Chinese Pressure Keeps Tibet Films at Bay
Dharamsala 17 August: In what turned out to be yet another instance of China exerting all possible pressure on India to check political activities against it on Indian soil, two films on Tibet scheduled to be screened at the eight-day Asian Film Festival in Mumbai beginning 21 August have been sidelined reportedly due to pressure from China.
A press release issued jointly by the Indian Committee for Cultural Freedom and Friend’s of Tibet, which was to supply the films to the organisers, described it as ‘shocking and unprecedented move’ saying that the films have been withdrawn as a result of ‘direct pressure from Chinese Embassy’.
“The Asian Film Festival’s committee, headed by Festival Director Mr. Sudhir Nandgaonkar, has bowed before the threats made by the Chinese Embassy, who threatened to coerce the Indian Government into lifting censor exemptions on all films (not just the two films under controversy) in the festival, and thus throw the entire festival into jeopardy,” the release said.
Mr. Nandgaonkar had reportedly informed Friends of Tibet that there were phone calls from the Embassy in Delhi warning him of fatal consequences. As Mr. Nandgaonkar puts it, there was no choice but to “surrender”. This surrender, resulting in China effectively deciding which films may be screened in a Mumbai festival, may be unprecedented, but similar Chinese bullying in India and other parts of the world is not a novel phenomenon, said Aspi Mistry, Friends of Tibet’s spokesperson.
The committee has backtracked on its decision to screen the two films, which speak out about the brutal and inhuman occupation of Tibet, ever since 1949, and the destruction of its culture, religion and environment at the hands of the occupying Chinese forces. Martin Scorsese’s ‘Kundun’ based on the life of His Holiness the fourteenth Dalai Lama, and Jean-Jacques Annaud’s ‘Seven Years in Tibet’, the story of Heinrich Harrer’s sojourn in Lhasa, at the time of the Chinese invasion, were part of a package of five films on Tibet.
More recently, during His Holiness the Dalai Lama’s visit to the United Kingdom in 2004, China objected to His Holiness’ giving an address to the University of Liverpool, as well as the Parliament of Scotland. It went to the extent of threatening to cancel the sister university arrangement that the University of Liverpool has with Shanghai University. However, both, the university and the Scottish Parliament stood firm. The Indian Committee for Cultural Freedom and Friends of Tibet had strongly protested this blatant interference in the freedom of the media.
That the Chinese should do so is not at all surprising considering the nature of the Chinese State, said SV Raju, Honorary Secretary of the Indian Committee for Cultural Freedom.
But it is sad that the organising committee of the Asian Film Festival should succumb to such illegitimate pressures from a foreign power and deny the Indian people the right to see the films of their choice, the two groups said.