What put the John Abraham-Sharvari starrer Vedaa on headlines, was its makers’ announcement two weeks ago that they are still to get a censor certificate even after having submitted their film well in advance to the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC). The CBFC Examining Committee (EC) viewed the film at the end of June for it to be sent to the Revising Committee (RC). After this, RC watched the movie on 29th July and gave it a green light. There were allegations that no single cut was made on the film. But what Bollywood Hungama has now learned is that Vedaa had minor deletions and modifications by CBFC’s RC.
Firstly, there should be a modified disclaimer and voiceover lasting one minute sixteen seconds. A dialogue with derogatory references towards women and social identity should be edited. In addition, there was also another scene where someone would have hung from a tree for 2 minutes 16 seconds but it was totally removed. Jodhpur word when referring to Jodhpur High Court was muted and visuals showing violence within court grounds were asked to reduce by 30%. As such, makers had to cut off 6 minutes 15 seconds of their film.
Additionally, during one sequence in Vedaa, one character listens to an audio track on his mobile phone with Sanskrit shlokas. This song was deleted by CBFC. While ‘behenkhor’ has been replaced with ‘bana’. And finally the tearing of currency notes and pieces of currency notes had blurred edited but not removed completely by request from CBFC as well as text information “Brahmin son…Shudra’s son” which finally had to be taken out.
Finally, they attested based on an authentic reference like newspaper articles; court decisions; religious scriptures etc., showing that this is a true story.
In all, there were 9 minutes and 14 seconds that CBFC deleted from the film. Vedaa had a U/A certificate issued after these changes on August 6. The duration of the film as mentioned in the certificate is 150 minutes. Basically, we have Vedaa that goes for two hours thirty minutes.Directed by Nikkhil Advani, it releases in cinemas on August 15.
Bollywood Hungama was informed by a source that “The Presiding Officer of the RC was Padma Shri Ramesh Patange. He used to clear movies when EC hesitated about them”. Lately he also cleared up Hamari Baraah which was very controversial and therefore it’s not surprising that he passed Vedaa with certain modifications on it.”
