Kangana Ranaut's role in the BJP's battle for Bollywood

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23 highlights

• In a recent promotional event for her film Dhaakad, which was released on 20 May, Ranaut spoke about the ongoing language debate. “No matter how dark the colonial history is, fortunately or unfortunately, English has become that link” of communication, she said. “Should that be the link? If you ask my opinion, I think that national language should be Sanskrit, because Kannada, Tamil, Gujarati, Hindi have all originated from it.” When people of Tamil Nadu and Bengal reject Hindi as the national language, she added, they are “denying Delhi being the centre of the government.”¹

• Ranaut spoke calmly about how Johar had belittled her for most of her career. “If it wasn’t for all the rejections and mocking, I wouldn’t have made it,” she said. She called Johar the “flag-bearer of nepotism” in the film industry and said that if she ever made a biopic, he would be represented as “the movie mafia.” When Johar asked her which of the Khans—Salman, Shahrukh and Aamir, Bollywood’s top three male actors—she would be interested in working with, Ranaut replied, “None.” She said she would not want to work on a film in which she would not have an equal share of screen time.

• It is difficult to say precisely when Ranaut’s transformation into her new avatar as Hindutva queen began, but industry insiders suggested to me that it was soon after an alleged affair with the actor Hrithik Roshan played out in the media, in 2016.

• “The young generation is always complaining, saying there is no infrastructure, there’s no cleanliness. This attitude is not okay.” Her statement mirrored the state of public discourse in the country, where international criticism is discouraged, on the pretext that it is meddling in India’s internal matters, and those raising questions within the country are told to “go to Pakistan.”

• Ranaut was born in Bhambla, in Himachal Pradesh’s Mandi district. The village, also known as Surajpur, is named after her great grandfather Sarju Singh Ranaut, a former Congress legislator. Her grandfather was a bureaucrat. Her father is a businessman, and her mother a schoolteacher. Ranaut has for long asserted her proud Rajput identity—she claimed in an interview that she belongs to a royal lineage—but it became prominently visible when she played the lead in Manikarnika. Her family lives in a sprawling haveli and owns several acres of land. She rarely mentions this wealth and privilege when casting herself as an outsider in Bollywood.

• After these successes, the producer said, Ranaut’s primary concern was why she was “not being accorded the same kind of awe and respect like the other female superstars.” He recalled Ranaut asking, “Why don’t people look at me the way they look at Kareena?” He agreed that the film industry accords higher star value to actors with a lineage. “See, when she talks about nepotism, it is partially true. But this whole country is built on nepotism, anywhere you go.”

• Justin Rao, an entertainment journalist with the Press Trust of India, asked Ranaut why her film had continued to run in Pakistan despite the Pulwama attack, which occurred less than a month after the film’s release. Her defence was that the decision could not be reversed since the film had already been distributed. When Rao pressed further, asking why the film had been screened in the first place, given the prohibitions on cultural exchange with Pakistan following the 2017 Uri attack, Ranaut again blamed the distributors.

• IN MARCH 2016, the actor Hrithik Roshan sent a legal notice to Ranaut for defamation. The two had been co-stars in the films Krrish, Krrish 3 and Kites. At a press conference, two months earlier, Ranaut implied that the two had been in a relationship. When asked whether she had been dropped from a film at Roshan’s behest, Ranaut responded in the affirmative. “I don’t know why exes do silly things to get your attention,” she said. In his legal notice, Roshan demanded a public apology and a statement clarifying that they had never been in a relationship. On Twitter, he went so far as to suggest that he would rather date the pope.

• In April 2017, Roshan’s lawyers filed another police complaint, alleging that Ranaut had sent sexually explicit emails to Roshan. The BJP was in power in Maharashtra at the time. “Ranaut had approached the state government to protect herself from the consequences of the investigations,” her former producer told me.

• ACCORDING TO SEVERAL of her colleagues, Ranaut has become increasingly difficult to work with. “We had to send her every single article that was written about her as early as 7 am each day,” an employee at a company that was handling publicity for Ranaut told me. She added that many colleagues had quit because meeting Ranaut’s demands was too exhausting.

• Despite Ranaut’s statements against religious minorities and her own fraternity, however, most major producers continue to work with her. Her upcoming film Tejas, in which she plays an air force pilot, is being produced by RSVP Movies, a production house owned by Ronnie Screwvala, who is among the biggest producers in the industry. In 2019, RSVP Movies produced Uri: The Surgical Strike, which was widely promoted by BJP leaders.

• Ekta Kapoor, who co-produced Judgementall Hai Kya, has regularly collaborated with Ranaut. She recently produced the reality show Lock Up, with Ranaut as a host. In the show, Ranaut plays a jailer who has imprisoned celebrities such as the wrestler and BJP leader Babita Phogat, the comedian Munawar Faruqui and the entrepreneur Tehseen Poonawalla. When Ranaut was asked about working with Kapoor, who comes from a prominent film family—her father is Jeetendra, a popular 1960s star and her mother, Shobha, is the managing director of Balaji Telefilms—her response was that she was never against nepotism. “I never had a problem with nepotism. I had a problem with ganging up on outsiders because of nepotism. There is a difference.” She added that Kapoor had never been a part of a “bully gang.”

• Two years later, Krish Jagarlamudi was removed as the director of Manikarnika after Ranaut complained about other actors being given more prominent roles and the production resembling “a Bhojpuri film.” Ranaut took over as director, reshooting several portions of the film. Her co-star Sonu Sood soon walked out, alleging that eighty percent of his scenes were deleted.

• In January 2021, Ranaut announced her upcoming film Manikarnika Returns: The Legend of Didda—a biopic of a former Kashmiri ruler. “It is an untold story of a queen of Kashmir who defeated Mahmoud of Ghazni not once, but twice,” she tweeted. Right after the film was announced, Ashish Kaul, a former Zee executive and author of Didda: The Warrior Queen of Kashmir, issued a legal notice to Ranaut, Chandel and the film’s producer Kamal Jain, accusing them of copyright infringement. Two months after the film’s announcement, Kaul alleged that Ranaut’s tweet was directly lifted from the subject line of an email he had sent to her.

• BOLLYWOOD HAS ALWAYS had to negotiate a relationship with ruling parties. Nearly three decades ago, the director Mani Ratnam screened his film Bombay before the Shiv Sena patriarch Bal Thackeray for his approval, so that it could safely be released in the city. The film told the story of a Hindu man and a Muslim woman in the 1992 communal violence in Mumbai and featured a character inspired by Thackeray. The film historian Gautam Chintamani writes that Thackeray was unhappy after watching it and asked Ratnam how he could “falsely ascribe emotions like regret for inciting his followers in a certain direction during the riots when clearly it wasn’t like that.”

• In 1999, when the actor Dilip Kumar was awarded the highest civilian honour in Pakistan, the Nishan-e-Imtiaz, the Kargil war had just broken out, and denouncing Pakistan became the test to prove one’s patriotism. Thackeray asked Kumar to return the award, but Kumar refused. The BJP government in Delhi refrained from making a fuss over the issue. Modi, who was the party’s general secretary at the time, said that returning the award was “best left to the wisdom of Dilip Kumar.”

• The tensions reached a tipping point when Ranaut alleged that, after she provocatively compared Mumbai with Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, the Shiv Sena leader Sanjay Raut had threatened that she should not return to the city. Calling Ranaut a “mental case,” Raut said that “she is spitting in the plate she eats from.”

• On 9 September, a week after her tweets about the police, bulldozers from the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation, which is controlled by the Shiv Sena, demolished portions of her office. In an affidavit, the corporation claimed that the property had several alterations which had not been sanctioned in the building plan.

• That week, she became the first Bollywood actor to be accorded “Y-plus” security by the central government. It was the BJP’s approval of her battle against the Shiv Sena, its friend-turned-foe.

• “Bimal Roy, Mehboob Khan or Raj Kapoor, they were personally secular, they personally believed that they should participate in nation-building.” These politics unravelled, he added, with the liberalisation reforms introduced in 1991, “as a result of which the whole focus became more on market economy. And there was a depoliticisation which began to take place of the younger generation, where they grew up, not with a political ideology but with a consumerist ideology.”

• The screenwriter told me that there is “a very clear diktat” against films that “can challenge the regime in any way.” The only political content that is allowed, she said, “is anything that demonises the Congress.” Screwvala’s RSVP Films has been working on a biopic of the lawyer Ram Jethmalani, significant portions of which dwell on his equation with the former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi. The screenwriter told me that one of the film’s producer summoned the writer working on the screenplay and complained that Gandhi had not been vilified enough, saying, “Yeh lekar jao aur Rajiv Gandhi ko villain banake lao”—Take this away and make Rajiv Gandhi the villain.

• One of the most prominent Muslim icons in Hindi cinema, Khan has refrained from expressing controversial political opinions but has not been as willing as his colleagues to praise the Modi government. When Mamata Banerjee appointed him a brand ambassador of West Bengal, the BJP’s state president, Dilip Ghosh, retorted, “We all know you need a Khan for electoral politics.”

• However, her huge social-media following no longer seems to translate to actual success for her recent films, which have not approached the critical and commercial success of Queen and the Tanu Weds Manu franchise. According to some reports, there were fewer than ten people at some screenings of Dhaakad.

Footnotes

1. Idea for a series titled: Logical Fallacies understood via Kangana Ranaut’s statements ↩