How Celebrities Reacted to Last Night’s Violence at JNU

Yesterday evening at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, a group of masked men and a woman barged into the college’s Sabarmati hostel and beat up students. Students have alleged that the attackers were members of the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad – BJP’s student wing supporters.

Soon after, a video JNU student union’s president Aishe Ghosh bleeding profusely surfaced on social media, prompting many to demand immediate inquiry against the alleged perpetrators. This also included many Bollywood personalities, internet influencers, comedians and so on.

Internet influencers and comedians

Among the internet influencers, Bhuwan Bam – a content creator on YouTube – tweeted a thread condemning the violence in JNU. He also spoke about receiving threatening calls that kept him from not speaking up about the violence in Delhi’s Jamia Millia Islamia.

Besides the usual suspects like Kunal Kamra and Varun Grover, comedians such as Kaneez Surka, Neeti Palta, Zakir Khan and others too took to Twitter to raise their voice against police brutality.

Actresses and actors 

A lot of actors and actresses also spoke out against the violence in JNU. Around the same time, some Bollywood actors and celebrities were attending a dinner meeting hosted by Union minister Piyush Goyal to discuss the Citizenship (Amendment) Act.

The list of attendees included producer Riteish Sidhwani, lyric writer and adman Prasoon Joshi, directors Kunal Kohli and Abhishek Kapoor, actor Ranvir Shorey (a big supporter of the CAA, according to the source), singer Shaan and many others.

“None of those who are openly pro-BJP, such as Anupam Kher, Vivek Agnihotri or Vivek Oberoi were present. Many others who were invited, like Javed Akhtar, Farhan Akhtar and Dia Mirza, did not turn up,” said a source present at the dinner who spoke to The Wire on condition of anonymity.

The actors who chose to tweet in support of the students were Rajkumar Rao, Dia Mirza, Taapsee Pannu, Neha Dhupia, Richa Chaddha, Ritesh Deshmukh among others.

 

 

Among Bollywood singers, composer Vishal Dadlani has been the most vocal about the JNU incident.

Directors

Directors like Anubhav Sinha, Anurag Kashyap, Neeraj Ghaywan and Alankrita Shrivastav has been unequivocally standing in solidarity with students ever since the violence in Jamia Millia Islamia broke out in the second-week of December.

Badminton player and winner of the Arjuna award Jwala Gutta emerged as a lone voice from the sports fraternity.