BHOPAL/VARANASI, FEBRUARY 10: Filmmaker Deepa Mehta arrived in Bhopal today to explore the possibility of shooting her controversial film Water in Madhya Pradesh, but said she would take a final decision only after talking to the producers and other unit members.Mehta, who flew from Mumbai, rushed straight from the Bairagarh airport to the Madhya Pradesh Assembly secretariat for a meeting with Chief Minister Digvijay Singh.After holding discussions with Singh for about an hour, Mehta addressed a joint informal press conference with him and said she had been given permission by the Information and Broadcasting Ministry for shooting the film anywhere in India. She did not require any fresh permission, she said.Mehta said a final decision on the shooting would be taken only after taking into consideration a number of things, including whether or not it was feasible to shoot it at the venue suggested to her.The Madhya Pradesh Assembly secretariat was jam-packed with people waiting to have aglimpse of the filmmaker at the main entrance, but she went straight to the Chief Minister's chamber through a back door without anyone noticing her.The filmmaker denied suggestions that she had compromised on the script of the film by agreeing to delete some words at the instance of the Information and Broadcasting Ministry.She maintained that she was not willing to show the script of the film Water to any committee, but only to one responsible person whose word was considered with respect in the State where it would be shot.Meanwhile, five members of the Kashi Sanskriti Rakasha Samiti (KSRS) have faxed a letter to the Chief Minister urging him not to allow the shooting of Water because Mehta's script has equated widows with prostitutes. ``Your party president Sonia Gandhi is a widow and late Indira Gandhi was also. Will you explain Deepa's perception of widows and the prostitutes to her,'' the letter asked the CM.``We will not let her shoot anywhere in the country and will mobilizemass support wherever she goes for shooting her film because this is not a film, but a document to tarnish the rich Indian culture,'' Kaushal Kishore Mishra, KSRS spokesman, told The Indian Express.However, intellectuals and religious heads in Varanasi are deeply peeved with the manner in which a ``handful'' of people with ``vested interests'' managed to force the film crew pack its bags from the city.``I have seen the script and found nothing objectionable in it,'' Veer Bhadra Mishra, mahant of Sankat Moachan Temple, said.Taking the same line, fiction writer and former Professor of Benaras Hindu University (BHU) Dr Kashi Nath Singh pointed out that the protest should not be seen as a case in isolation. ``In fact, this (protest) is the second version of the temple card played by the Sangh Parivar. This is why they tried to paint the Water controversy as a conspiracy of Christian missionaries to defame Hinduism,'' he said.In Delhi, various political and social groups demanded theresignation of the Ram Prakash Gupta government for its failure to provide protection to the film crew.At a demonstration outside the Uttar Pradesh Bhawan in New Delhi, activists of the Democratic Youth Federation of India (DYFI), Student's Federation of India, Janawadi Mahila Samiti, Jana Natya Manch and Sahmat shouted slogans like ``down with cultural policing'' and ``politics of hatred and violence will not work''.In Patna, however, BJP general secretary Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi came down heavily on the shooting of the film.Talking to newsmen, Naqvi, former minister of state for information and broadcasting, demanded driving out of all the foreign-origin people working in the film from the country and blacklisting of director Deepa Mehta and actress Shabana Azmi.
