Staff Reporter
N. Ram, Editor-in-Chief, The Hindu, releasing a documentary film CD on Nandigram at Banga Sanskriti Bhavan in New Delhi on Friday .Also seen are filmmaker Prakash Kumar Ray and Mala Hashmi.
NEW DELHI: For a directorial debut, Prakash Kumar Ray has been valiant enough to choose Nandigram killings and violence as a subject matter. He reasons it was important for him as a person to find out what really went wrong in the rural area and why the popular Left Government in West Bengal was in the news for the wrong reasons.
Prakash’s attempt to see Nandigram from close quarters has resulted in the documentary, Nandigram: Aasman Ki Talaash Mein, released by the Editor-in-Chief of The Hindu, N. Ram, here on Friday. The film trie s to explore the events at Nandigram before and after March 14 — the day when 14 persons were killed in police firing and subsequent violence — and “see through the anti-Left campaign” in West Bengal.
The film captures the run-up to the March 14 tragedy; how the Trinamool Congress-backed anti-land acquisition platform, Bhumi Ucched Pratirodh Committee, forced innocent people — several of them Communist Party of India (Marxist) cadres — to leave their homes and property; how the CPI(M) activists were attacked and killed; and how some of the complaints of people missing were fabricated.
“The Left has been helming the State for the past so many years. It has been a popular Government. So when the March 14 tragedy occurred, I could not believe what was happening in West Bengal. I knew I had to be in that area to find out the facts,” Prakash, a scholar at Jawaharlal Nehru University, said after the screening.
“So when I decided to go there, I thought of taking my camera and other equipments along. Three of us toured the area from March 29 to April 6 to get a first-hand report. Of course, we used deception and were under cover all the while,” he added.
Calling it an “exemplary effort,” Mr. Ram complimented the director on “successfully breaking through the barrier and giving us an insight into the missing dimension.”
“It is quite an achievement. We need to put this in the right perspective. Many of us have been bothered about the March 14 tragedy but there was always something missing, a huge part, from the whole story that did not make it to the mainstream media,” he said.
“The film captures the complex situation and makes a powerfully successful attempt to fill some good part of the gap. What is shocking is the manufacture of consent for the indictment of the Left Government in West Bengal and demonisation of Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee and the CPI(M). All kinds of people landed there without any thought about the implications of what they were doing. There was just one-sided grief, completely ignoring the plight of 3,500 people who were forced to become internal refugees,” Mr. Ram said.
