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.”
In a separate interview with NDTV’s Barkha Dutt, Khan called it “banal and silly” to reduce one’s religion to one’s dietary habits and argued that, if “we keep on talking about our religion, we’re going to go back to the dark ages.” Intolerance did not define India, he said, “but, if we don’t change it for ourselves, it is dangerous for all of us.” When Dutt asked him to elaborate on his statement that not being secular is a crime for patriots, he replied that being a true patriot meant loving one’s country as a whole. “Either you love your country, or you love your country in parts.” He added that those in the film industry returning their national awards in protest were “brave” and that their actions should spark a debate about creative freedom. He also expressed support for the students of the Film and Television Institute of India, who were protesting against the appointment of a BJP supporter as its chairperson, and called for the dispute to be settled through dialogue.
Khan’s comments were fairly anodyne and merely reflected the ideals enshrined in the Constitution, but, coming as they did amid a raging national debate on intolerance in the early years of the Narendra Modi government, they created a major controversy. The BJP leader Kailash Vijayvargiya tweeted that Khan “lives in India, but his heart is in Pakistan.” The VHP ideologue Prachi called him a “Pakistani agent.” Adityanath, the BJP MP from Gorakhpur and a future chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, said that Khan “should remember that if a huge mass in society boycotts his films, he would have to wander the streets like a normal Muslim.” He accused Khan of speaking the language of terrorists. “I think there is no difference between the language of Shah Rukh Khan and Hafiz Saeed,” he said, referring to the founder of the Lashkar-e-Taiba.
“With great power comes great vulnerabilities,” Khan had said when Sardesai asked him why actors did not take a stand on the prominent issues of the day. “If I take a stand on an X thing or a Y thing, people will come out and throw stones at my house, but if I do take a stand, I’ll stand by it.” In December 2015, after his film Dilwale underperformed at the box office, he told the media that, while he did not believe he had “said anything that I should apologise for,” he regretted that people had misconstrued his remarks. “I apologise if somebody got disturbed,” he said, asking audiences to “please go out and enjoy the film because it’s not me, there are thousands who have made it with a lot of love.”
As extreme intolerance has continued to grow unabated, Khan has been refraining from making public criticisms of the erosion of Indian secularism, even in the broad terms he used in 2015.
The backlash continued as he went to Gujarat to shoot his next film, Raees. The stone-pelting at the Hyatt Regency was the culmination of two weeks of disruptions by Hindutva outfits. “We are protesting against Shahrukh Khan as he is indulging in making statements on issues like intolerance,” Raghuvirsinh Jadeja, a VHP leader, told the Indian Express. “He should refrain from making such baseless statements as he has crores of followers and such statements give bad name to the country. By our protests, we are teaching him what is intolerance.” Thanks to increased police protection, the crew was able to complete filming, but the controversies did not abate.
On 18 September that year, four militants, allegedly affiliated to the Pakistan-based outfit Jaish-e-Mohammed, attacked an army base near the town of Uri, in the erstwhile state of Jammu and Kashmir, killing 19 soldiers. Soon after the attack, the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena, a political party founded on the twin planks of Hindutva and Marathi chauvinism, threatened to halt the release of Raees because it featured the Pakistani actor Mahira Khan. It issued a 48-hour ultimatum to all Pakistani artists working in Bollywood to leave the country, and the Indian Motion Pictures Producers’ Association passed a resolution blacklisting Pakistanis from the industry.
Since they had almost finished filming, the producers of argued that it was too expensive to find a replacement for Mahira Khan. They decided to shoot the remaining scenes in Abu Dhabi. On 23 October, after a meeting between the MNS chairperson, Raj Thackeray, and the chief minister of Maharashtra, the BJP’s Devendra Fadnavis, the MNS announced that it would not oppose the release of , since it had been shot before the Uri attack. Nevertheless, in December, shortly before he left for Dubai and Morocco to film two songs for the film, Shah Rukh visited Thackeray at his residence and promised him that Mahira Khan would not be involved in promoting the film.
