'This is the end' says Anurag Kashyap after getting a complaint against his Shortfilm in Netflix's Ghost Stories

Netflix India got a complaint against Anurag Kashyap's Shortfilm in the 2020 anthology, Ghost Stories, one of the first examples lf grievances to be registered after the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting formulated the Information Technology Rules 2021 earlier this year.

The complainant, has raised objection to a scene in the shortfilm, in which Sobhita Dhulipala's character eats her own foetus after suffering a miscarriage. The complaint notes, "The scene is not required for the story, and if the creators wished to add such a scene, there should have been a trigger warning for women who have gone through the trauma of miscarriages.”

According to the report, complaints must be registered within 24 hours and addressed at the earliest. The report quoted Netflix India spokesperson as saying, "As this was a partner-managed production , we reached out to the production company to share the complaint.”

Before the rules were notified, digital news media was very unregulated. The introduction of the news is seen by many as an effort to impose restrictions to digital creators. "So it has started… A complaint came to Netflix on Ghost Stories. This is the end," Anurag wrote in an Instagram Story that is no longer visible on his profile but was viewed by MediaNama.

Ghost Stories, an anthology film which also featured short stories from directors Zoya Akhtar, Dibakar Banerjee and Karan Johar, and was released on New Years in 2020. It was a follow up to the 2018 anthology Lust Stories.

Netflix India has also experienced backlash previously around titles such as Sacred Games and A Suitable Boy, while Amazon Prime Video has witnessed almost similar problems with titles such as Family Man and Tandav.