CBFC kept Nitin Kumar Gupta’s Galwan film on hold for 3 years, now released on YouTube
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Same story, two films, different fates
While Salman Khan’s “Battle of Galwan” is making headlines with its first look, another filmmaker’s struggle to tell the same story has gone almost unnoticed.
Director Nitin Kumar Gupta recently revealed that his film “LAC: Battle of Galwan” was stuck in censorship for three years before he finally had to release it on YouTube.
The journey from theatres to YouTube
“I wanted the families of the soldiers to watch the film in theatres,” Gupta told Mid-Day, expressing disappointment over his film’s quiet release on YouTube on July 5, 2025.
The Rahul Roy-starrer was originally scheduled to release in theatres on June 15, 2023.
Bureaucratic nightmare
Shot in November 2020, the film was submitted to the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) in June 2022.
Despite screenings for the Ministry of Defence and armed forces personnel, a series of demanding changes followed.
Censorship demands
“They asked me to remove LAC from the title, erase references to the actual location and reduce the violence by 33 per cent,” Gupta said.
“Basically, they were asking us to dilute the reality of the melee that our soldiers faced.”
Most painful for the filmmaker was the request to remove photos of 20 real soldiers from the end credits, which were already in the public domain and whose names had been released by the government.
Compliance efforts
Gupta made significant efforts to address potential concerns even before censorship:
- Changed the names of the soldiers to protect the privacy of the families
- Did not directly mention China to avoid diplomatic issues
- Based the story on verified sources
Despite resubmitting a revised version in September 2022, the director has not received a response from the CBFC since then.
Salman’s star power is pushing the competing project
Meanwhile, Salman Khan’s version of the Galwan story is moving ahead with significant publicity.
Directed by Apoorva Lakhia, the film stars Khan as Colonel B Santosh Babu, who was leading the 16 Bihar Regiment during the 2020 clash with Chinese troops.
The recently released motion poster shows Khan with blood stains and a moustache, depicting “one of India’s most brutal wars” in which “not a single bullet was fired”.
A tale of two perspectives
The contrasting journeys of these two films telling the same story raise questions about how star power and institutional support determine which versions of history reach mainstream audiences.
“For three years, I knocked on every door,” Gupta concludes.
The film’s digital rights holder, US citizen Vikram Jadhav, eventually decided to release it on YouTube.
