Inside India’s District 9

When a spaceship gets stranded over Johannesburg, the district administration decides to rescue the aliens and house them in a government camp in a far corner of the city

Inside India's District 9

When a spaceship gets stranded over Johannesburg, the district administration decides to rescue the aliens and house them in a government camp in a far corner of the city. Over time, the camp turns into a slum and comes to be known as district 9.

After 20 years or so, the aliens, now referred to derogatorily as prawns by the locals, have failed to integrate with the mainstream. The authorities decide to forcibly close down District 9 and move the alien community to another location, miles away from the local population.

While conducting the eviction drive, Wikus, a government official, meets with a freak accident in District 9 and starts mutating into an alien. The authorities lock him up to vivisect his alien limb so that they can replicate his ability to use alien weapons, which are only operable by aliens.

The Kafka-esque storyline then turns into a cat-and-mouse game with Wikus trying to escape the authorities who want to hunt him down for a biological experiment even as he struggles to retain his humanness.

Inspired by events that took place in South Africa during the apartheid in a residential area of Cape Town named District 6, the film is a brilliant satire on the oppressive role of the state and the plight of the Other.

Watching Wikus being hunted by the state for its narrow ends, I thought of Ishrat Jahan. If the administration wanted Wikus to used as a biological experiment in the film, Jahan fell victim to Modi's Hindutva experiment in real life. Like so many others before her. All innocents, who became as Harsh Mander says, children of a lesser God in Gujarat. Humiliated, harassed, hunted. It served Modi well. He went from strength to strength riding on the hard Hindutva plank even as Muslims in Gujarat lost their voice. And hope too.

In District 9, the aliens have one window of hope. That in their new habitat they will find peace. In Gujarat, that's expecting too much.

Daipayan Halder is City Editor, MiD DAY, New Delhi

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