On 11 November, the Delhi High Court held out a glimmer of hope to “En Dino Muzaffarnagar” (“Muzaffarnagar These Days”), a documentary analyzing the factors and processes at play behind the riots that engulfed the Uttar Pradesh district in 2013. Commenting on the Central Board of Film Certification’s (CBFC) refusal to allow it for public screening, Justice Vibhu Bhakru said, “It can't be true that an entire two hours and twenty minutes of the movie is violating the guidelines or is objectionable. The CBFC should have given detailed reasons on which part of the movie violated which guideline."

On June 20, Shubhradeep Chakravorty and Meera Chaudhary, the makers of the documentary, applied for a certificate to the CBFC's Regional Office in Calcutta. The refusal came within 10 days. The censors "reasoned" that the documentary was in breach of Guidelines 2 (xii) and 2 (xiii) of the Guidelines of Certification of Films. Both these provisions are part of the charter that is used to determine what spectators, audiences and viewers in India shall be allowed to see. While the former provision seeks to bar the presentation of any visuals or words which are "contemptuous of racial, religious or other groups", the latter prohibits the depiction of anything "promoting communal, obscurantist, anti-scientific and anti-national attitudes". Nothing was mentioned about which specific scene(s) in the documentary had fallen foul of the law or had the potential to instigate communal hatred – mind you, it was not a film that leaned on creative licence, but on interviews with survivors and perpetrators.

Undeterred, they appealed to the Film Certification Appellate Tribunal (FCAT). On 19 August, the FCAT delivered its order, finding nothing amiss in the CBFC's action. It went on to accuse “En Dino Muzaffarnagar” of being "openly critical of one political party (BJP) and its top leadership by name and tends to give an impression of the said party's involvement in communal disturbances." The next date of hearing is December 5, when the CBFC has to reply to the High Court.

Why they want to censor the film

Chaudhary and Chakravorty (who died in August after a brain haemorrhage) refused to believe that the Muzaffarnagar riots were a sudden communal conflagration, and suspected that there could well be a master-narrative, a premediated design behind them. This idea is not without foundation, for political scientists and sociologists have postulated how raking up, indeed creating, communal violence can reap substantial electoral results.

Paul Brass has argued that there are “institutionalized riot systems” in which “riot production” is carried out in three phases: first – the preparation and rehearsal phase which is never-ending; the second, the activation and enactment phase, which requires a certain situation or climate, for instance, an upcoming election; and the last phase is the battle for control of the explanation for what actually happened – whether it was a spontaneous riot or well-planned political mobilization. “En Dino Muzaffarnagar” seeks to see if, and how, Brass’ theory played out in Muzaffarnagar on the eve of the 2014 general elections, especially since Uttar Pradesh was one of the key battlegrounds of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Not only did the filmmaker duo stumble upon the truth of Brass’ hypothesis, the pattern they documented also seems to be playing out in the immediate present – such as the recent riots in East Delhi’s Trilokpuri and the communal incidents in Delhi’s suburb of Bawana.

Shooting entirely on location, Chakravorty and Chaudhary traced the events in Muzaffarnagar's Kawal village from August 27, 2013 onwards. The violence began with rumours of a Muslim boy having molested a Jat girl from the same village, in retaliation for which the girl's uncle and brother thrashed the alleged culprit, who succumbed to his injuries. A Muslim mob reportedly vowed revenge and lynched two Jat boys. Sangeet Som, the local BJP MLA, widely circulated what was supposedly a video of the lynching, and goaded the Jats and Hindus to wreak vengeance. This video was like a lit match to a powder keg. But it was a fake one – it was established later on that Som, feted by the ex-BJP president Rajnath Singh for his "contribution" to the electoral results in Uttar Pradesh, used the video of a lynching that took place in Pakistan's Sialkot two years ago. The mob, however, had no patience for factual niceties – even something as ubiquitous and conspicuous as the attire of the victims. The boys in the video were clad in shalwars, which the Muslims of Muzaffarnagar do not wear.

Story continues