Great to see you return to this week’s Politics to Policy edition. This week, we are going to talk about the controversy surrounding the movie Satluj and try and shed some light on the selective state pressure on Satluj versus the state's active promotion of certain other films, and the CBFC's role in enabling that selectivity. Let’s get started.

Satluj streamed for less than two days before ZEE5 pulled it from India. The Taj Story streamed for months, even while two petitions in the Delhi High Court challenged its own certification on the grounds that it spread fabricated history. One film draws its story from a Supreme Court conviction. The other builds a courtroom drama around a theory the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) has called baseless for decades. Only one of them ran into real trouble.

Honey Trehan's film began life in 2022 as Ghallughara, a term for the historic massacres of Sikhs. RSVP submitted it to the CBFC that year. The board's examining committee cleared it with 21 cuts and a forced title change to Punjab '95. RSVP appealed to the Bombay High Court. Somewhere in that appeal, the CBFC's revising committee raised the number of required cuts to 127 and reportedly asked the makers to change the name of the film's protagonist, a request they refused. The film's planned gala premiere at the 2023 Toronto International Film Festival was also cancelled, with a source telling Variety that political factors were involved. Nearly three years passed before the film reached an audience, retitled again as Satluj, the river that runs through Punjab.

Jaswant Singh Khalra investigated roughly 25,000 illegal cremations and enforced disappearances carried out by Punjab Police during the state's militancy years. He was abducted in 1995 and killed. Courts have already decided this story. Six police officers were convicted for exactly what the film depicts.

Satluj premiered uncut on ZEE5 on July 3. Diljit Dosanjh, who plays Khalra, said afterward that he had expected the takedown and had deliberately avoided promoting the release beforehand, reasoning that advance publicity would have gotten the film blocked before anyone saw it. He was nearly right about the timing. ZEE5 pulled the film from its Indian catalogue on the evening of July 5, less than 48 hours after release, saying only that the film would be "unavailable in India until further notice." No court order was made public. No government directive was confirmed. ZEE5's own statement praised the film's "courage" and vision in one breath, then suspended it in the next, a contradiction that says more about the decision than any official explanation offered. Trehan told The Indian Express he was "at a loss" when he heard the news. The film remains available on ZEE5 Global outside India.

The timing sits inside a specific political project. After winning Delhi in early 2025, the BJP named Punjab as its next target. The state remains one of the last major holdouts against the party's presence, with a 2027 assembly election already shaping strategy. The pitch runs almost entirely through the Sikh community. Party leaders have said openly that the plan only works if voters believe the BJP is genuinely pro-farmer and pro-Sikh, a task the party has struggled with since the 2020 split from the Akali Dal over the farm laws.

That courtship was on full display weeks before Satluj streamed. On June 29, 2026, 87 Punjab legislators from every party in the Assembly appeared before the Akal Takht in Amritsar over a sacrilege controversy involving Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann. Manjinder Singh Sirsa, the BJP's Sikh face in Punjab, was among the loudest voices demanding action. It let his party present itself as the Panth's defender against a rival's misstep.

A film that puts Sikh disappearances and police killings from the 1990s back into wide circulation complicates that project directly. It reopens a chapter that puts the security state itself in the dock. The takedown landed two days into a live campaign for Sikh goodwill, at the worst possible moment for the side trying to win it.

Compare that timeline to what the CBFC waves through when history runs the other way.

The Kashmir Files was declared tax-free in at least eight BJP-ruled states within days of its 2022 release, several of them announced personally by chief ministers, with Prime Minister Modi praising the film publicly. The Kerala Story received the same treatment in Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh in 2023, with Deputy CM Brajesh Pathak telling the public, "Everyone should see The Kerala Story." Chhaava got tax-free status across multiple states in 2025, framed by officials as a tribute to Maratha history. None of these three faced a certification fight remotely close to Satluj's. The Kerala Story's only real friction was over its tax status, after a state government briefly noted that 'A'-certified films are not supposed to qualify for exemption in the first place, and reversed itself anyway under pressure.

Dhurandhar and its sequel went further still. Critics at Frontline and IGN described the films as propaganda dressed as history, built around a fictionalised account of real events that still claims to be true. Al Jazeera covered the same fight playing out on both sides of the India-Pakistan border. None of that scrutiny touched the certification. The films streamed on schedule and broke box office records.

The Taj Story is the clearest case. Built around a theory the ASI has repeatedly dismissed, that the Taj Mahal was a Hindu temple seized by Shah Jahan, the film faced two separate Delhi High Court petitions arguing its certification should never have been granted. The CBFC had already cleared it with a UA 13+ rating months earlier, and the rating held. A film built on a claim historians and the ASI reject drew no cuts, no title change, no multi-year delay. A film built on a claim the Supreme Court has already affirmed drew 127.

None of this is really surprising once you look at who runs the CBFC. The board is chaired by a chairperson and 23 members, and every one of them is a central government appointee under the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting. There used to be an independent appeals body, the Film Certification Appellate Tribunal, that a filmmaker could turn to without going to court. The government scrapped it in 2021. Since then, the only route left for a producer who disagrees with the board is exactly the route RSVP was forced to take: years in the Bombay High Court.

The board does occasionally rule against what looks like the government's evident preference. Udta Punjab's suggested cuts fell from 89 to one in 2016, but only after a court forced the issue. That case gets cited often as proof that the CBFC can be independent. It also required a court to make it so.

There's a pattern in who runs the board, too. Pahlaj Nihalani said after his 2017 removal that he was pushed out for refusing to clear Indu Sarkar, a film about the Emergency, without cuts. His successor, Prasoon Joshi, held the chair through most of Satluj's ordeal. In May 2026, Joshi was elevated to chair Prasar Bharati, India's public broadcaster, a promotion within the same government structure he had just spent years gatekeeping films for.

One political commentator put the CBFC's own numbers to it directly online: 127 cuts for a film honouring a minority-community human rights icon, cleared without incident for films built on speculation or outright fiction. Anurag Kashyap's response to the takedown was blunter. "Pirate karo, par dekho," he wrote. Pirate it, but watch it.

A censor board with an independent appeals process and a genuinely mixed appointment structure would produce inconsistent outcomes in both directions. This one moves fast for films that flatter a preferred version of history, and slow, when it moves at all, for films that document the version courts have already found to be true. The certificate answers a different question every time: whose account of the past gets to stay online.

Thank you for reading through.

I am always awaiting your feedback. If you want me to discuss a specific policy or governance question, reply to this email. If there was something in this article that you did not agree with, let me know that, too. I would love to discuss this with you in even more detail.

This newsletter gets better the more you engage with it. So please hit reply. I read every response.

Until next time.

Anas Ahmad Tak