Bollywood actor Aamir Khan is facing sedition charges in India after saying he was “alarmed” by a growing climate of intolerance in the country.
Advocate Manoj Kumar Dixit, who filed the case against Khan and his wife, filmmaker Kiran Rao, said the actor’s recent “anti-national” statements amount to sedition, The Times of India reported.
In an interview at the Ramnath Goenka journalism awards ceremony, Khan, who is Muslim, said he was disturbed by incidents of intolerance in India. He also said that Rao, who is Hindu, even feared for the safety of their child.
“Kiran and I have lived all our lives in India. For the first time, she said, should we move out of India? That’s a disastrous and big statement for Kiran to make to me. She fears for her child. She fears about what the atmosphere around us will be,” Khan said.
A hearing in the sedition case is set for Dec. 1, The Times of India reported.
Khan’s comments set off a firestorm of criticism, particularly by Hindu nationalists and members of India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), headed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Hindu activists staged protests outside his house in Mumbai and in Patna and painted his posters with black ink before setting them on fire, The Hindustan Times reported.
A campaign has also been launched to remove a mobile phone app for Snapdeal, a New Delhi-based online store which features Khan in its advertisements.
“He was a celebrated actor till now. But now it seems that we handed over milk to a snake. If he does not want to stay here, he can go to Pakistan,” said Ramdas Kadam, Maharashtra state environment minister and a senior leader in the far-right Shiv Sena party.
Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi, minister of state for minority affairs, who is also Muslim, said India has given Khan “so much love and respect” and suggested the actor made his comments “in a hurry or maybe under influence from others.”
“Tolerance is in the DNA of this country,” Naqvi said.
A beloved actor, director and producer in India, Khan has starred in several Bollywood blockbusters, including PK, one of the highest-grossing Indian films of all-time. The movie depicts Khan as an alien who comes to Earth and questions religious customs and beliefs.
The film’s success, BJP MP Satish Gautam said, “shows that India is a tolerant nation, allowing freedom of speech and expression to everyone.”
Om Puri, another well-known Indian actor, urged Khan to apologize for his comments. “In fact, if somebody was an ordinary man he would have been arrested for saying these words. You are trying to incite people against each other,” Puri said.
Actor Anupam Kher also weighed in on the controversy. “Dear @aamir_khan,” Kher wrote on Twitter. “Did you ask Kiran which country would she like to move out to? Did you tell her that this country has made you AAMIR KHAN.”
In a statement on Wednesday, Khan said neither he nor his wife has any intention of leaving India. “India is my country, I love it, I feel fortunate for being born here, and this is where I am staying,” he said.
Khan said he stood by everything he said in his interview.
“To all those people who are calling me anti-national, I would like to say that I am proud to be Indian, and I do not need anyone’s permission nor endorsement for that,” he wrote in the statement.
“To all the people shouting obscenities at me for speaking my heart out, it saddens me to say you are only proving my point.”
The controversy comes amidst a growing debate in India over intolerance against religious minorities in the country of over 1.2 billion people.
In October, over two dozen Indian authors returned awards to the Sahitya Akademi (the National Academy of Letters) in protest of what they said was a rising wave of intolerance.
The Indian Express reported at the time that Indian author Nayantara Sahgal, who was among those who returned her award, said there has been a “vicious assault” on “India’s culture of diversity” and the right to dissent.
Novelist Dalip Kaur Tiwana also returned her Padma Shri prize — a high civilian award in India — over communal violence and attacks on freedom of speech. “At this rate our country will get destroyed, we are living in the 21st century, this is the time to think and act,” she said.
On Tuesday, The Times of India reported that while fewer people have died as a result of communal incidents in 2015, the number of incidents was up from last year.
Incidents totalled 630 between the start of the year and October, up from 561 incidents in that same time period in 2014, the newspaper said, according to Indian home ministry data. As many as 1,899 people were injured due to communal incidents this year, up from 1,688 last year.
Some of the most significant, recent incidents include the lynching of a Muslim man and his son after the family allegedly slaughtered a cow and the burning of a mosque and Muslim-owned homes in the village of Atali in northern India.
