Marathi film screening diktat: Shobhaa De is right, Shiv Sena is indulging in 'dadagiri'

Shobhaa De’s relationship with Twitter has been sort of tumultuous, with the latter having landing her in trouble before. She might be a bestselling novelist but a tweet in haste can trip the best of us up. Remember her spin on ‘achche din’ after Gopinath Munde’s death and how she observed that the dark continent (Africa) had become ‘darker’ after Nelson Mandela’s death?

She was taken to the cleaners by the Twitter moral police immediately, and in both cases, she perhaps had gotten carried away with her word play. So when news broke that the Shiv Sena has moved a privilege motion in the Maharashtra assembly in order to make De apologise for tweets she had sent out, we immediately went scurrying for the said offensive, or plain silly, tweet.

However this is what we found:

Devendra 'Diktatwala' Fadnavis is at it again!!!From beef to movies. This is not the Maharashtra we all love! Nako!Nako! Yeh sab roko!

— Shobhaa De (@DeShobhaa) April 7, 2015

We stifled a giggle over ‘Devendra Diktatwala’ which by the way is not the same as calling him a “Dictator” and said in our heads, “Hell hath no fury like a man/woman denied her steak’. We quickly moved on to the next tweet:

I love Marathi movies. Let me decide when and where to watch them, Devendra Fadnavis. This is nothing but Dadagiri.

— Shobhaa De (@DeShobhaa) April 7, 2015

She says, she loves Marathi movies but should be given the right to watch it when she wants to. Now, the new directive doesn’t necessarily encroach upon that right, given that the government has not issued any directives other than that prime time slot. Also, all other auditoriums will still be playing other films alongside that Marathi film. Maybe she didn’t quite think the tweet through? Or maybe she, like thousands of other people, is just irritated by the government trying to babysit us? Either way, there’s nothing remotely incendiary about that one.

Then we move to the next tweet:

No more pop corn at multiplexes in Mumbai? Dahi misal and vada pav only. To go better with the Marathi movies at prime time .

— Shobhaa De (@DeShobhaa) April 7, 2015

Now, that was an analogy to underline how ridiculous the government diktat seems if carried to the extreme.

You, like us, are probably wondering, where is that all-important incendiary tweet that can holds the potential to hurt enough Maharashtrian sentiments to bring a privilege motion upon her? According to the Sena, those three tweets you read above, are all that’s needed.

And just because De is a public figure, she makes for an even more attractive target for the Sena to use its political position to show her who is the big brother. At the end of the day, De is just another citizen who doesn’t have the privileges of the political class, like falling back upon the legislative practices of the country to reprimand a citizen who doesn’t agree with you.

How is it different from jailing a person for a Facebook post criticising a political figure? The intent behind the move and the sentiment driving it are the same - stifle dissent by inducing fear and showing the might of the state. It’s basically a new method of political muscle flexing that the Sena seems to have chanced upon after the scrapping of Sec 66A.

Also, Shobhaa De is a bit of a soft target, a semi-celebrity known for goof-ups in the past. In fact, De had to immediately clarify that she ’loves’ Maharashtra on Twitter, following the motion in the state Assembly. For all you know, Sena is just using De to send a rather ominous message to all and sundry: the Supreme Court may have struck down Section 66A, but there are many other ways to do ‘dadagiri’.