Holders of the highest offices in the land, the President and Vice-President, generally refrain from involving themselves in the burning controversies of the day, especially those fuelled by political considerations. Hence it is a sign of the dismay and anguish that Mr M Venkaiah Naidu must have felt over the ugly and vicious turn that the controversy over Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s  Padmavati had taken that he declared that death threats etc. were “not acceptable”. The Vice-President must be commended from asserting a “basic” from which government leaders had backed off: with a major election in the offing they had obviously opted against doing anything that might risk the cynically-engineered social/religion/community divisions that have come to be accepted as “polarisation”.

Though Mr Naidu ceased to be a member of the Bharatiya Janata Party after being elected Vice-President, it required considerable moral courage for him to state what leaders of a government of his former party ought to have emphasised ~ there are limits to expressions of dissent, protest, anger and what have you. While he refrained from specifically naming the film, the fact that he identified other movies that had incurred displeasure left no one in doubt about his “target” ~ which included a middle-level BJP neta.

“Whether these fellows have that much money or not, I doubt. Everyone is announcing Rs one crore reward. Is it so easy to have Rs one crore? You have the right to protest in a democracy, go to the appropriate authorities…you cannot physically obstruct and give violent threats. Let us not undermine the rule of law”.  Had similar words been spoken by any of the government’s top ministers the controversy may not have snowballed into an international shame inviting comparisons with the  fatwa against Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses.

It has now become standard practice for political leaders to keep their lips zipped and allow their underlings ~ conveniently projected as fringe elements ~ to run riot. The Vice-President has exposed such regressive mischief, reminded those in authority of their responsibilities.

It now remains to be seen how seriously the Central and state governments will heed the Vice-President’s exhortation to “let us not undermine the rule of law”. It requires little expertise in criminal law to point out that there are adequate provisions in the penal code to proceed against those who put a price on someone’s head, threaten to cut off another’s nose: the reason for no firm action being taken is political. Similarly, the authority of the “censor board”  is undermined when chief ministers queue up to announce that the film will not be allowed in their state even though the apex court has said it is for the Board to approve/reject the film.  Maybe a panel of chief ministers should replace the CBFC.