Agencies/New Delhi
Bollywood star Aamir Khan was at the centre of a political row yesterday over comments about intolerance in India he made this week.
Speaking at a journalism awards ceremony on Monday, the Muslim actor said he was alarmed over increasing acts of intolerance in the country, and said that his Hindu wife, filmmaker Kiran Rao, had asked him whether they should move out of India.
His remarks came after several writers, academics, filmmakers and artists protested in recent months over what they called rising intolerance towards dissenting voices and minorities.
“Kiran and I have lived all our lives in India. For the first time, she said, should we move out of India? That’s a disastrous and big statement for Kiran to make to me,” Khan said.
“There is this sense of growing disquiet” in India, Khan added.
“As an individual, as a citizen, certainly I have also been alarmed, I can’t deny it, by a number of incidents,” he said.
The killing of two rationalist writers and the lynching of a man on suspicion that he kept beef in his fridge have been seen - principally by critics of the current government - as evidence of growing intolerance in the country. The cow is regarded as holy by India’s Hindu majority.
The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government, in power since May 2014, reacted strongly to Khan’s remarks, saying there was a conspiracy to tarnish India’s image.
Federal Minister Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi, one of the BJP’s Muslim leaders, told reporters there was no country as tolerant as India. “Mr Khan you will not find a better country than India for Indian Muslims (or) better neighbours than Hindus,” he said.
“Don’t forget, India made you a star,” BJP spokesman Shahnawaz Hussain at a press conference.
Hussain told reporters it was “not all right to malign our Incredible India”, a reference to the campaign slogan used to promote the country of 1.2bn to tourists.
Khan, one of India’s highest-paid actors, featured in a television commercial as part of that campaign.
The row was trending top on Indian Twitter yesterday under the hashtag #aamirkhan, but users were divided over the actor’s comments.
“You publicly spoke your mind and that is courage,” said one, while another accused him of mounting a “publicity stunt” or a “malicious campaign”.
Dozens of activists burned posters featuring Khan in several cities across India, while police protection at his Mumbai home was reportedly upgraded.
The opposition Congress Party hit back at the BJP.
“What Aamir Khan, one of the most respected actors, has said ... is what the whole world is saying,” Congress spokesman Abhishek Singhvi said.
The 50-year-old actor was the latest in a series of high-profile figures from the art world to raise concerns about religious and cultural intolerance under Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Fellow Bollywood star Shahrukh Khan referred recently to “extreme intolerance in India.
Earlier this month nearly 200 figures including author Salman Rushdie signed an open letter urging British Prime Minister David Cameron to raise “the rising climate of fear” in India with Modi during his London visit.
Policemen stand guard outside the home of Aamir Khan in Mumbai yesterday.
