Pahlaj Nihalani — film producer, political loyalist, and the man who turned India's film certification body into a culture-war battlefield — died in Mumbai at the age of 76 after a prolonged illness linked to liver complications. The industry he helped build, and later policed, is mourning with the complicated grief reserved for figures who leave a genuinely mixed record.

Nihalani's career had two distinct lives, and the gap between them says something uncomfortable about how power works in Bollywood. In the 1980s and 1990s he was a producing force behind a string of commercial blockbusters, the kind of high-energy, mass-audience Hindi films that minted new stars. Govinda — one of the defining screen personalities of that era — built a significant portion of his box-office reputation on films Nihalani backed, and paid public tribute after news of the death broke, crediting Nihalani's patronage as foundational to his own success. That chapter of Nihalani's life was uncomplicated in the way commercial success usually is: he found what audiences wanted, he delivered it, and the money followed.

The second chapter was something else entirely. In 2015, the newly elected BJP government under Prime Minister Narendra Modi appointed Nihalani chairman of the Central Board of Film Certification — the body Bollywood shorthand calls the Censor Board, though its legal mandate is certification, not censorship in the constitutional sense. The distinction matters, and under Nihalani it was routinely blurred. His two-year tenure, which ended in 2017, produced a relentless stream of controversies that forced a genuine national conversation about who gets to decide what a democracy's citizens can watch.

The cuts and conditions Nihalani's CBFC imposed during his tenure ranged from the defensible to the frankly absurd. The board demanded deletions of scenes involving kissing and profanity in mainstream feature films, flagged the word "intercourse" in a public-health documentary, and at one point required a filmmaker to add a smoking disclaimer to a scene depicting a character merely holding an unlit cigarette. Critics — including prominent filmmakers, civil liberties advocates, and members of the CBFC's own examining committees — argued that Nihalani was not applying the board's statutory certification guidelines so much as enforcing a personal and politically convenient moral vision. Nihalani pushed back publicly and often, insisting he was protecting Indian cultural values and following the law. He described himself as a guardian, not a gatekeeper.

What made his position genuinely incoherent, and what his critics never let him forget, was the catalog of his own productions. Several films Nihalani had produced in his commercial heyday featured the exact kind of suggestive content, double-entendre song sequences, and item numbers that he later subjected to certification scrutiny. The contradiction was not lost on the filmmaking community, and it was raised loudly in print, in panel discussions, and directly to his face. Nihalani's standard response was that he had matured in his values. His critics' standard response was that he had acquired power.

The harassment allegations that surfaced during and after his tenure added a darker dimension still. Actress Niki Aneja Walia gave a detailed on-record account of an encounter with Nihalani early in her career, alleging that he had made objectifying remarks and implicit pressure toward a compromise when she was nineteen years old. The allegation was never tested in any formal legal proceeding, and Nihalani denied wrongdoing. But the account landed in the context of a broader industry reckoning with the structural vulnerabilities facing young women in commercial Hindi film — and it complicated the tributes that poured in from male contemporaries who had benefited from his patronage.

Nihalani was removed from the CBFC chairmanship in August 2017, replaced by lyricist and filmmaker Prasoon Joshi. The government offered no detailed public explanation for the change, but the political optics of a censor chief who had become more controversy than asset were not difficult to read. After leaving the post he returned to production, announcing several projects, though none recaptured the commercial momentum of his earlier career.

The Indian Motion Picture Producers' Association issued a formal condolence statement, with IMPPA president Abhay Sinha describing Nihalani as a veteran of the industry whose contributions to Hindi cinema spanned decades. Actor Anupam Kher, a longtime acquaintance, spoke publicly about a recent telephone conversation with Nihalani in which he described his old friend as sounding weak and sad — and expressed regret that he had not managed to visit him in hospital before the end.

What Nihalani leaves behind is less a legacy than a case study. He was a man who understood popular cinema deeply enough to produce it successfully for twenty years, then used a government appointment to restrict it — and in doing so revealed exactly how much of India's cultural gatekeeping rests not on statute or principle but on whoever currently holds the chair. The films he made will outlast the cuts he demanded. That, for what it is worth, is probably the right outcome.