BackSalman Khan and the silencing of the cyber-lambs
A Bollywood blog drops two posts and issues an apology
Premium(Hindustan Times)
Soumyadipta Banerjee, an entertainment journalist who has been covering Bollywood for more than a decade, is not the kind of person who apologizes easily. His blog, bollywoodjournalist.com, has a reputation for straight-talking, sometimes abrasive, and gleefully unapologetic posts that paint a picture of Bollywood and its denizens unvarnished by PR spin doctors. (Disclosure: Banerjee and I were colleagues at a newspaper for some years, but worked in different editorial departments.)
In the last week of June, Banerjee wrote two blog posts on Mumbai police constable Ravindra Patil, the prime witness in Salman Khan’s 2002 hit-and-run case. For those of you who may not remember the details of a decade-old case: According to the allegations, a drunk Khan rammed his SUV into a bakery in Bandra, injuring four homeless people and killing one. Patil, who had been assigned as Khan’s body guard, was in the car with him when the mishap occurred. He died in controversial circumstances in October 2007, amid speculations that he was under immense pressure to change his testimony. His statement that the actor was drunk, and was driving despite being advised against it, is key evidence in the prosecution’s case against Khan. It was Patil’s testimony that caused a Mumbai sessions court to order, on 2 July, that Khan be tried for culpable homicide instead of the relatively lighter charge of causing death due to negligence.
On 8 July, Banerjee took down both of his posts on Patil and the hit-and-run case (published on 26 and 27 June 2013) and uploaded a public apology to Khan, which says, “The last two days have been really excruciating for me. I have received a communication from Mr Salman Khan. There I have been instructed to remove two blog posts that I have written about him. Those articles have been removed from this blog. Here’s a public apology to Mr Salman Khan for writing two blog posts that he didn’t consider appropriate. I am taking a break from writing on this blog till I am in a proper frame of mind to write again. I am really sorry."
What was the exact nature of this “communication" from Khan that made a feisty journalist withdraw his posts all of a sudden? Why were the past few days “really excruciating"? Why was he not in a “proper frame of mind"? In other words, what was going on?
Since I happened to be in Mumbai last week, I wanted to meet Banerjee and get the full picture. But he sounded strangely out of sorts on the phone, and reluctant to meet or talk about it. He finally agreed to meet me “for old times’ sake" and on the condition that he would not discuss the Salman Khan apology.
So I braved one of the wettest days Mumbai had seen this year, traversed half the length of the city, and made it to a coffee shop in a mall in Andheri (West). While quite a few of my other appointments got washed out, Banerjee kept his word. Two hours and several phone calls later, when he finally walked in, the first thing he said was, “I have to leave in five minutes".
He would not reveal the nature of the “communication" he had received from Khan, except to say that he felt intimidated by it. “I do feel threatened," he said. “Wouldn’t you—if you suddenly start getting persistent calls from unknown numbers?"
On being pressed, he pleaded that he was too “afraid of consequences" to say anything more, while his friends report that he has shifted his wife and five-month old baby to a “safer location"—something Banerjee would neither confirm nor contradict. One of the reasons he chose to back off, he says, was pressure from his wife and worried family members.
All this seems way out of proportion for a couple of pieces about a film star on a blog that has not more than a 1,000 followers. But a member of the power elite seeking to turn the internet into a censornet is not a new phenomenon, and it is one that must be condemned and the perpetrators shamed every time it occurs.
India has already had its fair share of cyber-bullies but this is the first time that a Bollywood superstar has clamped down on a film blogger.
It seems like it was only yesterday that everyone was singing paeans to the “democratizing" nature of the online world. But the powerful elements of the offline world—governments, corporations, individuals (what the media likes to call “influentials")—have lost little time in replicating the power hierarchies of the real world in the virtual one.
Banerjee has since resumed blogging, and has promised that he will not stop writing about Khan. But in a new post, he insists, bizarrely enough, that he has no idea why he apologized to Khan: “Why was I required to apologize to Salman when I did nothing wrong? I am still looking for an answer to that question." Really?
Khan has made a career out of playing the little good guy bashing up the big bad guy. In the real world, as we all know, the little good guys don’t stand a chance. More often than not, they either end up like Patil—sacked and humiliated by his employer, disowned by his family, and dying a terrible death, with nobody to even claim the body—or like Banerjee, get silenced, and remain silent if they know what’s good for them.
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