Hindi cinema is in a difficult place at the moment. Potential blockbuster are performing poorly on box office and even most bankable and popular stars have failed to attract audience to the theatres. In a recent interview, actress Swara Bhaskar stated how some people are trying to degrade Bollywood in order to push their political agenda. She shared that Bollywood has always been a beacon of secularism in the country and that doesn’t sit well with some people.
Swara told NDTV, “A lot of negative hysteria has been generated around Bollywood and a lot of it is lies. I like to say that the ‘bring down Bollywood’ brigade is actually running a small industry of their own. They are profiting from it. All these Twitter handles. It’s like an industry on its own.”
Further talking about why Bollywood is being targeted, the actress said, “It is driven by an agenda for sure. The larger part of it has been that in 109 years, Bollywood has been one of the most popular vehicles of Indian secularism. Look at the kind of films we have made, we have always given the message that everyone is equal, love is greater than societal divide. Look at the credit at the end of the Bollywood film, every regional and linguistic identity of India is always represented there. It’s an industry which was spearheaded in its early days the Parsi and Muslim communities, it’s an industry which has popularised Urdu poetry and easy to digest Sufi concepts and is very diverse in an organic way.”
Swara concluded, “That is a problem for an agenda that wants to push a saffron kind of majoritarian identity in India. So, you have to discredit and delegitimise the most popular vehicle for Indian secularism if you want to discredit Indian secularism. That’s why Bollywood is being targeted.”
