MUMBAI: It was always difficult to be human in this country. Animal rights activist Maneka Gandhi has made it tougher for some. Her perception of what constitutes cruelty to animals is frightening a broad section of filmmakers, some of whom are even vegetarian. Rang De Basanti may have had a providential escape from the clutches of her righteousness, but tales of her many other actions are making the nervous industry shelve projects, change plots and order the rule book.

“It’s all very confusing,” says actor Shah Rukh Khan whose Paheli faced flak from her for the use of camels and even pigeons. Recently, aspiring director Taufeeq Ahmed had sent the script of Nimmi, a story of a girl lost in a jungle, to the Animal Welfare Board of India in Chennai. After several visits to plead the clearance of the script, he was told that only Maneka Gandhi, a member of the board, had such powers.

When he met her in Delhi, she looked unkindly at the fact that the film revolved around a man-eating tiger. “How can you show the tiger as a villain?” she said, according to a senior member of the production company, Factory. “It’ll have a bad influence on children.” Also, she questioned the producers’ right to shoot wild animals, even if he was going to shoot in Bangkok.

She also objected to a poacher in the film firing at a deer. To her, all this was violence against animals.—By arrangement with The Times of India