Not For You, Milord

Kashyap supporters doubt the film could prejudice the judiciary. In fact, the producer's counsel Ashok Desai had said before the SC that he failed to understand how the movie would prejudice the case as no "professional judge" was "influenced" by what appeared in the media.

The only precedent in India to the Black Friday case was that of Zee TV's 2002 film on the December 13 Parliament attack. The channel recreated the incident, and when the lawyers of the accused asked for a stay on the telecast till the judgement was pronounced, the Supreme Court let Zee telecast it, observing that judges by their judicial training were not expected to be influenced by any film. In that case, the trial court held the accused guilty and pronounced a death sentence, though after a 2003 part acquittal by the high court the case has moved to the Supreme Court.

America saw a similar case during a multi-billion tobacco lawsuit, when attorneys for Brown and Williamson Tobacco Corp asked the judge to bar the jury from seeing The Insider, the film about B&W whistle-blower Jeffrey Wigand. They said that the film could prejudice the jury. Though the judge ordered the jurors not to watch the film, it was released countrywide for the general public.

In any case, Kashyap claims his film doesn't demonise the accused. He says it points fingers at no one; it traces the roots of terrorism back to our political system and its increasingly unholy alliance with religion. In this particular instance, the provocation for the killings, allegedly masterminded by Tiger Memon, is shown to be the Babri Masjid demolition. He says the film furthers Mahatma Gandhi's message: an eye for an eye will make the whole world blind.

Kashyap is clearly dejected. "Will cinema be only about entertainment and escapism?" he asks. It could be a long time before the film is released. The Bombay bomb blast case is one of India's longest-running trials. It began in June 1995 and concluded in July 2003, with over 600 witnesses questioned. The judgement was to have been pronounced in July 2004 but the judge has a difficult task ahead with 13,000 pages worth of evidence to sift through and a chargesheet that runs into over 10,000 pages. Till all that is done Anurag Kashyap will remain a filmmaker in search of a debut.