Nepal has banned the Bollywood movie "Chandni Chowk to China" following protests over a scene suggesting the Buddha was born in India, officials said Thursday. Siddartha Gautama, who became the original Buddha around 2,500 years ago, was born in south-west Nepal and is considered a national luminary, appearing on bank notes in the deeply spiritual Himalayan nation.
"We've banned the screening of the movie in theatres across the country considering the growing public protests over the controversial remarks in the film," home ministry spokesman Nabin Ghimire told AFP. The offending section of the movie - a co-production with US studio Warner Brothers about a lowly Indian chef who is mistaken for the reincarnation of a fabled Chinese warrior - was cut at the request of Nepali censors.
But protests continued on Thursday in Kathmandu, where demonstrators burned tyres and shouted slogans. "We deleted the scene after checking the movie from the authorised distributor, but we cannot remove the scene on illegal videos that is smuggled into the country," said Narayan Prasad Regmi, spokesperson at the Ministry of Information and Communications. Regmi said Nepal's foreign ministry had also been asked to take immediate steps to stop the screening of the movie in other countries.
Despite being officially secular under the new Maoist government, Nepal - where around 80 per cent of people are Hindu and 11 per cent are Buddhist - remains a deeply spiritual place. At least four people were killed and dozens injured in protests in Nepal nine years ago triggered by hostile statements attributed to popular Indian actor Hrithik Roshan.