The controversy behind Bollywood movie “Chappak”, a story of an acid-attack survivor.

These days a post is making rounds in Social media, that the Bollywood movie based on the real-life story of a Hindu acid attack victim – Laxmi Agarwal and a Muslim culprit, Nadeem Khan has been twisted by the producers and directors by depicting a Hindu boy, Rajesh in the movie as an acid-attacker to put Hinduism in a bad light and brushing off the crime committed by a so-called jihadi- Nadeem Khan, to save Muslims and Islam from an ignominious fall. This post has only been creating mass hysteria and insinuating people to boycott the movie of one of India’s most celebrated actors – Deepika Padukone. Truth is that this is just a fallacy hoisted by some right-wing supporters to malign Bollywood and to create further fissures in the Indian Society. Wikipedia says that the acid-attacker in the movie is also shown as a Muslim, with the name of Basheer Khan.

India is a land of diversity inhabited by some 1.1 billion Hindus and 17 crores Muslims. It is quite obvious that the criminal can some times be a Hindu or a Muslim and the victim, similarly, can be from any of these communities. It would be a grave mistake to see an act of crime through the eyes of religion and to paint it as an attack of green on saffron or vice-versa.when acid is splashed on the face of a girl, for refusing to marry a boy, it is an act of patriarchal-related crime. It smacks of the feudal mindset of the culprit. His religion, in this case, Islam has nothing to do with the crime. And to arrive at any conclusion, one must understand the psyche of the criminal, what has been the motive behind the crime. In this case, the purpose of the criminal was certainly to punish the girl to put her in place by desecrating her face and turning her from a dazzling beauty to a disfigured, horrid lump of living mass, an object of ridicule and horror for the society.How can a girl dare to reject a man?

Instead of spin-doctoring the acid -attack case into a Hindu-Muslim issue, our aim should be to help such victims of the heinous crime by integrating them into our society. They are our sisters, daughters, and mothers. Beauty can not only be physical in nature but can also be of a character, of a discipline, of an effort to rise against the tide of adversity.

In a world that stands so divided and polarized today, we need to strengthen all sane elements which are not swept off their feet by the torrents of false information, religious innuendoes, either from the extreme left or from the extreme right ideology. we must remain alert, use our own intellectual and mental faculties, and rebuff all such propaganda with our grit and determination, for if we get swayed away, mankind will not survive.