The Making of #BoycottPathaan | Part 1: The Clamour, and How the Outrage Began
In Part 1 of our three-part investigation, read the origin story of the outrage against Shah Rukh Khan's Pathaan.
How is an online boycott campaign against Shah Rukh Khan and Deepika Padukone’s film Pathaan made
(Photo: Kamran Akhter/The Quint)
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The Making of #BoycottPathaan | Homepage
The Making of #BoycottPathaan | Part 1: The Clamour
Reports about the release of Pathaan were published in August 2020 on various entertainment and news websites. This is when we first noticed the calls to boycott the film.
To understand the origins of the boycott calls, let's go back to June 2020.
A Timeline of the Targeting
2020
June
In June 2020, actor Sushant Singh Rajput allegedly died by suicide and that opened a Pandora's box of conspiracy theories.
There were online groups which said that he was 'targeted for being an outsider' and this reignited the debate around nepotism.
August
Alia Bhatt and Aditya Roy Kapur starrer Sadak 2 was hit by a massive online hate campaign. The trailer got around 13 million dislikes.
Around this time, several websites and portals published source-based information about SRK's new film Pathaan.
Interestingly, an unofficial trailer was released by fans and that, too, faced boycott calls. There were posts urging people to 'dislike' the trailer and 'boycott' the film.
2021
September
The next major spike was noticed in September 2021, when right-wing Hindi news organisation Sudarshan News, oft called out for spreading communally-charged disinformation, aired a show on SRK.
The channel's Editor-in-Chief Suresh Chavhanke levelled unsubstantiated allegations against Shah Rukh Khan. He even tweeted a fake poster of a movie titled 'Tipu Sultan' and hit out at the actor. This led to some calling for a boycott of SRK's film Pathaan.
October
And then in October 2021, Khan's son Aryan was arrested from a cruise by the Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB) in a drug-related case. This led to not just trolling of the actor and his family, but there were also calls to boycott the film.
2022
March
On 2 March 2022, Yash Raj Films (YRF) released the first motion poster of the movie and announced the release date.
The poster was the fodder which fed the online chatter and, once again, there was a concerted effort asking people to boycott the film.
We also noticed that there was an appeal, specifically to Hindus, projecting the film and the actors as "anti-Hindus."
Pathaan was also compared to Vivek Agnihotri's The Kashmir Files, which was based on the 1990s exodus of Kashmiri Pandits from the valley and faced severe criticism with many calling it "propaganda."
There were certain posts that spoke about "victimisation of Muslims" in Bollywood and "projecting Hindus in a bad light."
The Kashmir Files released in March and we saw heightened activity from the right-wing groups online against Pathaan during this period.
August
Then came August and the time for another Khan's big release – it was Aamir Khan and Kareena Kapoor Khan starrer Laal Singh Chaddha, which was mired in controversy because of the actors' old comments.
September
In September, Alia Bhatt and Ranbir Kapoor's Brahmastra was subjected to a similar boycott campaign.
In an earlier story on the #BoycottBollywood trend, we had detailed how the right-wing groups and people "supporting SSR" were the ones who were feeding this trend.
As per data on CrowdTangle, posts with the text "संघर्ष निरंतर जारी हैं अब पठान की बारी हैं" ("Our agitation continues relentlessly, and Pathaan is our next target") had around 1,44,000 interactions on public pages and groups on Facebook between 14 August and 20 August alone.
This trend continued through August and September, and we also noticed posts that called for the boycott of Salman Khan's upcoming film Tiger 3.
And most recently, it was after the release of 'Besharam Rang', Pathaan's first song, that #BoycottPathaan started trending again. On Twitter, it was one of the top trends for the next three days.
The song released on 12 December but the trend started gaining momentum the previous night. And once the song released, the calls grew louder.
The Reason for Targeting 'Besharam Rang'?
The song showed Deepika Padukone in a saffron bikini and this was supposedly enough to offend people.
And yet again, Deepika was targeted for visiting the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) in January 2020, just two days after violence had broken out on the campus.
But this 'outrage' over her clothes was not limited to just some users online, even political leaders and ministers raised objections.
BJP leader and Madhya Pradesh Home Minister Narottam Mishra said that the song was "shot with a dirty mindset", BJP MLA Ram Kadam said that "no film insulting Hindutva will be tolerated".
This was also used as an opportunity to target Shah Rukh and his religion to claim that he disrespects Hindus and India.
In fact, an old clip of his movie Don 2, where he was shown in a Malaysian jail wearing an orange uniform, was peddled as a clip from Pathaan. (You can read our fact-check here.)
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