A group of more than 90 filmmakers, journalists, academics, and activists from India, Israel, and several other countries has issued an open letter condemning the Central Board of Film Certification’s (CBFC) refusal to certify The Voice of Hind Rajab for theatrical release in India. The signatories include actors Naseeruddin Shah and Ratna Pathak Shah, filmmakers Anand Patwardhan and Payal Kapadia, Israeli filmmaker and Tel Aviv University professor emerita Michal Aviad, Standing Together national field organiser Uri Weltmann, and Columbia University philosopher Akeel Bilgrami, among others.

The letter, published on April 6, describes the ban as “a plainly unlawful attack on freedom of expression, protected by Article 19 of the Constitution of India” and argues that it endangers free speech not only in India but in Israel as well.

Tunisian director Kaouther Ben Hania’s docudrama reconstructs the killing of Hind Rajab, a five-year-old Palestinian girl, by Israeli forces in Gaza on January 29, 2024. Hind and six members of her family were attempting to flee Gaza city when their car came under fire from an Israeli tank. Hind survived the initial assault but was trapped inside the vehicle with the bodies of her relatives for hours, making desperate phone calls to the Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS). When paramedics were finally dispatched, they too were killed. Media investigations concluded that the Israeli army had fired over 335 rounds into the car.

The film premiered at the 82nd Venice International Film Festival in September 2025, where it received a record-breaking standing ovation of nearly 24 minutes and won the Silver Lion Grand Jury Prize. It was subsequently nominated for Best International Feature Film at the 98th Academy Awards—Ben Hania’s third consecutive Oscar nomination—but lost to the Norwegian drama Sentimental Value. The film has been released theatrically in the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Italy, and several other countries, all of which maintain diplomatic ties with Israel.

The CBFC’s reasoning

The film’s Indian distributor, Manoj Nandwana of Mumbai-based Jai Viratra Entertainment, submitted it for certification in February, planning a March 6 release ahead of the Oscars. According to Nandwana, a CBFC member informally told him that releasing the film would “break up the India-Israel relationship”. The Board has not issued a formal order of refusal or provided written reasons, nor has it responded to press queries on the matter.

The open letter dismantles this reasoning on constitutional grounds. Invoking the Supreme Court’s ruling in the Ramlila Maidan case, the signatories argue that restrictions on free speech under Article 19(2) must be reasonable, proportionate, and bear a direct nexus to their stated objective. The Board’s invocation of Indo-Israeli relations, they contend, fails all three tests. The relationship between the two countries is built on economic, defence, and strategic cooperation, not on film certification. And the Board, the letter notes, felt no need to deny certification to films such as 120 Bahadur or The Bengal Files, which were at least as likely to cause diplomatic friction with other countries.

A pattern of censorship

The letter places the ban within what it calls “a worrying pattern of Indian censorship of Palestinian and progressive Israeli voices”. In January, Israeli theatre director Einat Weitzman and her troupe were denied Indian visas, forcing the cancellation of two scheduled performances of The Last Play in Gaza at the International Theatre Festival of Kerala (ITFoK). The play, which documents the destruction of Palestinian cultural spaces, had been invited under the festival’s theme “Voices in the Silence”. Weizman, an anti-Zionist Israeli playwright whose work has faced censorship in Israel itself, described the visa denial as “a continuation of the same erasure mechanism that the play itself speaks about”.

In December 2025, the Union Ministry of Information and Broadcasting refused censor exemptions for 19 films scheduled at the 30th International Film Festival of Kerala (IFFK), including several Palestinian titles—All That’s Left of You, Once Upon a Time in Gaza, Palestine 36, and Wajib—as well as Sergei Eisenstein’s century-old classic Battleship Potemkin and Abderrahmane Sissako’s Timbuktu. The Kerala government defied the Centre and ordered all screenings to proceed. Some exemptions were eventually granted after sustained political pressure.

The pattern extends to Indian cinema as well. Sandhya Suri’s Santosh, the United Kingdom’s submission for the 2025 Academy Awards, which deals with police brutality and caste discrimination, was subjected to extensive cuts by the CBFC that effectively prevented its release.

The diplomatic backdrop

The ban arrives against the backdrop of a decisive shift in the country’s posture towards Israel under Prime Minister Narendra Modi. On February 25–26, Modi made his second visit to Israel—the first by a Global South leader since the beginning of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza in October 2023. Addressing the Knesset, he declared that “India stands with Israel firmly, with full conviction, in this moment and beyond,” without any reference to the tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians killed in Gaza. The two countries elevated their bilateral ties to a “special strategic partnership” and signed 16 agreements spanning defence, technology, agriculture, and cybersecurity. India remains the largest buyer of Israeli weapons.

This indicates a departure from India’s historical position. Independent India was among the first countries to recognise the State of Palestine in 1988. For decades, New Delhi led solidarity efforts for the Palestinian national cause within the Non-Aligned Movement. The open letter’s signatories argue that the Indian authorities’ “idea of friendship is appeasement of the government of the day, to the point of censoring films bringing to light their most appalling crimes”.

Self-censorship as a vicious cycle

The letter makes a broader argument about the structural consequences of such censorship. Self-censorship, it argues, creates a vicious cycle: once a State demonstrates willingness to suppress material on another government’s behalf, it invites further demands. “Israel would likely not even have thought to concern itself with film certification in India before these incidents,” the letter states. “Now the Indian authorities have shown themselves willing to censor films in foreign powers’ interests.”

The signatories also warn that the ban endangers Israeli free speech. Governments that censor material to protect allied governments, they argue, will tend to expect the same treatment in return. In Israel, where freedom of expression is under growing pressure—with police attacks on anti-war protesters in Tel Aviv and Haifa in March, a rifle-armed raid on a gathering of Standing Together, and the banning of a protest by Sudanese activists outside the UAE embassy on the grounds that it might “harm foreign relations”—such a precedent only compounds the threat.

The open letter follows an earlier intervention by eight opposition MPs, who wrote to Information and Broadcasting Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw in late March, urging the government to direct the CBFC to examine the film strictly within its statutory framework. The letter, signed by the CPI(M)’s John Brittas, the Congress’ Jairam Ramesh, the Samajwadi Party’s Ram Gopal Yadav and Javed Ali Khan, the Rashtriya Janata Dal’s (RJD) Manoj K. Jha, the DMK’s Salma, the Indian Union Muslim League (IUML)-nominated Haris Beeran, and the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha’s (JMM) Sarfaraz Ahmed, noted that the CBFC had only communicated its refusal orally, without issuing a formal order—raising concerns about whether considerations outside the statutory framework had influenced the decision.

“Disagreement with the perspective presented in a film cannot, by itself, constitute a valid ground for restricting public exhibition,” the MPs wrote. “India’s civilisational ethos has long embraced plurality of thought and artistic interpretation.”

‘Countless small acts of complicity’

The open letter closes by invoking David Borenstein, co-director of the documentary Mr Nobody Against Putin, which won the Best Documentary award at the 2026 Oscars. In his acceptance speech, Borenstein described his film as being about how people lose their countries “through countless small little acts of complicity”. The signatories draw a parallel: when public attention is consumed by social media, censorship of dissenting voices becomes particularly corrosive.

“Both India and Israel have the misfortune to be in the international vanguard of democratic backsliding,” the letter states. “Governments in this vanguard have learned to skilfully cooperate to silence dissenting voices in their own countries. We hope by this letter to promote another kind of international solidarity—between peoples, in support of freedom, justice, and equality.”

With inputs from agencies

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