A day after meeting members of the film industry, I&B Minister of State Rajyavardhan Singh Rathore met some members of the Central Board Of Film Certification (CBFC) in Mumbai on Tuesday afternoon. But unlike the meeting on Monday, where some prominent faces from the film industry including Aamir Khan and Anushka Sharma were in attendance, not all members of the CBFC turned up to meet Mr Rathore.
"I am in Mumbai for a few days and my friends and some members from the board wanted to meet me. This is not an official CBFC member meeting and I don't have anything to say," said Mr Rathore on his way to the 'unofficial' meeting.
The Athens Olympics silver medallist however wasn't too impressed with a story that appeared in the tabloids suggesting that the CBFC chairperson Pankaj Nihalani will be sacked. Mr Rathore told news agency IANS, "The point is a lot of people do not represent the news of what is coming, some of you have already decided what news you want to show, so let me make it clear. Yesterday's (Monday's) discussion was issue specific and not person specific. We are discussing ideas, suggestions. Film certification is so robust that no one person can affect it and I stand by the word today."
Mr Rathore also said: "Film certification - we take it seriously because many people are associated with it. What the audience wants to see, how will it reflect the society. It's an important issue to understand. There should be transparency in it and we would like to do it online. It will take time but we will try," he said.
Among the Board members who attended the meeting were Ashok Pandit and Dr Chandraprakash Dwivedi, who have publicly disagreed with Mr Nihalani over the editing of abusive dialogues from films.
"The meeting was very positive today (March 17) and we discussed how to modernise the CBFC, how to convert the CBFC to film certification, how to come closer to the film industry, how to do modern work. The basic meeting was on the relation between the CBFC and the film industry. How do we come closer to each other, that is what was discussed," Mr Pandit told reporters.
On March 16, Mr Rathore told the delegation from Bollywood that the job of the CBFC was to certify and not censor. Aamir Khan and others who were at the meeting said they were pleased with the outcome.
There has been discontent in the film industry over recent restrictions placed by the CBFC on films, including the chopping of dialogues from NH10 and Badlapur.
