Gandhi not convinced she ought to be in pictures
By Amelia Gentleman International Herald Tribune
THURSDAY, JULY 27, 2006
NEW DELHI Had things gone smoothly, Sonia, the movie, would have hit screens sometime next year, billed as an epic love story.

Producers were in talks with the Italian star Monica Bellucci to play the heroine and the director had already decided what the posters would say: "The story of a woman who came to India for the love of her man and stayed for the love of her nation."

For the moment, however, it is a love story that will remain untold. The governing Indian National Congress Party served legal notice this week on the director, producer and writer behind the Sonia Gandhi biopic, outlining its concerns about the accuracy of the portrayal of their party leader and warning that legal action could follow. Alarmed, the producer halted the project.

It was the second time in less than a decade that Gandhi and her political advisers had taken legal action to prevent the making of a film about her life.

The action highlighted the Gandhi family's obsession with privacy, the political sensitivity of Gandhi's Italian heritage and her general desire for careful stage-managing of the family's public persona.

The shelving of the film illustrates the skill with which the Gandhi entourage fights off any unwelcome intrusion into the family circle. On a personal level, Gandhi is notoriously reserved. On a political level, she is conscious of the dangers that a film documenting her life could pose, particularly one that reignites the explosive controversy over her foreign roots.

Jagmohan Mundhra, the film's Los Angeles-based director, was surprised by the legal notice.

"I have nothing but the utmost regard for Sonia Gandhi as a person," he said by telephone from London. The script was, he said, "uncontroversial," portraying a young Italian girl from a modest middle- class background who met and fell in love with the heir to India's most powerful political dynasty, moved to India and transformed herself over four decades from a retiring housewife into one of the most powerful people in Indian politics.

The multiple tragedies that accompanied that transformation - the assassination of her mother-in-law, Indira Gandhi; the death of her brother-in-law in a stunt plane; the killing of her husband, Rajiv Gandhi, by a suicide bomber - are ingredients for a gripping screenplay.

"My fascination with her life comes from an interest in how the hand of destiny can pick someone up from where they started out and throw them somewhere else. As a young girl in Italy, she would never have imagined that she would end up a leader in a country of one billion people, of different race, different color, different religion. I was interested in looking at how she rose to the occasion," he said.

The producer, Murali Manohar, was also surprised by the lawyers' letter.

"We have been working on the film with great enthusiasm for the past year, and we were about to start production in the next 60 days," he said. "But the Congress Party is a very big political party, and we are trying to make a film in India. We can't move forward until we have cleared these apprehensions."

For close Gandhi watchers, however, there was nothing surprising about the action. Ever since she arrived in India in 1968 to marry Rajiv, Sonia Gandhi has been uncomfortable in the public eye.

After years in the country, she described how she resented "the gaze of curiosity which followed me everywhere."

"It was an exasperating experience - the total lack of privacy, the compulsion to constantly check myself and repress my feelings," she wrote in a book dedicated to her dead husband.

As she has grown in confidence and accumulated power, her distaste for media intrusion has not softened. Rasheed Kidwai, author of the biography on which the proposed movie would be based, notes in his book that she was "media shy and hated being photographed" and that "whenever she faced a camera, tension would show all over her face."

When an Italian producer started work on his own film about her in 1997, she employed the Zaiwalla law firm, based in London, which succeeded in halting the movie on the grounds of her right to privacy.

Although she renounced office after the 2004 elections in favor of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, no one questions the immense power Gandhi wields behind the scenes.

And if her initial dislike of the media was motivated by innate shyness and passion for privacy, her current reserve is more strategic. There are powerful political reasons why it is not in Gandhi's interest to have a mass-market film made about her life story.

Particularly unwelcome would be a revival of the storm over her foreign origins, which was central to the 2004 election, when a xenophobic attack by the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party prompting her to step back from taking the office of prime minister.

Mundhra's film was to have scenes in Italy, and also in Cambridge, England, where Rajiv and Sonia met, when she was studying at a language school there. Since entering politics, Gandhi has been at pains to minimize her foreignness - appearing in public only in a sari and making most campaign speeches in a heavily accented but fluent Hindi.

Public relations experts in India are generally impressed with the way she projects herself to the media on her own terms.

"Usually she is extremely good at this," Prahlad Kakkar, an advertising executive, said. "However, the way this film has been stopped is a little ham-fisted. It smacks of having something to hide."

The blocking of the movie has set off debate in Delhi over the boundaries between the right to privacy and freedom of expression.

In an angry editorial, The Times of India noted wryly that this was an unprecedented "attempt to censor a film even before it is made" and warned that the government was favoring "censorship over vital freedoms."

A Congress Party lawyer, Abishek Singhvi, who dispatched the legal notice to the producers, said the party wanted to make it clear that the project had not been authorized either by Gandhi or the party.

"Freedom of speech is subject to reasonable restrictions in India, in relation to defamation, for example," he said. There is precedent for the Congress party's behavior: A film thought to be based on Indira Gandhi's life, "Aandhi," made in 1975, was banned while she remained prime minister. But it is possible that the party's anxieties this time are fueled primarily by questions of taste.

"The majority of films made previously by director Mundhra have been erotic, semi-pornogaphic works," the film writer Subash Jha said. "The party may have hoped for a more demure approach to her life."