Well...this is just a theory, but I read in the paper the other day that a young college student was arrested for rape after he took a gorl back to his dorm room, tied her up, gagged her, paddled her and had sex with her. He said he was just emulating the male lead of the movie and thought what he was doing was sexy. The girl involved said she was terrified and said he raped her. With all the trouble India has had with rape (and some of those other countries you mentioned also seem to have a pretty high precentage of rape victims, as well), perhaps Indoa is trying to snuff out a precived possible problem before it begins...?
~Beaux
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It's more abuse than actual BDSM (one reason many in the BDSM community loathe it) though the movie filters out the worst of it so that it's a lot less abusive (the book has an actual rape scene, though portrayed in a "sexy" way, but that's one of the things the movie leaves out).
It gets a wide range of ratings. Some countries ban it and even the UK made it so you have to be 17 to see it (IIRC) while France rated it so 12-year-olds can see it (but remember the movie is a lot less intense than the book). I was surprised to find that one African country (which tends to be very fundamentalist whatever their religion) was even promoting the book of all things (I forget the details on that and I'm not sure if they realized what it was about).
I don't know enough about Indian culture to hazard a guess on why it's banned there, though what Beaux says sounds like a reasonable guess.
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