Actor Swara Bhasker is known for speaking her mind. She recently gave her two cents about the ‘Boycott Bollywood’, saying the trend is being promoted to harm the film industry which, she believes, promotes secularism. Speaking in an interview, when asked about the social media trend of ‘Boycott Bollywood’, Bhasker said, “A lot of negative hysteria has been generated around Bollywood and a lot of it is lies. I like to say that the ‘bring down Bollywood’ brigade is actually running a small industry of their own. They are profiting from it. All these Twitter handles. It’s like an industry on its own.”
When asked if this move is political in nature and to bring down the three Khans - Shah Rukh, Salman, and Aamir, she decoded the agenda behind the social media trends. She said, “It is driven by an agenda for sure. The larger part of it has been that in 109 years, Bollywood has been one of the most popular vehicles of Indian secularism. Look at the kind of films we have made, we have always given the message that everyone is equal, and love is greater than the societal divide. Look at the credit at the end of the Bollywood film, every regional and linguistic identity of India is always represented there.”
She added, “It’s an industry which was spearheaded in its early days the Parsi and Muslim communities, It’s an industry which has popularised Urdu poetry and easy to digest Sufi concepts and is very diverse in an organic way. That is a problem for an agenda that wants to push a saffron kind of majoritarian identity in India. So, you have to discredit and delegitimise the most popular vehicle for Indian secularism if you want to discredit Indian secularism. That’s why Bollywood is being targeted.”
