TIGHTROPE ACT

Shah Rukh Khan's silent rebellion

- ERAM AGHA

A GROUP OF AROUND TEN PEOPLE arrived outside the Hyatt Regency in Ahmedabad early in the morning of 14 February 2016. Chanting "Jai Shri Ram" and "Shah Rukh Khan hai hai," they threw stones into the hotel's parking lot, shattering the windshield of a car that the actor had been using. They soon fled the scene but, after the hotel's security officer filed a complaint, the police arrested seven activists of the Vishva Hindu Parishad on charges of rioting and property damage. Later that day, upon hearing that members of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party's youth wing were planning to burn an effigy of Khan outside the hotel, the police cordoned off the area and detained 17 protesters.

Three months earlier, at a Twitter Townhall telecast on the news channel India Today on Khan's fiftieth birthday, the journalist Rajdeep Sardesai had asked him whether there was growing intolerance in the country. "There is extreme intolerance," he replied. "People put words in the air even before thinking. And here is a secular country. Here is a country, perhaps for the last ten years, on the cusp of going beyond what we think. We keep talking about modern India, we keep talking about progressing, we keep talking about new India and we just keep talking." The youth, he said, would not stand for such intolerance. "Not being secular is the worst kind of crime you can do as a patriot."