However, the tribunal has also asked director Prakash Jha to remove certain portions of the film to which he readily complied. One of the toned down portions was the intimate sequence between Katrina Kaif (said to be enacting the part of Sonia Gandhi in the film) and Arjun Rampal.
The tribunal also asked Jha to replace the word Vidhwa(widow) with Bitiya while referring to Katrina Kaif’s character Indu Pratap Singh in the film. As the film is due for release on June 4, Prakash Jha was lucky to have the tribunal given its judgment within two days of appeal.
On the contrary, the censor and its revising committee had taken more than a week to inform the director about its objection to the flick. The film is about the electoral politics in the country with Nana Patekar, Ajay Devgan, Arjun Rampal, Manoj Bajpayee and Katrina Kaif playing the part of politicians vying for power. The film also has handsome Ranbir Kapoor playing an important role in it.
Though Prakash Jha’s flick ‘Raajneeti’ has been in the news from the very beginning due to its uncanny resemblance with Congress President Sonia Gandhi but Jha always denied any reference to Mrs. Gandhi. Perhaps due to this, the top leaders of Congress did not have any objection to the release of the film and its passing by Censor board.
But overenthusiastic middle level congress leaders continued to put stumbling blocks in the way of Prakash Jha, and if the sources are to be believed, even the revising committee decision in refusing the U/A certificate to the film, was their handiwork.
The buzz doing the rounds in the industry is that three congress sympathizers from Delhi had attended the meeting of Revising committee in Mumbai which watched the flick. One of them was ‘Sandesh’ editor Pankaj Sharma, who did not approve of the content of the flick and hence it was denied certificate.
Another congress sympathizer was its media coordinator Tom Vadakkan who was also present at the meeting of Revising committee, which rejected Prakash Jha’s flick. These congress people felt that the film would not help Congress president in any way, but it might harm her image, and so they refused the certificate.
The whole confusion grew because Katrina Kaif’s character Indu Pratap Singh comes into politics to fill the void created by the death of her husband (Arjun Rampal) and its obvious similarity to Sonia Gandhi joining Congress after the untimely demise of her husband Rajeev Gandhi.
However, Katrina Kaif herself stated several times that she drew inspiration from several lady politicians like Delhi CM Sheila Dixit, Priyanka Gandhi, Indira Gandhi and also Sonia Gandhi. But she borrowed only to buttress her character of Indu Pratap, which was certainly not a carbon copy of anyone of the above politicians.
