Choreographer cum film director Farah Khan is once again in the news, but this time it’s not the announcement of a new film. In a podcast published on the audio portal ‘Audible Suno’, sponsored by Amazon, Farah Khan revealed that she deliberately did not choose a Muslim villain in ‘Main Hoon Na’. Also, According to a newspaper clipping that featured in the film, while she deliberately chose not to have the identity of ‘Muslim terrorist,’ she most definitely chose the identity of ‘Hindu fanatic’ for the villain.
In the audio podcast ‘Picture ke Peeche’, Farah Khan mentioned, “I did not want the villain of my film to be a Muslim. I also chose Khan as the name of the antagonist’s right-hand man, who realises he was being misled all along and ends up choosing his country over terrorism.”
Farah Khan intentionally didn't give the Terr0rist in 'Mai Hu Na' a Muslim name as it could have damaged image of her community.
And here we have Hindu Liberals who want people to convert to lsIam to oppose CAA. Secularism lol. pic.twitter.com/7UrSe5LnBv
— Amit Kumar ( Modi Ka Parivar ) (@AMIT_GUJJU) February 19, 2020
I don't know why people are realising this so late. My dad(RSS bkgd) explained it to me in the year of release of the movie. Here is the attached newspaper clipping used in the movie.
Raghavan is a well known….. Go ahead read it, it will definitely make your blood boil. pic.twitter.com/Yfx7osoFDw— RADHE SHYAM TIWARI (@RadheShyTiwari) February 20, 2020
The clipping can be seen in this music video towards the end of the film.
For those unaware, ‘Main Hoon Na’ was the debut of Farah Khan as a film director in 2004. The movie starred Shahrukh Khan as the main protagonist and Suniel Shetty as the lead antagonist. In the film, Shahrukh Khan played the role of army officer Major Ram Prasad Sharma, who sets out to foil the plans of ex-Army officer Raghavan Dutta, who is out to destroy the peace talks between India and Pakistan.
With this revelation, Farah has once again thrown light on the dark side of Bollywood, where many creators feel free to deliberately insult Sanatan Dharma and its followers in order to appease a few sections of the society. However, this is not the first such occasion, when Bollywood has been blatantly Hinduphobic in order to maintain their ideals of pseudo-secularism. Initially portrayed in a subtle way, the Hinduphobia soon turned in your face with ‘Zakhm’. Directed by Mahesh Bhatt, the 1998 movie had a weird plot, wherein a Muslim woman is burnt alive by Islamic radicals during communal riots, and yet the Hindus should feel guilty for the same.
Likewise, in 2000, Kamal Haasan came out with ‘Hey Ram’. While the movie was one of the very few [and still continues to be so] films to portray the reality of the barbarians who massacred innocent Hindus and Sikhs during the Direct Action Day riots of 1946, Kamal somehow made the Hindus as the actual villains, through the character of Shriram Abhyankar.
This is not all. In 2008, ‘Shaurya’, the unofficial remake of the Hollywood classic ‘A Few Good Man’, also exhibited extreme Hinduphobia as they showed Brigadier Rudra Pratap Singh’s character in an extremely negative light, as an officer who completely disregarded democracy and secularism, while his subordinate, Captain Javed Khan, is shown as an officer who kept humanity above everything else.
However, the audience is now slowly, but steadily growing awareness of the propaganda. While the change is not extremely prominent, films or projects that are blatantly Hinduphobic are rejected by the audience. While films like ‘Kalank’, ‘Why Cheat India’ tanked at the box office, web series like ‘Sacred Games 2’ got a tepid response from the audiences.
Likewise, one of the reasons behind ‘Chhapaak’ flopping at the box office was that the movie tended to deviate from the main issue and focus on nonsense, such as upper-caste dominance etc. ‘Shikara’, which mocked the genocide of Kashmiri Pandits with a ludicrous plot failed to even earn 10 crores despite being made on a shoestring budget of 12 crore rupees. Farah’s revelation only goes on to prove, that even today, for a section of Bollywood, merit, artistic capabilities come second in the pursuit of peddling their lowly agenda.
