The CBFC’s Saffron Scissors Are Cutting Deeper Into Cinema

The new CBFC guidelines may be the dying gasps of a regime desperate to control what the mirror can & can't reflect.

This kind of excessive tightening of creative leashes betrays panic rather than strength.

(Photo: Vibhushita Singh/The Quint)

Recent history is testament to the fact that if reality is a house on fire, cinema must be commanded to paint a more favourable facade on the front door. And to maintain this illusion, an authoritarian state requires obedient bouncers at the gates, which brings us to the latest bureaucratic theatre in India: the newly reconstituted Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC). 

Under the stewardship of Shashi Shekhar Vempati—a technocrat and former Prasar Bharati chief whose ideological proximity to the ruling ecosystem requires no grand forensic investigation—the board has unveiled fresh guidelines that conveniently borrows heavily from its predecessor’s regressive archival dispatches while adding a few diktats of its own. 

Bollywood has been beleaguered under the BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) governance for years. Partially perishing under pressure to cave in to their propaganda, going to the movies has not really felt the same for quite some time. This is a party that would rather spend millions to sanitise its image rather than doing good work that can speak for itself.

The result is a frustrated populace struggling with a crumbling economy, worsening natural environment, fraudulent healthcare and education sectors, religious bigotry, gender violence, among several other issues.

A New Face, The Same Old Censorship

This is a government that cannot afford to let art roam free.

The lineage of CBFC appointments across the three Modi tenures reads like an intentional tragicomedy of institutional co-optation.

We got Pahlaj Nihalani in 2015, a man whose tenure was defined by an unctuous sycophancy so brazen that his obsessive moral policing and arbitrary lists of prohibited expletives turned Indian censorship into an international running joke. When his cartoonish zeal became an embarrassment, the regime swapped the blunt instrument for a velvet glove, installing the lyrical ad-man Prasoon Joshi. Joshi lent the censor board a veneer of urbanity for eight years, all the while strangling dissenting cinema in committee rooms. Now, entering the third act, we have Vempati.

The accompanying 18-member board is equally calculated. It is decorated with familiar stars like Pankaj Tripathi and Preity Zinta to provide cultural credibility and polite mainstream cover, while safely packed with partisan loyalists like Pallavi Joshi, Manoj Joshi, and Hansraj Hans.

Old Rules, New Targets

The rules they intend to enforce are almost laughably archaic, resurrected from the petrified logic of 1991 under Section 5B of the Cinematograph Act. Despite the Shyam Benegal Committee’s urgent 2016 recommendation that the CBFC abandon its paternalistic fantasy of censoring films and restrict itself purely to certification, the ministry has clung to the language of subjective surveillance. 

Filmmakers are once again instructed to ensure their work provide "clean and healthy entertainment" and remain "sensitive to the values and standards of society". These are deliberate catch-alls. In practice, they mean that movies like Sandhya Suri’s Santosh (2024), with its unsparing portrait of caste and police brutality, or Honey Trehan’s Satluj (2026), which traces the murdered human rights activist Jaswant Singh Khalra, are trapped in lengthy legal purgatory and eviscerated by “mandated” cuts.

Meanwhile, religious sensitivity is policed with absurd pedantry. The board initially attempted to veto the title of the Malayalam film JSK: Janaki V v/s State of Kerala (2025) simply because a sexual assault survivor shared a name with the mythical Sita. The irony was not lost on us that Sita was a victim of patriarchal abuse even in Ramayana.

Apoorva Lakhia’s upcoming Salman Khan-starrer Maatrubhumi: May War Rest in Peace (formerly Galwan Attack) has already hit a bureaucratic roadblock simply because its depiction of China might clash with delicate diplomatic mood swings.

Films screened at festivals generally do not require certification from CBFC but they do need a censor exemption from the Union Ministry. After the Union government’s interference as many as 31 films—dealing with issues of caste, sanitation workers, and the Palestinian genocide—may get banned from being screened at Kerala's International Documentary and Short Film Festival (IDSFFK). This kind of censorship is not even new.

What Gets Cut, And What Gets Through

The double standard is galling. While films dissecting state violence or democratic rot are bled dry, historical fabrications and Islamophobic dog-whistles masquerading as cinema—from The Kerala Story (2023) and Dhurandhar (2025) to Swatantra Veer Savarkar (2024)—sail through the certification rooms to receive tax exemptions and prime ministerial shout-outs. For a film that has an abysmal 14 per cent critic’s approval rating on international movie ranking site Rotten Tomatoes, Randeep Hooda was felicitated with a National Film Award for Best Debut Film of a Director recently.

The bottomline for this form of film fascism is this: mediocrity (even over all inferiority) is hailed, rewarded, and encouraged, provided it flatters the crown. However, I would argue that this kind of excessive tightening of creative leashes betrays panic rather than strength.

The ruling establishment is realising, with palpable terror, that the cultural hypnosis which pacified older demographics is failing against India’s youth. The recent volcanic Gen Z demonstrations over rigged entrance exams, rampant paper leaks, and systemic unemployment forced the government onto its back foot, shattering the illusion of an infallible regime.

The resulting moral dissonance has become impossible to ignore even by those who feigned ignorance even a few years ago. 

Censorship As A Sign Of Panic

There is something profoundly ugly and uncouth about an administration that cries over culture when it comes to moral policing but turns away its face when actual crimes are committed against its citizens. When a prime minister feels compelled to publicly admonish and accept the humiliating repentance of a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl (Ruchika Singh), while maintaining a deafening, cowardly silence when a seventeen-year-old girl is gang-raped a stone's throw from his residence, the hypocrisy does become visibly conspicuous.

This contrast is actually the entire story. A government that cannot protect teenage girls on the streets of its own capital wants to protect them from swear words and provocative plot-lines in a darkened cinema hall. It wants to dictate theology and tone on celluloid while the country outside burns through its own social fabric. 

The new CBFC guidelines may just be the dying gasps of a regime desperate to control what the mirror can and cannot reflect. But art, unlike state institutions, is not a dog that sits on command, it is a discerningly incisive little cat that is wiser than it looks and entirely uninterested in whoever happens to be holding the leash.

(The author is an independent film, TV, and pop culture journalist who has been feeding into the great sucking maw of the internet since 2010. This is an opinion piece. The views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)