Dear Farhan Akhtar,

I saw your moving post on Facebook, expressing outrage on the recent killing at Dadri. I wanted to share two divergent American struggles with gun control laws and gay rights and how India can learn from it to bring change.

Bernie Sanders is a Senator from Vermont who is ultra-liberal and a self-described socialist. In terms of progressive views, he is to the left of Hillary Clinton and rapidly catching up with her in the nomination for the Democratic candidate for the US presidential elections. After the recent horrible shooting in Oregon, any person would have expected an ultra-liberal to support stronger gun laws? Guess what? He gave a measured non-response and hedged against gun control. Why is that? Because the state he represents, Vermont, has a big population of voters who love hunting and value their gun ownership. Even though public demand for gun control increases after a shooting, it dips after sometime. The chart below on gun control and public opinion shows how it waxes and wanes and explains why gun control laws are stuck.

Barack Obama ran on a campaign of hope and change. Some have argued he is one of the most progressive Presidents America has seen in the past 30 years. If I had to ask you if Barack Obama supported gay marriage, what would your answer be? The real answer is complicated. Barack Obama was against gay marriage will 2012 and then suddenly switched to supporting gay marriages. See the chart below on changing public opinion on gay marriages and see the year it crosses over? It’s around 2011 and 2012, the same period Barack Obama shifted to supporting gay marriage.

Even the US justice system – which is supposed to represent the will of the minority – supported same-sex marriage only this year, using arguments and logic that could have been made 30 years ago. Both Barack Obama and the US Supreme Court changed their mind only after public opinions shifted decisively in favor of gay rights. Here is a piece from the Atlantic on how the Supreme Court had no choice but to accede to gay rights because of public opinion:

The fight for gay marriage was, above all, a political campaign—a decades-long effort to win over the American public and, in turn, the court. It was a campaign with no fixed election day, focused on an electorate of nine people. But what it achieved was remarkable: not just a Supreme Court decision but a revolution in the way America sees its gay citizens. “It’s a virtuous cycle,” Andrew Sullivan, the author and blogger whose 1989 essay on gay marriage for The New Republic gave the idea political currency, told me. “The more we get married, the more normal we seem. And the more normal we seem, the more human we seem, the more our equality seems obviously important.”

Politicians and justice system are sheep. Even in America, the bastion of progressive values, they don’t go too far out from public opinion. After all they are supposed to represent public opinion – that’s how they win elections. There are rare exceptions like Lincoln or Gandhi, who managed to stay ahead of public opinion and drag the public to the future by sheer force and cunningness. But most politicians are like momentum investors, they see a trend or opinion and try to get ahead of.

We have seen how supposedly liberal politicians in the US shy away from making tough but the right choices. Now, what hope do we have of politicians in Uttar Pradesh of coming out and taking positions that are right but against the self-interest, i.e. public opinion of their constituents. By the way, it is the same public opinion and animal spirit that led to the lynching in Dadri, T.J. Joseph’s hands being cut off in Kerala and Sanal Edamaruku being chased away to Finland.

So, if we want change, we need to change public opinion on intolerance.

That is why I am writing to you as a movie man. You would have seen the eight-time Oscar nominated movie Milk, where the gay rights activist Harvey Milk says that to win gay rights in America you need to change people’s opinions (where they ultimately succeeded). I also urge you to watch the Chilean movie called No, about how an ad campaign stopped the dictatorship of Pinochet.

You are one of the most creative film forces in India today. You need to use your creativity in mass communication to change public opinion. Here is a really amateur idea to get your creative juices going: A series of short films or ads on how do riots start, to give an example. How did a squabble in Muzaffarnagar lead to large scale riots? How does it get inflamed? Who benefits from intolerance? How do riots and intolerance impact economic development? How does negative development impact jobs? And so on? What fundamental change do voters need to see in themselves to vote for the long term self-interest?

Here is hoping you can change public opinion so that politicians and the justice system can follow it.