Bhopal (Madhya Pradesh): Filmmaker Onir Dhar’s talk session on “Making Literature LGBTQ Neutral” in the Bhopal Literature and Art Festival got cancelled on Friday, allegedly due to a group threatening to protest if the topic and the filmmaker were made a part of the festival.
It seems like even after 5 years of the Supreme Court scrapping Section 377, our society is still not ready to talk about the LGBTQ+ community and their inclusion in other disciplines like art and literature as the talk session related to this subject gets cancelled due to safety threats of the speaker.
Talking about the same, famous filmmaker Onir Dhar went to Twitter and penned down his feelings about the talk session getting dropped from the festival.
He tweeted, “Shocked and sad that an event I was really looking forward to speaking at had to drop me. Apparently, there was a group threatening protest and violence, and the police told the organisers that they could not guarantee my safety. So, they cancelled the event. Let me process this…”
Dhar also quoted a tweet bashing the organisers of the festival for making such a ‘nonsense’ topic a part of the festival, with “No comments”
Asked about the reasons behind the cancellation of the program, an official, Raghav Chandra told Free Press, “We had to cancel it because we were concerned about his safety. We got advice in oral communications from the state government itself that there would be opposition to him. We received information that there would be opposition against both the filmmaker and the topic.”
As of now, the official website of the literature festival has removed this topic from the schedule.
