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28 March 2024

India actor Aamir Khan hits back at haters calling him traitor

(Files) In this photograph taken on March 25, 2015, Indian Bollywood actor Aamir Khan looks on during the start of the Ficci Frames 2015 annual media and entertainment industry event in Mumbai. (AFP)

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By Correspondent

Indian actor Aamir Khan had raised the issue of "rising intolerance" in his homeland, sparking a storm of criticism including from the ruling Hindu nationalist party.

Aamir Khan, who like many Bollywood stars is Muslim, said Monday that a sense of 'insecurity' and 'fear' was gripping India and revealed that his wife had even questioned whether the couple should leave the country.

His comments attracted a major backlash in the Hindu-majority country, and a withering attack by the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

Social media was outrage over his remark, and the actor was called an anti-national, a traitor, asked to leave his country for a safe haven and was also reminded that his fame is due to the 'tolerant fan'.

Aamir on Wednesday hits back at his abusers saying neither he nor his wife Kiran have any intention of leaving the country. He also said that those hurling obscenities at him only prove his point about intolerance.

Here's the full text of his statement:

First let me state categorically that neither I, nor my wife Kiran, have any intention of leaving the country. We never did, and nor would we like to in the future. Anyone implying the opposite has either not seen my interview or is deliberately trying to distort what I have said. India is my country, I love it, I feel fortunate for being born here, and this is where I am staying.

Secondly, I stand by everything that I have said in my 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.

To all the people shouting obscenities at me for speaking my heart out, it saddens me to say you are only proving my point.

To all the people who have stood by me, thank you. We have to protect what this beautiful and unique country of ours really stands for. We have to protect its integrity, diversity, inclusiveness, its many languages, its culture, its history, its tolerance, it's concept of anekantavada (theory of viewpoints or standpoints), it's love, sensitivity and its emotional strength.

I would like to end my statement with a poem by Rabindranath Tagore, it's a prayer really :

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high,
Where knowledge is free,
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments,
by narrow domestic walls,
Where words come out from the depth of truth,
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection,
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way,
Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit,
Where the mind is led forward by thee,
Into ever-widening thought and action,
Into that heaven of freedom, my father, let my country awake.

Jai Hind.

Aamir Khan.