ARGUMENTS FOR THE BAN:-

1. To begin with, director Mark Robson chooses to cast his film almost entirely from
outside India, employing only four or five Indian performers in minor roles.  All the
other main parts are played by a medley of white actors sporting brown face and a
wild range of accents that fail to get even the pronunciation of the Indian names right.
It’s disconcerting, to watch Horst Buchholz, a German actor in the role of Godse,
refer to Apte as ‘Apter’ and valiantly try to inject some verisimilitude into the part of
India’s most notorious murderer. This is a huge disgrace and an attempt by the movie
makers to attempt to distort history.
2. Before the assassination, Godse spends most of his nine hours smoking, guzzling
liquor and holing up in a brothel to escape the police – a hilarious display of
decadence that flies in the face of the RSS/Chitpavan Brahmin asceticism that was his
path in real life. True, there is very little in the public space about his private life, but
by all accounts Godse had no minor vices – his fixations were his Hindutvavadi
nationalism and his visceral hatred for Gandhi. This is extremely hypocritical of the
movie makers as the movie is supposed to redeem the man it is portraying in such a
bad light.
3. The film also contradicts Wolpert’s contention in the book that the government
criminally neglected Gandhi’s security – it shows the superintendent of police taking
every conceivable measure to thwart the assassination plan, which comes to naught
because Gandhi himself never allowed police guns or frisking at his prayer meetings.
The whole movie feels like a trumped up version of misrepresented facts in order to
incite anti-communal feelings in a post-independence India which was fresh from the
partition and amidst communal tension in the country.
4. Godse’s co-murderers and planners all get an outlandish treatment. The RSS/Hindu
Mahasabha is a gangster mafia that will take you in but never let you leave. Narayan
Apte is a shivering nervous wreck constantly trying to wriggle out of the murder he’s
been chosen to co-commit (in real life, he was a devil-may-care man who was
acknowledged as having more leadership qualities than Godse). An hour before the
assassination, Godse is willing to abandon his mission if his lady love, the Gandhian,
elopes with him. This is a clear deviation from the real historical outcome and is
closer to blasphemy.