A crime of absolutely abhorrent magnitude has been committed, but let us not run after the criminal to punish him. Before 10 February 2025, this argument was mostly heard in the consciously silent corridors of India’s High and Supreme Courts. Additionally, these people used to pen forgiveness letters for terrorists, and in the newspapers, they used to appear as columns and opinions. On 10 February 2025, Ranveer Allahbadia ’s sickening video gained traction on social media handles. Virtually everyone, whether they belong to the left, right, centre, far-left, or far-right of the spectrum, agrees that the man has crossed almost all limits of morality. It has been years since both sides agreed on a point, although I doubt whether he would get the same bashing from the left if he was not being perceived as a pro-PM Modi podcaster.
Ranveer Allahbadia’s social media team likely did not foresee the trouble, and damage control was needed. Since culpability was established, only apology and forgiveness were the way to go, and so Ranveer Allahbadia uploaded a 52-second video accepting his fault and stating that it was a “lapse in judgement.”
Ranveer Allahbadia also said that “family is the last thing he would disrespect.” So, basically, Ranveer is saying that what he said about family on the show was not disrespect. Or is this the way big influencers across the world choose to respect family? On the Comedy Circus show, Archana Puran Singh had once said that “making fun of someone or something is a form of tribute.”
Probably Ranveer Allahbadia’s inspiration comes from Archana’s assertion.
It is as if people were just waiting for his apology to dilute the issue. Suddenly a barrage of tweets appeared asking people to let the issue go. Infamous journalist Rajdeep Sardesai tried to divert the issue by criticising the politics of the day and asked people to speak on hate crime and not this.
In indirect reference to countering communal politics from Hindus, Sardesai hinted at the normalisation of violence against a particular community. From his past, we can clearly state that he was talking about Muslims.
This is the art his opposition needs to learn from Sardesai. He is clearly saying that what he said was inappropriate, but this is not a hate crime. Firstly, hate crime is a very diluted concept lost in definitional ambiguity – which is why Sardesai-type people seek refuge in it.
Secondly, why is offending the moral fabric of society not a part of hate crime? The context in which Ranveer spoke is something upon which every healthy, functioning family in India is built. That is one of the basic pillars of private life. We call it intimate because it is strictly personal, and pure privacy is a universal norm.
Evading this privacy, even in talks, deserves not just criticism but at least an apology as loud and as long as the show was aired. Just uploading it on Twitter and deliberately not doing so on Instagram – where most of the dank memes are found – speaks volumes about Ranveer’s intent.
Then Kushal Mehra also jumped in but with different problems than Rajdeep’s. His issue with people criticising and wanting to push Ranveer Allahbadia is that Indians are not caring enough about Air Quality Index, low growth rates, and poor roads.
But why can’t the two incidents be seen in isolation? Why does Kushal think that Indians can’t focus on both and seek the correct course of action when each problem knocks on the door at a different time frame? We do have mechanisms to nab culprits for both pollution and insensitive remarks. How on earth does it make sense to not punish one misdemeanour simply because there are other fault lines too? Frankly, it belies common sense.
Akhilesh Sharma, executive editor and anchor at NDTV, also speaks in the same vein. Sharma acknowledges that Ranveer Allahbadia made a vulgar, absurd, and low-life joke, but he still seems unable to get his head around the fact that it is discussed on prime time.
There are thousands of such tweets which do not absolve Allahabadia of his crime but do not want him to face any consequences other than public outrage.
That is a really bad way to go. Ranveer Allahbadia is the influencer who grew up in an era where celebrities were constantly seen saying, “any attention is good attention.” The word “good” here has very bad repercussions on Indian society and is also a bad-faith argument.
With India’s population, celebrities and companies treat it as a tool of influencer marketing to make as much money as they can. No matter how that attention comes, the only thing which matters for people like Allahabadia and Samay Raina is that it is making money.
This is blatant abuse of India’s social fabric, which is built on respect for elders. These so-called elites treat this moral system as a virtual border which, if broken, only gets more people to watch the content and hence more advertisers’ money flows into the influencer-ad revenue pipeline.
This is the same reason why racism against Indians is skyrocketing on social media platforms. These foreigners know that India is not as bad as they show, but since Indians would comment, retweet, reshare, and quote-tweet their outrageous filthy lies against India, they revel in that. At the end of the month, a payment has to arrive anyway, so why not through defaming India? These desi influencers also do the same.
In the process, these people forget that the privilege they have received has been extremely hard-fought. People have gone to war for generations to make speech a sacrosanct principle. Only a few generations back, physical aggression had more market value than soft skills which deploy speech as a tool.
The rise of the service sector as a better service provider has been possible only because written and spoken words have greater moral virtue than hands providing manual labour good enough to be deployed in the manufacturing industry.
Even today, the backward countries like our neighbour Pakistan focus more on distributing money to musclemen rather than to an educated individual. Those places in which words lose their intrinsic, authentic value decline in a generation or two. We have West Bengal as a classic example, where the sickle replaced the pen in common men’s hands (not the elites’) and the state is now nowhere on the developed state map.
In the USA, a political ideology tried to manoeuvre around words and changed definitions and language. Within a decade, people decimated it, and power lies in the hands of the opposition. That is how important words are.
For those who are taking it lightly, is it possible that they replace their travelling songs with the sentences spoken on the India Got Latent show? Similarly, they would not want a goalkeeper to be called a midfielder because words do not matter that much – it is only the game that matters.
The fact of the matter is that words drive societies. Words can be and have been used to present genocidal tyrants as heroes. Words can be used to change a criminal dacoit into a saint. Such is the power of words.
Then it is also relevant who is speaking those words. What Raina’s show speakers make jokes about is something practised daily by uneducated individuals. Do these free speech advocates know why we don’t take them seriously?
Because they earn 500–1000 per day, and our children do not take them as idols. That is not the case with Allahabadia and co., for sure. We are aggrieved at him because he has presented himself as someone our children can emulate. He has made a million-dollar empire just because Indians have believed that he is real and intelligent.
Should we assume that this man is dumb and does not even have the basic sense of what to speak in which circumstance? In that case, will he return the money he earned from ads because we decided to listen to him? Obviously, the answer is no.
Then where is the question of forgiveness?
In the last scene of the movie Sirf Ek Banda Kaafi Hai, Manoj Bajpayee argues that a criminal in the guise of a saint can never be forgiven. That is because he committed the crime by taking shelter under the positive image associated with sadhus. Try applying that principle here.
