Why attack on Gajendra Chauhan has nothing to do with FTII's future

The arts should be free and creativity must remain unshackled like the breeze caressing the Himalayas. And surely, those who sent Solzhenitsyns to Gulags and shared ideological kinship with Pol Pot, those who never uttered a word against the anti-national jihadis of Kashmir and barbaric fifth columnists of the Maoist variety (the Indian version of the ISIS), can't be entrusted to do so. The stinking rich writers and the fashionable politicised journos have a reason to oppose every decision this government makes and that reason is hate.

Those who had turned the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) into a second theatre of SAHMAT had been happy to work under a non-film civil servant for 15 years, they didn't protest when three-year courses were dragged to five and six years, no complaints were made when convocations were not held for the last 17 years, they kept mum when diploma certificates were not given since 1995, and 70 per cent of the teachers are contractual faculty with hardly any new appointments happening. The left-driven decay of FTII found new expression when a celebrated actor like Mohan Agashe was harassed and forced to quit just because he wanted to improve the quality of the studies there.

The farce enacted at FTII is credited to the foot soldiers of ideological extremism and now when they see their days are numbered, they have found Gajendra Chauhan a good alibi to put on the mask of FTII protectors! The agitationists have nothing to do with the FTII’s future, nor are they interested in improving its standards. It’s their illegal and anarchic predominance that’s under threat, hence the noises. Chauhan has an impressive background that many don’t know about - he has acted in more than 70 prominent serials including the Mahabharata, fourteen feature films with Amitabh Bachchan, Priyanka Chopra and Salman Khan, ten regional films (in Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, Assamese, Bengali and others), and has a theatre experience of 25 years. But certainly, he doesn’t belong to the Maoists. Can that be a disqualification for the FTII?

These people didn’t allow any one having a different ideology to enter such centres. It's time that the liberal right in India asserts itself and frees intellectual centres of art and culture from the suffocating clutches of the cartel of Stalinists.