Ma’am,
We have seen you plenty of times around the world promoting your movies as well as your Indian heritage. Whether it was draping a sari on Oprah Winfrey or taking a jibe at David Letterman on the close knit family structure of an Indian household. Something that opened new windows for the world into the diversity of Indian culture. Something that would and should make your fellow citizens proud. Your statements on the Mumbai attacks were loud and clear and something that the media kept reiterating. Yet when it comes to the scars that have disfigured and maimed your national identity for decades, your not only not found issuing condemnations but in essence support it through not just your silence but by greeting those responsible for the ugliness that permeates your society.
Film stars have to bear the added baggage of political correctness and that’s a sentiment many find common in Bollywood yet when artists like you and many others consistently claim to be normal people and continue to protect corporate elitist and governmental interests in contrast to showing solidarity to the suffering of ordinary people then you would agree many would find it hard to see anything normal about celebrities.
Artists should be not be functioning in the realm of governmental expediency and state propaganda. They don’t exist to negate the conception and existence or resistance of other people. They are people who should be above national identities not just in terms of working across borders but to relate to the sentiments of people not to those of political and military establishments. They shouldn’t be among the loudest who happen to be beating the war drums and sensationalizing jingoistic tendencies in fact, they should be staunchly opposing it. Why are we saying that?
It’s simple. A country becomes great when its citizens have a strong sense of justice and tolerance above else. When its leading academics and intellectuals and celebrities are the harshest critics of their own state and do not succumb to pressures of stifling political correctness to not speak out against blatant criminality of their state. When conscientious dissenters object to state brutality and do not intertwine servicing the government machinery as nationalistic therefore speaking out against it as treasonous.
We know you have an incredibly busy life juggling your family life and work but I believe even then you must have witnessed the bloodbath that has and is still taking place in Kashmir. Why is it that you didn’t once issue even a statement to support those victims of your state brutality? Why is it that your father in law who happens to be a highly respected actor and has played characters in more than two dozen movies in which he is speaking out against victims of state’s crackdown on civilians yet he is unable to utter a word in solidarity with the innocent children that have been shot at by the Indian Army? You happen to be a mother yourself and if I am not mistaken you once mentioned how you prefer to protect your daughter from the incessantly prying lens of the cameras so at least you must understand as to how a mother feels when her son or daughter gets shot at multiple times in front of her eyes and she knows she can’t demand justice or protect her family against this perpetual slaughter. I totally see your point that young children should be protected from the glaring eyes of the media and paparazzi but I hope you would agree that its much more urgent for mothers and fathers to want to protect their children from getting killed in broad day light when their murderers are exempted from facing the music based on piles of reports of evidence issued by leading and respected International human rights organizations.
I believe you must not be aware of the number of people that have lost their eyes thanks to the pellet guns of the Indian Army or the bodies that have been riddled with bullets for simply exercising their basic human right to protest for their freedoms. You might not have read hefty human rights reports of how many innocent girls have been raped in Kashmir by men in uniform in the past six decades with no justice in sight. I can understand its not easy to focus on the lives of ordinary Kashmiris when your life is so hectic but their lives aren’t just a number that gets referred to in a news bulletin and forgotten without given a second thought. Their freedoms shouldn’t be curtailed for the political expediency of a political elite neither for half baked notions of patriotism.
Your proud of living in a democracy and its indeed something to be proud of but you visit the US, Britain, France and many European countries frequently for projects and events so you can inform us better that is there a single democratic country in the world that allows democratic freedoms for a certain section of her people and denies it for others? Didn’t Britain allow the Scots the right to chalk their course for themselves? It’s indeed blatantly obvious when we look at other instances of democracies on how undemocratic the third world happens to be despite contrary claims. Shouldn’t there be a few voices from your own community to condemn the massacre occurring in Kashmir? Why is it that artists of all people let their establishments decide for them regarding who the victims and the perpetrators happen to be? If people can watch your movies around the world in different languages why is it that people like you who happen to have an audience never sympathize with the cries of those Godforsaken people of Kashmir? Why can’t you decode their cries? Why is it that Indian citizens don’t protest en mass in support of these victims is it because they see their icons silently paying homage to the perpetrators somehow considering it a bizarre act of patriotism? Why is it that artists from your community can see terrorists in just about any and everyone and love to jump the sensational bandwagon of ultra jingoistic tendencies yet keep mum in the face of a state actively committing a bloodbath against innocent civilians. You might not like or agree with those people and their political inclinations but I believe your mature enough to recognize that justice isn’t and shouldn’t be reserved for like-minded individuals in the absence of all disagreements.
Why are the identities of ordinary Kashmiris reduced to a term terrorist? Is it a tool for governments to maneuver so that they can bask in the hysteria and paranoia that surrounds the issue of terrorism and use the term broadly for any and everyone that dares to rise to protect his or her basic human rights? Why otherwise, would we see the label being thrown at any legitimate dissenter of a state that stands in the way of corporate and political conglomerates with some degree of effectiveness? We all can have varied opinions and that’s encouraged among citizens of democratic states but silence in the face of repeated massacres is simply to side with the devil no matter what anybody’s political beliefs might be. That’s simply inhuman and people who are either fans of yours or have watched a film you starred in, deserve that people they see enacting and appreciating characters that oppose and fight against such criminality should not just do so on screen but should have the moral clarity and conscience to stand up in support of real victims of Kashmir whose only crime, if we’re being honest, has been to demand their basic democratic rights. Something with which our very open minded iconic figures in Bollywood can’t seem to come to terms with.
The Political Crescendo of dissent 