[Reader-list] the american center incident - the need for protest.

[Anand Vivek Taneja]

On the day Edward Said died, three students from The Mass Comm Research Centre, Jamia, were taken into custody by the Delhi Police; harassed and interrogated, for taking cutaway shots of the American Centre without permission.
 
If the linkage implied in the in the previous sentence makes little sense - Edward Said and the Delhi Police; what do you make of this? Ruhail is a Kashmiri Muslim, Shihabuddin is from Bihar, Rita is from Manipur. The had an official letter with them from MCRC,'to whomsoever it may concern', they had an official 'Government of India' car, a driver and an engineer along with them. Despite all of this, and despite the American Centre authorities being satisfied once they had erased the footage on the spot, the police took them into custody and subjected them to interrogation by the Intelligence Bureau, and harassment. "The IB and Special Cell officers asked us about everything but our footage. they asked us about our families and homes. They kept asking us if we were from SIMI." They weren't allowed to answer their phones. When a girl phoned Rita, the police called her back, to ask for her name and her address. Mug-shots were taken of the three of them, which is 'procedure', but only in the registration of criminal cases. The ordeal ended, but only after the video faculty of MCRC, the director of the Institute, and the Provost from Jamia all went to the Police Station.  

In Jamia, of course, there is a feeling that the incident is over, that it should be forgotten. IN MCRC, all of us, Ruhail, Rita and Shihabuddin's batchmates are busy running around for our final films, so it is very hard to catch people long enough to gauge their feelings about the issue. But I do/did get the sense that a lot of people would rather forget this. I also got the feeling, and briefly harboured it, the terrible commonsense, that somewhere Ruhail was asking for it; that he probably over-reacted when the police started questioning them, and the rest was inevitable.
 
But that's a common-sense that works on the cynical assumption that it's okay for our freedoms to be circumscribed; that somewhere the police are right in hauling people off on the most baseless of suspicions; that shooting in the middle of Connaught Place in broad daylight, openly, is somehow stupid and suicidal.
 
It is, now, but why should it be? 
 
'"One needs permisssion to shoot in the New Delhi district becuase it's a sensitive area. They were unaware of this. We do not want to give their names because it could spoil their careers, " said a senior police officer, somewhat ominously.' 
 
About four months ago, at the end of May, I was taken into police custody in the Connaught Place thana. I had been shooting stills of buildings with my two actors in the foreground, for a production I was about to do in a week. One of the actors was American. The beat constable along with a plain-clothes 'spy' stopped us from shooting, called the Police Station, and we were hauled off to the station. The report that went along/ahead of us was, 'Three people were taking photographs of buildings on Barakhamba Road. One of them is a foreigner.' Our names, addresses and phone numbers were taken, before we were told that what we'd done was a crime, but we were let off in less than half an hour, and given chai before we left. I think it helped that two of us had Hindu, Punjabi, Upper Caste names; and the other one was a white American. How suspect could we be? On the other hand, " I am from Kashmir, and my classmates -a boy and girl - are from Bihar and Manipur. it's a deadly combination..."
 
You don't know New delhi district is a photographically sensitive area till you start shooting. The police hasn't exactly gone out of their way to highlight the fact, till you have encounters of the sort that  at least four students from MCRC have had. There are hundreds of white and Japanese tourists in and around CP on any given day, with cameras of all descriptions. I doubt if any of them have been made aware of the 'sensitivity' of the New Delhi area in quite the same fashion. it is when we locals/natives/ 'not-tourists' start taking photos, even slightly outside the tourist zones of the Inner Circle and Jantar Mantar, that the troubles begin. your own nationality, your ability to argue with the cops in their own language, becomes dangerous. one of the reasons that we attracted attention back in May, was that I was taking the photos, and not my American friend.   
 
If you're not a tourist, you have to be a terrorist. Thanks to the paranoia of the past couple of years, the Delhi Police is using this simplistic, racist logic; to harass those who want to film their own city. If you're Kashmiri Muslim, you don't have a hope. What scares me is the ease with which this could have become something else. For example, if they did not have cell-phones, and hadn't been able to get back to the faculty at MCRC; the next day the newspapers would have carried reports of a terrorist nexus between Kasmir and the North-East. it could have happened so easily.
 
This is ridiculous. Here we are, supposedly students of the premier film-making institute in the city, and three of us get treated worse than common criminals. all the official backing that an Institute gives to students becomes meaningless because the police writes us off as their version of 'Jamia' - which is a breeding ground for 'Islamic terror'. 
Someone neds to tell the police that this sort of idiotic communalism and harassment won't stand. Someone needs to tell them that 'terrorists' are probably the last people in the world likely to openly shoot images on a crowded street in broad daylight. We need to reclaim our freedom to shoot the spaces of the city.

I don't know how to go about this, but maybe we at MCRC, need to join up with film-makers in Delhi (at least) and formulate how to protest this. And soon.

The independent film-making community in India has recently been successful against the State's attempted repression and censorship at MIFF. Can the community come together with us film students to, at the very least, get a public apology out of the Delhi Police? And some assurance that the police doesn't make 'mistakes' like this anymore?
 
Anand  

ps - all quotes are from The Indian Express, Express Newsline Delhi edition, Friday, 26th September, 2003. 
 
    Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons, because you are crunchy
and taste good with ketchup.

 
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