Right-wing Hindu activists on Friday disrupted shooting for Oscar-winner Kathryn Bigelow's movie on the hunt for Osama bin Laden, protesting at the use of Indian locations to portray Pakistan. Members of the hard-line Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) stormed the set in Chandigarh - the northern Indian city famously designed by Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier - where Bigelow's crew had been shooting for four days.
The location was a Chandigarh market, which the production company had transformed with shopboard signs in Urdu, auto rickshaws with Lahore number plates and burqa-clad extras.
"They removed signs that had been put up in Urdu and also pushed and abused the camera crew. They raised slogans against Pakistan and forcibly removed some Pakistani flags," a local police officer told AFP by telephone. "We don't want Pakistani flags on Indian soil and we don't agree that Indian markets should look like Pakistan," said Punjab VHP secretary Ramkrishna Srivastava.