. “I butchered my own films into three- or four-minute clips so that it could be easily circulated using social media tools like Whatsapp,” he said. “There should not be just one kind of narrative,” he added.
Noted feminist and documentary filmmaker Deepa Dhanraj said that at a time of paid trolling and paid news it was not enough to say that were being crushed but we should also know how it was being done. Ms Dhanraj tried to map the fast spread of the national/antinational narrative in the country. According to her, its starting point was in JNU, after an incident that involved the blocking of a documentary screening. “But two months later, when Hyderabad University vice chancellor (Appa Rao Podile) returned to the University he had ordered a police lathicharge against the student protesters,” she said. “The unusual thing was that the Telugu-speaking SI was heard asking teachers whether they were teaching students to love Pakistan, that too in Hindi. It was as if he was mimicking the policeman in Delhi who roughed up the JNU students,” she added.
