#DNAReaderEdit: Of blood diamonds, filmwallahs and political gains

In July 2000, the World Diamond Congress adopted a resolution, known as the Kimberly Process Certification Scheme that increased the diamond industry's ability to block the sale of conflicted (blood) diamond (a diamond mined in a war zone and sold to finance an insurgency).

Now, imagine if Waris Ahluwalia, the New York City-based jewellery designer, had stood up and told the World Diamond Congress to leave his art of designing jewellery out of the politics of blood diamonds. Would we have overlooked the brutality and bloodshed involved in the procurement of diamonds to focus on the beauty of Mr Ahluwalia's creation? If art is one part of the argument, politics is another. It is interesting to see a highly politicised film industry demanding that they be kept away from politics. After all, nobody will deny the politics within the film industry.

The concentrated attack on filmmaker Vivek Agnihotri earlier this year, when his Naxal insurgency drama ‘Buddha in a Traffic Jam' was released, comes to mind. In 2014, sixty film personalities wrote an open letter asking people not to vote for Mr Narendra Modi. Last year, some film personalities signed a petition asking President Pranab Mukherjee to pardon Yakub Memon, an accused in the 1993 Mumbai blasts case.

For an industry that so desperately wishes to stay out of politics, these guys seem to go fishing for political gains an awful lot.