Prakash Raj launching the Telugu translation of “The Book of Disappearance,” the novel by Palestinian writer Ibtisam Azem, at Lamakaan in Hyderabad on Thursday, September 10. A process is a punishment: Prakash Raj There had always been somebody to stop a questioning voice, he said. In “Jana Nayagan,” a film he acted in with actor and Tamil Nadu Chief Minister C Joseph Vijay, a line referred to a “Project Om.” The censor board, he said, would not permit him to pronounce the word, insisting he say the English letters “OM” instead. In another film, playing a lawyer, he had a line about a character named Saraswati who is raped. “They told me, ‘No, no, Prakash Raj garu , you shouldn’t say Saraswati was raped. Call her L Saraswati.'”
The consequence falls on those who have not yet begun, he argued. “A young writer or a director will start thinking while writing the story itself… if I write this, it won’t get past the censors, it won’t release and no producer will back it.”
He said he had warned the film industry when regional certification was centralised several years ago. “I told them, you won’t understand this conspiracy now, but it’s a massive one. Today, everyone understands.”
The judicial process was being turned to similar ends, he said, naming Stan Swamy, GN Saibaba and Umar Khalid, and pointing to a book by Justice Nagamohan Das he had released recently on how dictators and fascists turn the judicial process itself into a punishment. “A judicial process is meant to punish the guilty. But how do you use that same process to punish the innocent? Legally, they appear right. But morally, are they right? This is another form of censorship.”
Actor and activist Prakash Raj speaking at Lamakaan in Hyderabad on Thursday, September 10. SIR a bloodless genocide: Prakash Raj The Constitution had held the line where neighbouring countries had not, he said. “Because of our Constitution, the military cannot take over here. So how do they take over this country? They use the institutions.”
Citing a formulation he attributed to economist and commentator Parakala Prabhakar, he described the mass deletion of voters from the electoral rolls as “a bloodless genocide.”
“A massacre without bloodshed is happening. They have silently deleted nearly 12 crore voters,” the outspoken Raj said.
The exercise would continue until February, he said, after which the Census would follow. “There is a grand design to it all. Eventually, the Election Commission offices in the states will be reduced to small, powerless rooms. They hold all the data. They will use it to track who is having inter-caste marriages, who belongs to which community, and who should be reduced to a secondary citizen.”
With Adivasis, Dalits, Muslims and Christians, the actor-activist said, “they are actively making them secondary citizens.”
A novel about vanishing Palestinians First published in Arabic in 2014 as “Sifr al-Ikhtifaa,” the novel is set in Jaffa and Tel Aviv and turns on a single speculative premise of one morning where every Palestinian in the land has vanished. It alternates between the notebooks left behind by Alaa, a young Palestinian man, and Ariel, his Israeli neighbour, a liberal Zionist who reads them while searching for an explanation.
Sinan Antoon’s English translation was longlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2025.
Poetry and a deer Raj, among the more visible voices in Indian cinema speaking on Palestine, answered the familiar question about why an actor speaks politics by quoting Mahmoud Darwish, as he did at a solidarity rally in Chennai last September. Asked the same, the poet had replied that if his poetry were to be free of politics, he would first have to be able to hear birdsong, “and for that, the warplanes would have to fall silent.”
“Usually, we only know the tears we shed for the wounds on our own bodies. But if another human being suffers far away in Gaza, or far away in Manipur, we must invite those tears of pain into our own eyes,” he said.
He closed on hope, with a story about a deer that spots a tiger crouched in a bush and, rather than fleeing, steps forward and calls out – not to warn the herd, but to tell the predator it had been seen.
In an apparent reference to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Raj said, “Our Mahaprabhu is scared. The kids have scared him,” referring to the Cockroach Janta Party-led protest at Jantar Mantar against the NEET paper leak, which led to the resignation of then Union education minister Dharmendra Pradhan.
The young had made the ruler flinch, he said. “He took two steps back, didn’t he? Let us take a step forward. Now the poor man is making reels. Reel King,” Raj said, referring to Modi’s attempts to win back Gen Z support through short videos.
Asked on his own sets why he cannot simply adapt and compromise, he said he offers the same reply each time: “Dead fish are enough to float along with the stream. But a fish must be alive to swim against the current.”
