Members of Ritwik Ghatak’s extended family have issued the following statement, responding to reports appearing in the media about the BJP youth wing planning to use bits from Ghatak’s cinema for what appears to be some propaganda film about refugees and migrants. 

We, the undersigned, family members of the late Shri Ritwik Kumar Ghatak, strongly condemn the reported misappropriation and misuse of his politics and his cinema by the Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha to defend the controversial and discriminatory National Register of Citizens (NRC) and the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA).

Shri Ghatak’s cinema reflected his deep empathy for the underprivileged — in particular, the displaced and marginalised victims of political and social upheavals. He was secular to the bone, as everyone who knew him can attest, and his writings and cinema are proof of this.

To use any part of his filmography — divorced from context —to justify laws that will make every citizen of the country pass through an ordeal to re-establish their citizenship and might render millions from one particular community stateless, is deemed unacceptable by us. It violates the fundamental principles he stood for.

We demand that the material spreading disinformation be repealed with urgent and immediate effect.

Signatories

Proteeti Debi

Soma Mukhopadhyay

Sara Lahiri-Majumdar

Basundhara Bhattacharya

Dhriti Bagchi

Aroma Dutta

Ina Puri

Paroma Ghose Ghatak

Bubla Basu

Rajoshi Nagchowdhury

Maitreesh Ghatak

Tinnie Mukherjee

Saran Ghatak

Atreyo Mukhopadhyay

Sujato Ghatak

Aritra Mukhopadhyay

Shamya Dasgupta

Shinjana Chaudhuri

Tathagata Bhattacharya

Sanchari Bhattacharya

Parambrata Chattopadhyay

Esha Aurora

Sayani Ghatak

Disha Ghatak