In real life, the petite actor who played the brave Rani of Jhansi now needs highly trained commandos to protect her. TV anchors raved breathlessly as she landed at Mumbai airport on Wednesday. The Karni Sena rushed in droves to protect her, while Shiv Sainiks protested. Posters of her popular film show her leading the troops, sword in hand. Life, however, did not imitate art in this case. Twitter was the new battlefield and you only needed crude verbal weapons.
At some point, Ms Ranaut switched track from a person sympathetic to the suicide of fellow actor Sushant Singh Rajput (and even willing to help in the probe, provided she got protection), to a sort of leader of the Opposition mode in Maharashtra.
Before she took on this role in full measure, she was tweeting about drug abuse in Bollywood and how “it is quiet (sic) evident Sushanth knew some dirty secrets that's why he has been killed.” Soon after, she trained her Twitter guns on the Mumbai police saying she was scared of them, then Mumbai city was called Pakistan-occupied-Kashmir and finally she dubbed the country’s richest municipal corporation “Babar ki army”.
For the Shiv Sena, an attack on Mumbai and its police, even a verbal one, is a battle cry. Sanjay Raut, Sena MP, countered it, calling her treacherous as she had eaten the salt of Mumbai (on those lines). Like a true paper tiger, the Sena-run Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai tried to demolish the actor’s office in Pali Hill. Ms Ranaut hit back calling it the death of democracy and screamed that it was akin to demolishing the Ram Mandir. She approached the Bombay High Court which stayed the demolition.
For her continuing heroics, she trended on Twitter, and her uncritical followers posted unflattering pictures of Uddhav Thackeray as Babar in full Mughal regalia, which is beyond irony. To cap all this, she sent a video message to Thackeray saying that she now understood the pain of Kashmiri Pandits, and she has given a pledge to this “desh” that she will make a film not only on Ayodhya, but also on Kashmiri Pandits.
What is eerily relevant is that her outbursts and need for protection were not ignored. She was granted ‘Y-plus’ category security, at a time when the Centre is pruning this rather wasteful expenditure, and this must give us pause. Also, her pitch-perfect proclamation of the Shiv Sena as “Sonia Sena”, can’t really be treated as an angry rant alone.
While the BJP has distanced itself from Kangana’s outbursts about the city and its police, former chief minister Devendra Fadnavis has asked the government to fight Covid, not Kangana! As the country hits new highs in daily Covid-19 cases, it is incumbent on us as conscientious citizens to wait in breathless anticipation for the screen Jhansi’s next move.
(Meena Menon is an independent journalist and author based in Mumbai)