Revoke Padmashri for Kangana Ranaut: CPIML's Dipankar

NEW DELHI: General secretary of CPIML Liberation Dipankar Bhattacharyya on Saturday demanded from the government to revoke the Padma Shri Award given to Bollywood actor Kangna Ranaut , who has courted a controversy through a statement on India's freedom.

"Immediately after receiving the Padma Shri Award, actor and prominent pro-BJP public figure Kangana Ranaut declared that what the country won in 1947 was mere alms, and that true freedom only came in 2014 with Narendra Modi being elected Prime Minister", Bhattacharya said, adding that her comment like that had hurt patriotic sentiment of everyone.

He said that Kangana Ranaut's statement was very much in line with the sentiments expressed by the RSS during the freedom movement, in the immediate wake of independence, and ever since. 

"The RSS' founding ideologue Golwalkar declared that the martyrs of the freedom struggle were "failures" and should not be held up as ideals. He also said that the anti-British orientation of the freedom struggle was "disastrous", he said.

"For Kangana Ranaut, it seems that freedom from colonial British rule is a matter of contempt. Freedom, she implies, is the freedom to lynch, to express and propagate bigotry and obscurantism, and to violently impose the RSS code of ideas, diet, dress, religion, and conduct onto the whole of India", he taunted at Bollywood actor Kangna Ranaut.

"The least that the government must do is to revoke the Padma Shri awarded to Kangana Ranaut. The government cannot simultaneously be claiming to celebrate "Amrit Mahotsav" of Independence while promoting and honouring people who insult India's freedom movement and freedom", Dipankar Bhattacharya , demanded.