Published in Vantage section of The Caravan magazine on February 21, 2015
Courtesy: The Caravan
On 20 December 2014, comedian Rohan Joshi took
the stage at the Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel Stadium in Worli, Mumbai, and faced
an audience of nearly four thousand people. It was twenty minutes into the All
India Backchod (AIB) Knockout, a two-hour long, no-holds barred roast—a comedic
format in which the guests of honour, in this case Arjun Kapoor and Ranveer
Singh, are subjected to jokes at their expense. The jokes weren’t restricted to
the duo, though, and the night soon turned into a carnival of humour replete
with jibes targeted at the rich and famous. Joshi, a part of the foursome that
forms the comedy collective AIB, was one of the hosts of the evening.
What followed was unintentionally prophetic as
it encapsulated the essence of the outrage directed at the show barely a month
later. Joshi articulated what he thought was going on in the minds of the
audience members, “Why are they saying in public what we say at parties?”
I couldn’t help but think of this line when I
went to meet advocate Abha Singh at her office in Fort, Mumbai, nearly a week
after she had lodged a
complaint on behalf of Santosh Daundkar—an RTI activist who had exposed the
Adarsh scam in Mumbai—against the fourteen people who were a part of the AIB
Knockout. The accused included Jayantilal Shah, the president of the National
Sports Club of India (NSCI); Ravinder Aggarwal, the secretary general of the
NSCI; Karan Johar; Tanmay Bhat; Rohan Joshi; Gursimran Khamba; Ashish Shakya;
Ranveer Singh; Arjun Kapoor; Aditi Mittal; Rajeev Masand; Deepika Padukone; and
Alia Bhatt. Singh, a women’s rights activist, has been an integral part of
several high profile cases such as those of the Palghar girls who were hauled
up for a Facebook post on Bal Thackeray’s death and the Salman Khan
hit-and-run case.
“They should have done it in their house,” Singh
told me. “When you make it [the jokes] in a public place, it becomes the duty
of the public, of the enlightened citizen, to see that such things don’t
happen.”
Singh wasn’t a part of the audience that evening
in December. In fact, she was oblivious to the existence of this event until it
was uploaded on the internet. On 28 January, AIB uploaded an edited version of
the closed-door, ticketed show on their YouTube channel. Before long, it
exploded into the urban consciousness clocking eight million views within five
days.
Protests against AIB began shortly after their
video was released, and escalated with Maharashtra chief minister Devendra
Fadnavis’ declaration on 2 February that action would
be taken against the organisers if the programme was found to be “vulgar and in
violation of the law.” Following the backlash, Maharashtra’s minister of
Tourism and Culture Affairs, Vinod Tawde, attempted to steady the boat by tweeting from his
official account soon after, stating that there would be no moral policing. But the dominoes
had started to fall. On the same day, Akhilesh Tiwari, a
former member of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) and
the president of a little-known organisation called the Brahman Ekta Seva
Sanstha submitted an application to the Saki Naka police station. Barely
twenty-four hours later, the Maharashtra Christian Youth Forum approached the
Bandra police station to file an application, which was forwarded to the police
station at Tardeo. Both of these bodies called out the show for hurting
cultural and religious sentiments, apart from being offensive and abusive. A
day later, on 3 February, AIB removed the
video of the roast from its YouTube channel.
Interestingly, neither of the two applications
was converted into a formal complaint in Mumbai. The first salvo came on 5
February when Wazir Shaikh, an inspector from the Pune Crime Branch, lodged an FIR, charging all the organisers, crew members,
participants and actress Deepika Padukone for obscenity under IPC sections 292
and 294, among other crimes, while YouTube was named in the FIR for
transmitting sexually explicit material online under Section 67 and 67(a) of
the IT Act. Padukone, who was not a participant, but only a reveller, had
apparently erred in letting Ranveer Singh kiss her at the start of the show.
According to the complaint, it was an act that was done “openly, in a public
place” thus “amounting to obscenity.”
On 9 February, I met DCP Prashant Holkar, the
zonal head of the Saki Naka police station. I was curious: how could the same
content, governed by the same laws, produce two distinct reactions from the
Mumbai and Pune Police? “By definition, “obscenity” is something that offends
people or can cause them to feel shame. But there are no clear parameters to
it. Our CP—commissioner of police—is very clear, no moral policing is to be
done from our end.” Holkar explained. “Now that the FIR is already lodged in
Pune, there is no need to duplicate it. The Pune police is already
investigating.”
It was perhaps why the Tardeo police, too, were
reluctant to lodge a formal complaint. After dragging their feet on the
Christian body’s application, the station received another one from advocate
Singh on 7 February. Sensing no progress on her application, Singh told me that
she decided to approach a magistrate court four days later, following which the
Tardeo police were directed to lodge an FIR.
The fresh charges that were framed were of a
more serious nature compared to the ones in Pune. The comedians were accused of
criminal conspiracy, insulting the modesty of women, and breaking environment
norms. The list of the fourteen people accused comprised the heads of the
National Sports Club of India, ten of the eleven participants, including actors
Ranveer Singh and Arjun Kapoor, director Karan Johar and two members of the
audience—Deepika Padukone and Alia Bhatt. Sonakshi Sinha was conspicuous by her
absence, as were stand-up comedian Abish Mathew and Raghu Ram ofMTV Roadies fame.
I asked Singh about the rationale behind holding
two spectators in an audience of four thousand responsible for these acts.
“They were a part of the script,” Singh alleged.
“They were told that those jokes would be cracked on them. Had it been any
other woman subjected to sexual innuendos—any self-respecting woman—she would
have slapped the anchor.” Singh maintained that she didn’t know about most of
the participants, and the names of the accused had been included in her
petition after she researched them. She attributed that as the reason behind
the exclusions of Sinha and Raghu Ram, although she seem to think that she had
apportioned the blame by adding “other unknown accused” in her complaint.
Celebrities, she added, should be a role model for the youth, and not
participate in making obscenity glamorous.
“We have done fourteen. But what is stopping
Mumbai Police from lodging the other names? Nothing stops them from adding
twenty-four more names,” said Singh.
When I met the DCP S Jaykumar on 16 February,
the zonal head of the Tardeo police station, he avoided mentioning any
reluctance on their part to act on the previous application, but he did tell me
that it was only on the instructions of the court that they registered the FIR.
At the time the court stepped in, Jaykumar said, the application was being
“checked on different angles.”
“We had differing opinions [on whether to
register an FIR] then,” he said, refusing to elucidate who the “we” were. He
then went on to reiterate the Mumbai police’s stand against moral policing.
One of the aspects of the case unanimously cited
by all the stakeholders was the lack of guidelines on what constitutes
obscenity. In the first week of February, Sharmila Ghuge, a professor at the
Jitendra Chauhan Law College in Vile Parle, filed a public interest
litigation (PIL) in the High Court demanding that the government frame
guidelines for such programmes and begin regulating YouTube, citing the
potential dilution of morality through obscene content. In the conversation I
had with her, even as she made a passionate case for how the AIB Knockout
contributed to the rupturing of society’s moral fabric, Ghuge admitted that
there needs to be a clear definition on obscenity.
It is this ambiguity that is often leveraged to
lodge criminal proceedings in cases such as this one, as was witnessed more
recently when a criminal case was filed against Aamir Khan—who, ironically,voiced his
displeasure with the Knockout recently—for obscenity in the poster of his
recent blockbuster, PK. Mihir
Desai, a human rights lawyer, told me over the phone that while the courts have
become liberal with time, sections 292 and 294, which relate to obscenity, have
stayed as vague as they were in 1860.
“The problem in India is that lodging of FIR is
the easiest thing to do in certain cases. The power to allow it is equally
vested with the police. But just because something is distasteful to you, you
shouldn’t lodge an FIR,” said Desai.
In the heat of the debate, AIB went
incommunicado after it had removed the video, resurfacing again to announce
that they had met with
the Archdiocese of Bombay and offered an unconditional apology for any offense
caused to religious sentiments by their jokes. Even as the copies surfaced on
torrent sites and were uploaded by irrepressible netizens through their own
YouTube accounts, AIB went a step further and proceeded to take down their
archive of podcasts from all the portals on which they had been uploaded.
In the course of reporting for this article, I
tried in vain to contact AIB for a quote, but they chose to not respond. By
then, they had already summed up their stand in a Facebook post: “Let’s all take a deep breath. They’re just
jokes.”
