Hey Ram: Genocide in the Land of Gandhi
A Film by Gopal Menon

"It was not a communal riot but planned genocide and selective destruction of property which took place in Gujarat," states Gopal Menon, who has made the 24 minute documentary, Hey Ram: Genocide in the land of Gandhi. During the making of the documentary, Menon interviewed almost a 100 victims, 15 of whom have been featured in the film and include people who have witnessed their family members being killed. Hey Ram is the first documentary to come out of Gujarat following the massacre and since its first screening in India on March 22, it has been screened 600 times in Kolkata, Mumbai, Chennai, Hyderabad and Kerala.

Delhi-based 28-year-old Gopal Menon is from Calicut and has an MBA from PSG Institute of Management in Coimbatore. As a second year student of English literature in Calicut, he documented the local struggle against illegal felling of trees and transportation of wood with police connivance in the Nilgiri range. Kerala Shastra Sahitya Parishat supported the 21-minute 1994 documentary titled, Destruction of Tropical Evergreen Forest. While in Coimbatore, Menon documented the atrocities against Muslims on the outskirts of Coimbatore city, in which 19 Muslims were shot dead on the pretext of recovering firearms following a strike sponsored by Ms Jayalalitha. In 1998 Menon moved to Delhi and in association with Other Media Communications, made a film on the Naga political struggle called Naga Story: the other side of silence. Menon is currently making a documentary on the Dalit issue, focusing on the social hierarchy, atrocities and the resistance of the Dalits. Menon will be back in other parts of Gujarat to make a comprehensive documentary focusing on the political ideologies that led to the systematic destruction.

Recent Press Articles

Documenting the Gujarat genocide
Deccan Herald, May 2, 2002

“It was not communal riot but planned genocide and selective destruction of property which took place in Gujarat,” confirms Gopal Menon, who has made a 24 minute documentary, “Hey Ram: Genocide in the land of Gandhi.”

Mr Menon, who is in Bangalore, said that during the making of the documentary he interviewed 80 to 90 victims, 15 of whom have been featured in it. They include people who have witnessed their family members being killed.

“Gas cylinders were used in the blasts destroying the properties of the victims with the extreme heat causing holes in the ground. Industrial chemicals obtained from a chemical factory in Hyderabad, industrial gas, crude country bombs have all been used in the destruction of property,” he said.

It is the first documentary to come out of Gujarat and since its first screening on March 22, it has been screened 600 times in Kolkata, Mumbai, Chennai, Hyderabad and several places in Kerala. The documentary was witnessed by 7,000 people when it was screened at Jallian Wala Bagh in April.

Delhi-based Gopal Menon (28), who hails from Calicut, has an MBA (marketing) from PSG Institute of Management in Coimbatore.
As a second year student of English literature in Calicut, he documented the local struggle against illegal felling of trees and transportation of wood with police connivance in the Nilgiri range. The 21-minute 1994 documentary titled “Destruction of tropical evergreen forest”, was supported by Kerala Shastra Sahitya Parishat.

While in Coimbatore, he documented the atrocities on Muslim in Kottamedu, on the outskirts of Coimbatore city, in which 19 Muslims were shot dead on the pretext of recovering firearms following a bundh sponsored by Ms Jayalalitha.

Another documentary titled “Death Penalty”, with the support of Tamil Nadu chapter of PUCL, is yet to be completed.
In 1998 he moved to Delhi and in association with Other Media Communications, made a film on Naga political struggle called “Naga Story: the other side of silence” which took three years to make.

Mr Menon is currently making a documentary on the Dalit issue, focussing on the social hierarchy, atrocities and the resistance of the Dalits. Menon will be back in other parts of Gujarat to make another comprehensive documentary focussing on the political ideologies which led to the systematic destruction. Meanwhile, Menon’s first documentary will be screened in some places in Bangalore.

Gujarat uncut
By Bishakha De Sarkar
THE TELEGRAPH, Calcutta
March 31, 2002

Most of the time, Gopal Menon just sat in silence. He was in the relief camps in Gujarat, where thousands of Muslims -- victims of a carnage that still rages in parts of the state -- were huddled together. The first day he was there, they sat in silence. By the second visit, some of the people had opened up a bit. When he went back there for the third time, there was no stopping the tide.

Menon -- a 27-year-old film maker -- just listened, while his small digital camera, a Sony VX 2000, rolled on.

The result was 10-and-a-half hours of footage. Out of that, Menon has made a 21-minute documentary film. Called "Hey Ram! Genocide in the Land of Gandhi," the film was screened in Delhi last week - despite stiff opposition from the city's police.

The film is a simple collation of narratives. An old man says he can feel his slain grandson's blood stains on his chest, a woman, still searching
for her son, says she wants nothing but her son back. A middle-class Bohra Muslim says that he had never heard of the Babri Masjid, and didn't care where it was. A woman, raped by a mob, wonders why people use the names of Ram and Rahim to kill and plunder. A young man says he can't think straight any more. A small boys recounts all that he saw -- men being killed, women being raped, limbs being cut off...

In case people still have trouble believing that such a massacre did take place, the film is juxtaposed with 12 slides of mangled bodies.

The film is a documentation of reality. Gujarat, it tells you, was not an exaggerated media account -- as many among the state's rulers claimed.
Everything happened, the film says -- from the burning alive of people to women being raped, from plundering and looting to swording foetuses, from chopping off limbs to killing children. Everything happened.

At the end of one such screening, organised by the Safdar Hashmi Memorial Trust (SAHMAT) under the protective shade of a banyan tree, there were few dry eyes in the audience. There were people who wept through the film; a middle-aged woman sobbed loudly, former minister Arjun Singh's wife didn't try to control her tears and many in the audience said they had to leave the screening after the first five minutes because they couldn't sit through it.

Shubha Mudgal, the singer, was to have rendered some bhajans after the screening, but had to collect herself before she could do so. "She never drinks tea or water before she sings," says one of her associates. "For the first time, she asked for some tea."

Menon believes that the film moved people simply because of the footage. "It was a very difficult decision for us to take -- what to keep in the
film, and what to leave out," he says. "I have shown these stills not out of any sense of voyeurism but because I thought it was important to do so. Otherwise, people would never have understood the magnitude of the massacres," he says. Yet, there were stills that he felt he couldn't
possibly put in the film. "In that way, I had to sanitise the film as well."

The government did its bit to stop the screening. "At least 30 policemen came calling on us for two days before the film was screened," says Shabnam Hashmi of SAHMAT. First the constables turned up, asking members of the group what the footage was all about and how many people were going to come for the film. Next the junior and some friendly officers called, urging SAHMAT to stop the screening. Finally, the top brass got in touch with SAHMAT and said there was an official request from the government not to air the film. "The last call on that day was from the Deputy Commissioner of Police, Parliament Street. He wanted us to hand over a copy of the film. We obviously couldn't do that," Hashmi says.

Even now, policemen keep dropping in at the SAHMAT office on Rafi Marg, still asking for a copy of the film. "The moment there are copies on sale, the police can buy one," says Hashmi.

Menon believes that the film would never have been shown if Hashmi hadn't stuck to her guns. "There was enormous pressure on the organisers not to show the film - even though there was no scope for heroics or heroism in the film," he says. "I was not making a Mani Ratnam kind of a product. This is a campaign film, a political film. One wouldn't call it a work of art," he says. The film, thanks to the handy camera and a friend's editing table, was made at a cost of Rs 20,000, including travel expenses.

The Calicut boy -- who was initiated into student politics in the politically-humming state of Kerala -- says he believes that the film has
an "interventionist" role to play. This was the reason why he rushed with the post-production work soon after returning to Delhi and spent hours on the raw footage with his team members. "Everybody says 'ethnic cleansing, ethnic cleansing' but what does it really mean? The film tells you what it means," he says.

The film, he believes, may be used as evidence of the violence as well. The Srikrishna Commissionm, while probing the Mumbai riots of 1992-93, had examined films shot during the riots. Menon believes that his film can help anybody who seeks to get to the bottom of the violence that rocked Gujarat.

Till then, the film will make its rounds of the country. It has been shown in Kerala, and there have been demands from some other cities as well.
Menon, who has just made last-minutes changes in the film, is rushing around town, organising screenings.

But then, the waking hours have never been a problem for him. It's when he sleeps that the images he captured on camera -- and in his mind -- haunt him. "Everything keeps coming back," he says.

If 21 minutes could shake a crowd of several hundred viewers, the raw footage of 630 minutes can be scarring. Hashmi, who sat with Menon when he edited the film, said she couldn't sleep for two nights after that. "I have never felt like a minority in this country before," she says. "For the first time, I did."