Director's Statement
Post-911, we live in a world where politics of hate and intolerance has gained mainstream acceptance, even grabbed centrestage. The right-wing seems to be tightening its stranglehold across Europe and USA, a nationalism being fuelled by the anti-immigrant/anti-Moslem rhetoric. The ‘War on Terror’ dominated the electoral discourse in the US presidential elections, with both candidates promising to hunt ‘em and kill ‘em better than the other. In a world where it has become legitimate to use fictitious intelligence to justify the bombing of innocents in Iraq, where it has become acceptable to launch precision bombs and rockets against non-“embedded” journalists, where shameless politicians divide up oil wells and farm out reconstruction contracts for their $ 36 million bonuses, where babies are killed and mutilated as acceptable “collateral damage”, where suicide bombers and terror attacks claim hundreds of innocent lives, we face a challenge greater than ever before. We have earlier lived through many dark periods in history, often justifying our barbarism by using similar rhetoric. Hate, despair, destruction and tragedy can not possibly help create harmonious societies and a democratic world. During the making of this film, I noticed shocking parallels between India 2002-2004 and Germany of the 1930s - State-supported genocidal violence against Moslems in Gujarat and its continuing impact – segregation in schools, ghettoisation in cities and villages, formal calls for economic boycott of Moslems and attacks on intelligentsia by right-wing Hindutva cadres. Unchecked and unchallenged, the rapid rise of politics of hate and intolerance could very well be the forerunner of a 21st century Endlosung – the Final Solution. One of the interviewees was a nursery boy who claimed to have seen his parents being killed in the riots. He said that he wanted to become a fauji(soldier) who would kill Hindus when he grew up. When asked why, he replied in Hindi, "Because they did the same."
Read more about this topic: Final Solution (2003 Film)
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