Warpath with Bollywood
When Kangana Ranaut first burst on to the Bollywood stage, she was a breath of fresh air. Unlike many of her contemporaries, Kangana was an outsider, a small town girl from the hill state of Himachal who came to Mumbai to pursue her acting dreams and made it.
Her big break came in 2006 with the movie ‘Gangster’ and stardom followed. I always admired how Kangana took on the established cliques of Bollywood, who sniggered at her accent and her clothes when she started out. Kangana worked on both, and became an articulate speaker and a fashionista with an eye for elegant clothes and timeless handbags from Hermes and Dior. She had arrived.
But it didn’t take long for controversy to follow her everywhere. She took on the film industry, calling Bollywood a “gutter” as she spoke about nepotism and abuse. Kangana wasn’t afraid to take on the industry’s big wigs, from Karan Johar to Hrithik Roshan, and it put her on the warpath with her colleagues.
It also started becoming clear that she had political ambitions, specifically to join India’s ruling BJP, and that partly explained her outbursts against the industry. Those political dreams also came true and she is now an elected Member of Parliament from her home state. But that honeymoon has ended.
Kangana has officially become a headache for the BJP. In the last few days, she was summoned not once, but twice by party president JP Nadda as controversial remarks she had made about the farmer protests received huge backlash.
With crucial assembly polls in Haryana in a few weeks where the farmer agitation played out in a big way, the BJP was quick to dissociate from her comments, issuing a statement that she was not authorised to speak on policy issues. For the BJP, such public rebukes are rare which means the party leadership was furious with Kangana. But within days, she did it again by strongly opposing a caste census and putting the BJP in a tight spot yet again.
Harming the party
The issue is sensitive and the BJP has been treading carefully. One again, they were forced to distance themselves and say her comments did not reflect the party position. While she played to the galleries on social media platforms in order to catch the attention of the BJP, Kangana Ranaut may have now realised that politics is a different ballgame altogether and in the BJP in particular, no one is indispensable if they harm the interests of the party.
She is, to put it simply, a loose cannon. Her outlandish, often hateful comments may have made headlines in the past, but this time she may have to face consequences.
For the BJP too, there is a lesson. Motormouths don’t always make smart politicians. You may stir up your supporters on ‘X’ but in the real world, what they say has real life implications especially at election time.
As I write this column, yet another controversy has put Kangana in the headlines. Her new film, ‘Emergency’ (based on Indira Gandhi’s imposition of the Emergency in 1975) has been put on hold by the censor board. The trailer had caused a huge uproar in Punjab over its portrayal of the Sikh community. The Akali Dal has even sent a notice to the censor board saying the film could “incite communal tension”.
Kangana claims the censor board members have received threats. As her political fortunes soared, her film career has tanked in recent years.
Kangana, today, is a caricature of what she used to be. She resorts to the lowest level of discourse to make headlines and it is not working anymore. And if she isn’t careful, her political career may also be over sooner than she expected.
