Rakesh Sharma

In 2014 Rakesh released a number of video clips of Indian Prime Ministerial candidate Narendra Modi from his election speeches for the 2003 election. In these clips Modi appears to endorse the violence perpetrated against Muslims in the 2002 Gujarat riots. Rakesh stated that he were releasing the clips because Modi's early speeches had been gradually disappearing from online repositories due to a concerted whitewash campaign to improve Modi's image that could possibly be tarnished by his endorsements of the riots.

Rakesh Sharma is an Indian documentary filmmaker. His most notable work is the feature-length documentary Final Solution (2004 film) on the 2002 Gujarat riots. Rakesh Sharma spent his formative years in Agra, before moving to Delhi to finish school and college education. He started career as television journalist in 1986. He graduated from SRCC, University of Delhi in 1984 with a BA Honours (Economics) degree. He studied MA in Mass Communication from Jamia Millia Islamia MCRC in 1986. Rakesh was born in Uttar Pradesh, in 1964.

The film was denied certification in July 2004. But, following widespread civil society protests, Central Board of Film Certification convened an unusual suo moto screening, as the filmmaker refused to reapply or approach the Revising Committee on the grounds that the Examining Committee preview panel was politically partisan and did not even bother to see the film in its entirety before effectively banning it. In Oct 2004, after a special Revising Committee preview convened by Chairman, Central Board of Film Certification, Final Solution was cleared by the Censor Board without a single cut. Final Solution won the President’s Award (Special Jury award) in 2006, underscoring what the filmmaker called “the schizophrenic nature of the State, (that first bans a film and then gives it an award)”. Curiously, the two state-run film festivals of India -International Film Festival of India and Mumbai International Film Festival never ‘selected’ or screened Final Solution. Nor did the state broadcaster, Doordarshan, mandated with showing national award winning films, ever telecast the film despite formal requests. International broadcasters who aired the film include BBC (Storyville), NHK, YLE, DR2 and several smaller TV stations in Europe, West Asia and Africa.

The battle for Final Solution was fought in the realm of public opinion. The strategy ensured that instead of the film being buried, it went viral. It also resulted in widespread public support and civil society protests that eventually created pressure on the Censor Board (CBFC) to re-examine the case. A week after the ban, 10,000 discs were bulk-replicated and launched in a Pirate-and-Circulate campaign (get a free copy if you promise to pirate and make at least 5 or more copies, urging those getting the ‘pirated’ copy to pirate it further). This campaign got a tremendous and widespread response, enabling the film to reach towns and villages no commercial DVD distributor could possibly have.Simultaneously, on the website, it was made clear that neither a formal permission nor a screening fee was necessary for any India screenings. This led to hundreds of protest screenings at cultural spaces, in college hostels, trade union halls and community auditoria etc. On Oct 2, 2004, Gandhi’s birth anniversary, inspired by his Civil Disobedience campaign, a nationwide Show@Home initiative was launched by (Late) Himmatbhai Zaveri, an old Gandhian. Free DVDs were made available for over 200 such screenings countrywide, for home screenings for neighbours, family, colleagues and friends.Further, activist groups & grassroots networks were encouraged to use the film for advocacy, urging them as well to pirate-and-circulate the film. A tie-up with smaller journals, focusing on Democracy, Fundamentalism, Communal/ sectarian violence etc, offered free DVDs to their subscribers. It ensured targeted distribution to ground-level activists already working on the very issues the film explored. Some groups were even given the master tapes to prepare dubbed versions in regional languages (Tamil, Kannada, Gujarati etc). Finally, the film was also uploaded for free viewing, in the limited spaces available online in 2004-5, as well as on institutional intranet servers at Indian universities, technical colleges, management institutes and even BPO call centres! That’s how the film went viral even before the ban was officially lifted.

Sharma made waves with Final Solution, a documentary that presents the 2002 Gujarat riots as an anti-Muslim pogrom orchestrated by right-wing Hindu nationalists in Gujrat. Himself a Hindu, Sharma used primary sources — testimony from both victims and perpetrators — to allege that the state was complicit in the violence.

Rakesh Sharma returned to documentary film-making after a decade, with the multiple award winning film Aftershocks: The Rough Guide to Democracy, a subaltern re-examination of the Narmada debate (Development at whose cost? For whose benefit?). Set in Kutch's lignite mining belt, the film probes democracy 'from below'. The film travelled to over 120 international film festivals, in addition to several universities and academic conferences. 2002-2006: After finishing and releasing Final Solution, Rakesh worked full-time on making other versions (including the Gujarati version), DVD sales and self-distribution of the film to broadcasters, institutions and film festivals etc.

After quitting Star in 1997, Rakesh took up large production consultancy and TV channel launch/ relaunch projects. These included the mega Polls’98 results show (72 hours live, DD1 and DD2; last of the ‘manual count’ elections) as the Executive Producer in charge of the show. A joint venture between Prasar Bharti and India Today group. Rakesh moved to Chennai in 1999 to relaunch Vijay TV now known as Star Vijay, a Tamil channel. The 8-month consultancy included finalizing programming strategy, channel re branding, commissioning fresh shows for the entire prime time band, recruitment and training of staff (Programming, in-house production, on-air promos etc). Rakesh finally quit broadcasting altogether in 2000 to return to film-making. It was while working on his first screenplay that he decided to accompany a friend to Kutch for relief work following the Jan 2001 approach, triggering his accidental return to documentary film-making with Aftershocks, initially planned as an advocacy video cum field report to pressurize GMDC and Gujarat government into releasing relief and compensation money. Aftershocks was premiered at the Fribourg International Film Festival in Feb 2002, where it won the Best Documentary award.

Rakesh gave up documentary film-making in 1992, as “projects funded by international broadcasters and agencies always came with strings attached, however benign and I had no interest in making commissioned sarkari films”. In 1992-93, following the Bombay riots in the aftermath of the Demolition of the Babri Masjid, Rakesh took a sabbatical from his career, to run a relief camp in Jogeshwari East (Jhoola Maidan, near Gandhi chawl, where the Bane family had been burnt alive inside their home). As a full-time Nivara Haqq volunteer for several months, Rakesh ran the camp and worked with both the communities on relief, rehab and preliminary legal work, incl filing FIRs and compensation claims etc. Rakesh then move to the corporate side of broadcasting for the next 7-8 years, before returning to self-financed, independent film-making in 2001-2.