Binayak Sen in Sin City

There is one script Frank Miller would have loved to mull over for a sequel to his graphic gore fest Sin City. In the original, a film panned by critics as porno-sadism for its "depictions of castration, murder, torture, decapitation, rape and misogyny", the lawmakers are the bad guys and the lawbreakers emerge as the keepers of conscience and sanity in a town without either.

At the top of the food chain is a megalomaniac senator and his pedophile son, the Yellow Bastard. Then there is a sinister cardinal and his accomplice, a boy-cannibal called Kevin. Protecting them are a bunch of corrupt cops and an insensitive judiciary.

Like in Sin City, castration, murder, torture, decapitation, rape and misogyny abound in this God-less land too

In this dark landscape, the only do-gooders are a band of armed prostitutes who want to keep their territory free from cops and pimps, a tortured soul with a heart of gold, a hitman who respects women, and an out-of-luck cop in jail for a child rape he didn't commit.

Here the innocents are badgered and the guilty are protected. Here greed is God and the head priest a pervert.
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The Christian lobby understandably attacked Miller for building a world without morals and defaming the Church.
Now, consider a script where a 58-year-old activist doctor who has dedicated his life to providing healthcare to tribals in a remote land is thrown in jail for allegedly being a sympathiser of armed rebels who have waged a war against the State. To protect its own, the State has armed tribals to take on the rebels who were reportedly fighting for the rights of those very tribals.

Like in Sin City, castration, murder, torture, decapitation, rape and misogyny abound in this God-less land too. Keeping aside city comforts, the good doctor had made it his life's mission to campaign against fake encounters, custody deaths, hunger deaths, malnutrition and
dysentery. He had taken on the State for neglecting its poor and arming one set of tribals against the other.

Unlike in Sin City, there was no band of prostitutes to protect the doctor. Even as the big scamsters roamed free, he is given a life sentence after producing Karl Marx's Das Kapital and a letter from a social institute as evidence against him. This is a script Miller would have lapped up. The problem is, it is already being played out in a theatre called Chhattisgarh.