Modi finds his biggest fight — with film students
PUNE, INDIA— As battlegrounds go, the leafy campus of India’s premier film school must count among the more graceful, with its rows of tidy bungalows gently shaded by neem and tamarind trees.
Yet there is no mistaking the ferment at the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII). Hand-painted slogans snake across building walls, quoting Albert Camus and Martin Luther King. Outside the cafeteria, students smoke hand-rolled cigarettes, talking of fascism and free speech.
For nearly three months, the roughly 400 students here have been on strike, protesting the Indian government’s appointments of loyalists with dubious credentials — including an actor who appeared in B-grade adult movies and a maker of right-wing propaganda films — to the state-funded school’s governing body.
“They want to turn FTII into a factory for their political views,” said Ranjit Nair, a directing student helping lead the protests. “We totally reject that.”
The skirmish is over not just the future of the foremost film academy in the world’s biggest moviemaking nation, a breeding ground for Oscar winners, expert technicians and stalwarts of Bollywood and India’s thriving regional cinema. It also represents the biggest showdown yet over Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s efforts to reshape India’s cultural institutions to fit his conservative Hindu nationalist agenda.
The confrontation escalated last month after a group of students refused to let the institute’s director, Prashant Pathrabe, leave his office one night. They formed a chain and blocked Pathrabe’s door in a type of civil disobedience known as a gherao, or encirclement, a favourite tactic of Indian labour activists in the 1960s.
Police arrived to free Pathrabe, and that night arrested five students, who were freed on bail.
At the core of the dispute is the peculiar status of FTII, which is formally a unit of India’s Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, founded in 1960 to train skilled workers for a nascent film industry. The full-time professors are civil servants. On the campus in the bustling western city of Pune, everything is sub- sidized, from the $1,100 annual tuition and fees to the cafeteria’s $1chicken curry.
The latest agitation began in June, when Modi announced nominees to the FTII Society, from which the school’s governing council is selected.
His choice for chairman was Gajendra Chauhan, a 58-year-old actor who appeared in a few sleazy soft-core movies but is best known for playing a prince in a TV series based on the Hindu epic Mahabharata.
Chauhan has said he can solve the administrative crisis at FTII, which for years has admitted more students than its limited resources could support.
Faculty members say it is impossible to complete the syllabus in three years, leading to a backlog of students who enrolled as long ago as 2008 but have yet to complete their diploma films. Some continue to live rent-free in the dorms.
Students believe the government is trying to split the students, portraying the 2008 class as lazy drug users who would rather strike than enter “the real world.”
“They have called us every name: antinationalist, anti-Hindu, Naxals,” said one member of the 2008 entering class, Ajayan Adat, referring to an anti-government Indian guerrilla group.
“People have this impression that FTII is an elitist institution,” Adat said. “But I came here on a bank loan.”