Mohar Basu (MID-DAY; August 31, 2017)

"It's a ridiculous reply,” says Kushan Nandy, who is fresh out of the success of his film Babumoshai Bandookbaaz starring Nawazuddin Siddiqui. After Nandy had sent a legal notice to Pahlaj Nihalani claiming that the then Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) chief was trying to sabotage his film, he has received an 18-page counter, claiming defamation from Nihalani.

In a chat with mid-day, Nihalani, who was recently sacked from the Censor Board, had claimed, “Filmmakers like Nandy are using the CBFC diktats to garner publicity for their films.” Kushan rubbishes this saying, “There are two major problems with how Nihalani went about things. Firstly, he wrote a letter to the Film Certification Appellate Tribunal (FCAT), trying to stop them from giving us a clearance. Secondly, he claimed that we’ve shown two different films — one to the CBFC’s Examining Committee (EC), and other to the FCAT. We have no reason to do that. I had to take a lot of pains to procure a letter from authorities to confirm that both the versions, shown to the FCAT and EC, were the same. Now that he isn’t the Censor Board chief, these are his gimmicks to make sure he remains in news.”

Asked how he plans to take the issue forward, Nandy says, “I just want to move on. The first day I met Pahlaj, he’d said if it were in his hands, he would have banned the film. Anything that doesn’t fit into his mould of sanskari, he wants to pull it down. I was reading an interview where he’d said that he can’t clear a film he thinks his daughter shouldn’t watch. I have no idea what kind of archaic universe he comes from.”