She may be the shortest-lived Padmashri in the history of the Padma awards.It looks like Padmashri Kangana Ranaut may have to return her Padmashri just days after she made her damning declaration on India having got her freedom in 2014 rather than 1947.
The clamour for redressal is growing almost by the hour.
One now hears of the Hindi film fraternity coming together to send a letter of protest to the Prime Minister Narendra Modi against Kangana’s latest crimebomb.
When I contacted Taapsee Pannu she said, “She is too irrelevant for me to comment on.”
But Ms Ranaut’s other bete noire Swara Bhaskar minced no words when she said to me, “What Kangana said equating our independence to ‘bheekh’ was uninformed, illiterate and disrespectful. It was a toxic and poisonous statement rightly condemned by any rational sane minded patriotic Indian.”
In a tweet on Friday Mahatma Gandhi’s nephew the eminent scholar Tushar Gandhi wrote, “Padmashri Kangana Ranaut is a agent of hate, intolerance and rabidity. It is not surprising that she feels that India got its freedom in 2014. Hate, Intolerance, Sham Patriotism, intolerance and oppression were liberated in India in 2014.”