Actors Swara Bhasker, Twinkle Khanna, Richa Chadha, Siddharth and filmmaker Anubhav Sinha have spoken up against the Citizenship Amendment Bill (CAB) which was passed by the Lok Sabha on Monday night. Twinkle Khanna took to Twitter to write, “Discrimination based on race, colour, caste, religion and other such social constructs in whatever form, goes against the fundamental moral integrity of the human condition.”
Swara Bhasker said that she does not want her hard-earned money to be spent funding the “sick” project. “I do not want my hard earned money as a taxpayer to be spent in funding this sick bigoted NRC/CAB project!,” the actor tweeted.
She further replied to a journalist who said “Why can’t our Bollywood social smugglers Amitabh Bachchan, Akshay Kumar, Salman Khan and Shah Rukh Khan speak so bluntly for the people?” Swara gave it back to him, saying, “ Bollywood mein aur bhi Actors hain Prashant ji :) Hamaari aawaazein bhi sunn lo! Hum bhi Bollywood ka hissa hain :)“
Just before the passing of the Bill, Richa Chadha wrote “God Save Us.”
Tamil actor Siddharth, who has been one of the rare actors who has consistently spoken out against the establishment, slammed Tamil Nadu Chief Minister Edappadi Palaniswami for supporting the CAB in the parliament.
Siddharth’s post said that “supporting the CAB shows his true colours, his lack of integrity and his desperate need to remain powerful at any cost”
The actor also went on to make a point about the AIADMK by stating that, “Jayalalithaa would have never supported CAB. How the AIADMK has crashed in its ethos in her absence.”
Article 15 director Anubhav Sinha wrote that he is proud of the “exemplary patience” that Indian Muslims have showed.
Pooja Bhatt is not someone to shy away from expressing her opinion, so she quoted a line from DaShanne Stokes’s work - “If you won’t stand up against those who tear us apart with their lies, hate, and bigotry, expect to do a lot of sitting down.”
Her father, director Mahesh Bhatt, also weighed in with strongly worded tweets. “There nothing more destructive to this fragile thing we call civilisation than the illusion that a handful of people can decide who are human and who are not,” he wrote.
(At The Quint, we question everything. Play an active role in shaping our journalism by becoming a member today.)