Lata Mangeshkar, who has sung
the vocals for Bollywood heroines for decades, at an award ceremony in
Hyderabad, India, in 2010. The Indian police have asked for a comedian’s
video, which mocks the singer, to be removed from the web.
Credit
Noah Seelam/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The Mumbai police have asked Facebook and YouTube to
remove a video mocking two beloved Indian figures, a cricket star and an
86-year-old Bollywood singer, after receiving complaints from politicians.
Ashish Shelar,
the leader of India’s governing Bharatiya Janata Party for Mumbai, and a
rightist regional party filed complaints with the police on Monday objecting to
language in the video, which was posted last week by a comedian, Tanmay Bhat.
“They’re the
icons of all India, and you cannot insult them with such bad language,” Sandeep
Deshpande, a spokesman for the rightist party, Maharashtra Navnirman Sena, said
on Monday in an interview with the television station India Today. He said the
video was “hurting sentiments all over India” and could undermine law and
order.
Mr. Shelar
said the video was defamatory.
Sangramsinh
Nishandar, a spokesman for the Mumbai police, said on Tuesday that officers had
taken no legal action over the video but were “looking into the nitty-gritty”
of how it could be removed. He said the police had asked Facebook and YouTube
to take it down.
Gaurav Bhaskar, a spokesman in India for Google, which
owns YouTube, would not confirm whether the company had been contacted by the
police but said that it complies with valid requests from law enforcement
authorities. A spokesman for Facebook in India would also would not confirm if
the company had been contacted by the police but said the video was still on
the site.
In the
expletive-laced video, which was created on Snapchat, Mr. Bhat uses that
app’s face-swap feature to impersonate Sachin Tendulkar, a hugely popular
cricketer who retired in 2013, and Lata Mangeshkar, a so-called playback singer
for Bollywood films whose career dates to the 1940s. Playback singers record
vocals for song-and-dance numbers, to which actors and actresses lip sync.
Mr. Bhat depicts the two celebrities arguing, with the
cricketer telling the singer that she is “5,000 years old” and suggesting she
should die. “Have you seen your face? It looks like someone has kept you in
water for, like, eight days,” he has Mr. Tendulkar say.
The singer,
her middle finger slowly rising, responds in a singsong tone, “Vinod is better
than you,” an apparent reference to the retired cricketer Vinod Kambli.
In a post
sharing the video on Facebook, Mr. Bhat wrote, “Also I obviously love Lata and
Sachin, just having some fun.”
But Mr. Shelar of the Bharatiya Janata Party said by
telephone on Tuesday that the video was “a public insult — it is defamation
against Lata Mangeshkar and Sachin Tendulkar, who are public icons."
Mr. Bhat is
a member of All India Bakchod, a comedy troupe whose
videos are often widely circulated on social media in India, and which has
courted controversy before. Complaints were filed last year against 14 people
over use of obscene and vulgar language at an event in Mumbai organized by the
group that was attended by several prominent Bollywood actors.
Many people
in India reacted on social media to Mr. Bhat’s video, saying it was offensive,
and some adding that he should be arrested. But others came to his defense,
including Sanjay Jha, a spokesman for the Congress party who used the
opportunity to take a dig at Prime Minister Narendra Modi of the Bharatiya
Janata Party.
“We endure
Modi’s one-sided bad jokes repeatedly with great grace in India,”, Mr. Jha
wrote. “Let’s apply the same yardstick” he added, referring to Mr. Bhat’s case.
Rajdeep Sardesai, a political journalist, wrote on
Twitter that the calls for Mr. Bhat’s arrest were “crazy,” adding,
“Except incitement to violence and slander/defamation, free speech must
prevail.”
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