Mumbai, Sep 10 (IANS) NCP-SP leader Fahad Ahmad on Thursday refuted claims of his wife and Bollywood actor Swara Bhaskar “insulting” rape survivors, while alleging that she is being targeted for speaking against the ideology of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS).
A controversy erupted after Bhaskar, while revisiting her eight-year-old open letter to ‘Padmaavat’ maker Sanjay Leela Bhansali, at a recent event, said that the representation of thousands of women committing ‘jauhar’ to protect their “honour” could make rape survivors look like “cowards” today for choosing to live.
Speaking to IANS, Ahmad said: “Blatant lies were spread. When a woman speaks out against the ideology of the RSS and BJP, she has to face all sorts of things. Swara Bhasker never said that the women who committed ‘Jauhar’ were cowards.”
According to the NCP-SP leader, Bhaskar’s major point was incidents like ‘Jauhar’ “should not be celebrated”.
Giving an example from a recent Bollywood film, ‘Main Wapas Aaunga’, Ahmad said: “It also featured a scene from the Partition era where a grandmother slits the throats of young girls to prevent them from being raped; that scene was filled with anguish and portrayed in a way that made the viewer feel the pain…so the crux of the matter was that we should not be celebrating this.”
He also clarified regarding the use of the word ‘coward’, saying: “She (Bhaskar) had actually said that if she was a rape survivor and saw this, she would feel like a coward herself, wondering why she hadn’t done the same. That was the point, yet it was presented in completely different ways. And this is distressing.”
“When ‘Jauhar’ was committed, no one did it out of happiness. It involved immense suffering and was deeply painful. Her point was that the event shouldn’t be celebrated, it shouldn’t be glorified, but rather the pain behind it should be acknowledged. And she clearly didn’t call them cowards, that is a complete lie,” Ahmad asserted.
Moreover, the NCP-SP leader claimed that both he and his wife have been receiving “death threats” over the incident.
“Everyone knows about the death threats Swara and I have received…The level of trolling is intense, one should counter a woman’s opinion with an argument, but this kind of targeting makes no sense,” he said.
–IANS
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