Juhi Chawla, Dalip Tahil accuse students of violence, stay mum on JNU attacks

Senior actor Dalip Tahil and actress Juhi Chawla attended an event organized by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) yesterday to garner support for the controversial National Register of Citizens (NRC) and Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), against which protests have been raging across India since December 2019.

The event took place at the Savarkar memorial at Shivaji Park in central Mumbai.

Chawla asked the crowd who among them had never taken a holiday in the past five years. People responded by chanting the name of prime minister Narendra Modi.

“I am not talking about any party or politics. I am only talking about one person who is currently our prime minister. Throughout the day and night he only keeps thinking what next should he do for the nation,” she claimed. 

The actress accused students and protesters of committing violence and railing against the act without studying it. “Can we stop reacting and start responding? Can we first please understand what the matter is about? We should first understand and then open our mouth. It doesn’t take time to break anything like smashing a bus or someone’s head. But it takes a lot of time in making something,” she said.

Tahil joined her and accused students of various universities of planning and coordinating their protests. “Even before [Union] home minister Amit Shah uttered the word CAA, universities started objecting. But it wasn’t limited to that, people also started violence,” he claimed.

The veteran continued in the same vein: “It was pre-decided that as soon as the home minister says something they will start violence with students in universities like Jamia Millia [Islamia] and ANU (sic). It doesn’t take time for fire to spread.”

Tahil also dragged Mahatma Gandhi into his speech saying, “I am sure none of us want violence. We want peace. Like Mahatma Gandhi had said that India is a peaceful nation.”

The invocation of Gandhi's name was rather curious, given that Tahil was standing at Savarkar's memorial under Savarkar's portrait. As any student of history knows, Savarkar was staunchly opposed to Gandhian philosophy and was even accused of being party to the conspiracy to assassinate Gandhi.

Interestingly, neither Tahil nor Chawla had anything to say about the masked thugs who had run riot in the JNU campus on Sunday, assaulting students as well as teachers and leaving many of them in hospital with broken heads and limbs.