New Delhi: The Madras high court has quashed an FIR that was filed against filmmaker Divya Bharathi, who directed the documentary Kakkoos on the lives of manual scavengers.According to The News Minute, the complaint filed by advocate and Puthiya Tamilagam party leader Bhaskar Madhuram in 2017 said that Bharathi had portrayed the Devendra Kula Vellalar community wrong in her film. He said the people Bharathi had shown in her documentary were agricultural workers and not manual scavengers.Certain groups have been saying that Devendra Kula Vellalars should not be included in the SC list, as this is an “imposed identity”, according to The News Minute.On Wednesday, November 20, 2019, Justice Anand Venkatesh said the FIR should be squashed. Bharathi had asked the court to dismiss the complaint, saying that her two years of research had proved that certain Scheduled Caste members are still forced to clean human faeces manually.Also read: Five Years After SC Judgment, States Yet to Submit Proper Data on Sewer DeathsAs The Wire has reported earlier, public screenings of Kakkoos have frequently been shut down by the police citing law and order concerns, particularly in Bharathi’s home city of Madurai, where six such screenings have not been allowed to proceed. “They have also told us not to circulate the DVD,” she had told The Wire.Bharathi has also said in the past that she has faced severe harassment ever since Kakkoos was released. On July 25, 2017, she was arrested and produced before a magistrate for failing to attend a court hearing about a student protest in 2009. Several activists had then questioned the timing of her arrest, saying that very public nature of her arrest were meant to intimidate her into silence on the subject of manual scavenging.
