FTII Students End Phase I Of Their Strike To Take The Protest Nationwide

By Countercurrents.org

28 October, 2015
Countercurrents.org

After 139 day long strike the students of Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) has ended the first phase of their protest. The students has vowed to continue the protest and make it a nationwide campaign. The students will resume their academic activities from now onwards.

One student said ,

"the new form of our protest will be in a wider manner, all across the country by addressing and taking up the larger issue which includes the murder of Dhabolkar, Pansre, Kalburgi, the issues of Dadri, Faridabad and so on... In a sense, it will be a protest against the Policies of Narendra Modi Government, be it financial, cultural, academic and everything. We'll make sure that the politically appointed society members won't enter the campus by passing our main gate.

The corporate-terrorist state which is being backed by the Militant Organizations of Sangh-Pariwar and the Desi and International Corporate Giants will be prosecuted in the Public. The International Film Festiva of India in Goa will witness the mass protest by the people of this country who don't believe in the pseudo democracy. All the people who read between lines and identify the presence of a silent-undeclared emergency will come under a single umbrella to to protest against the fascist state. The Hindutva agenda to create a new historic and cultural block will be thrashed by the people of this country.

We request the artists, thinkers, film makers and academicians vow to take this battle forward. We hold the entire film fraternity responsible for our security under this fascist regime."

The strike began with the appointment of Gajendra Chauhan as Chairman of India’s premier film institute. He is best known as Yudhishthira in the popular Mahabharata TV series. Chauhan has appeared in television serials, generally of inferior quality, and several ‘B’ grade Bollywood films, some of them can be termed as semi-porns. He is an active member of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). He extensively campaigned for the BJP in Haryana during the Lok Sabha elections last year.

FTII panel also was reconstituted with four of the eight members aligned with the ruling party. Some call them propagandists of BJP and its parent organisation Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sang(RSS). These include Anagha Ghaisas, who has made several documentary films of Prime Minister Narendra Modi; Narendra Pathak, a former president of the Maharashtra ABVP; Pranjlal Saikia, an office bearer of an RSS-linked organisation; and Rahul Solapurkar, who is intimately associated with the BJP.