Bollywood actor Kangana Ranaut has been elected an MP in India, joining a small crowd of people from the film industry in the country’s new parliament.
Ranaut stood as the candidate for prime minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party in Mandi, a seat in her northern home state of Himachal Pradesh, and won by a margin of just under 75,000 votes.
The breakout star of 2013’s well-received Bollywood hit Queen, Ranaut became the most prominent of Indian celebrities to openly, and closely, align herself with Modi’s ruling party after it first came to power in 2014, and has championed its Hindu nationalist cause.
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She has repeatedly faced criticism in the past for echoing the ruling party’s anti-Muslim rhetoric.
“Heartfelt gratitude to all Mandi residents for this support, this love and trust,” she said on X, referring to her constituency. “This victory is of all of you, this is the victory of faith in prime minister Modi and BJP, this is the victory of Sanatan, this is the victory of the honour of Mandi.”
The actor defeated Vikramaditya Singh of the main opposition Congress party who comes from an influential political family. His father, Virbhadra Singh, served six terms as chief minister of Himachal Pradesh.
Ranaut was named in a police complaint in April 2020 for stoking communal tension after she called Muslims “terrorists” in a video supporting her sister and manager Rangoli Chandel, who herself was suspended from the social media platform X, then Twitter, for inciting violence against the religious minority.
“Make these mullas plus secular media stand in a line and shoot them dead,” Chandel declared in her post, using a slur for Muslims. “F**k history, they may call us Nazis who cares, life is more important than fake image.”
Ranaut once said she was afraid to live in Mumbai because it felt like Pakistan-administered Kashmir to her. Hindu nationalists often invoke Pakistan and Kashmir as proxies for violent Muslims out to destroy India, and its Hindu majority.
In 2021, she was named in another police complaint after denouncing a mass protest by farmers against Modi’s government as a “Khalistani movement” and referring to farmers from the minority Sikh community, who were the majority of the protesters, as terrorists or separatists.
The Khalistan movement aims to establish a separate homeland for Sikhs in northwestern India, particularly the state of Punjab where most of the protesting farmers came from. The movement, which waged a bloody insurgency in Punjab in the 1980s and early 1990s, is proscribed in India.
That same year, she said India’s freedom from the British in 1947 was “bheek”, a handout, and that the country attained real freedom only in 2014 when Modi took power. She repeated these talking points on the campaign trail, asking why India wasn’t declared a “Hindu Rashtra”, a Hindu state, when it got independence and said she supported recasting it into a Hindu state now.
Ranaut was banned from X, then Twitter, for repeatedly violating its rules on “hateful conduct” and “abusive behaviour”.
In addition to her political rhetoric, Ranaut has gained attention for railing against nepotism in Bollywood.
She saw her popularity shoot up after calling out filmmaker Karan Johar on his talk show for his tendency to work with the children of actors and directors, describing him as the “flagbearer of nepotism”.
She brought the same pitch to her election campaign, criticising Singh, her rival, and his party for perpetuating dynastic politics.
“The Congress has always been an appalling party for me. Nepotism in the party has been hugely problematic for me because I was a target of the same system in my industry,” she said at an event hosted by the TV news channel Times Now in March.
“I condemned it openly, I fought against it. Something that was exploiting me... nepotism, groupism, dynastic politics...I despise this party.”
Asked to describe Rahul Gandhi and Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, current generation of India’s most influential family that has produced three prime ministers, Ranaut simply called them “nepo kids”.
“They are weird as if they have landed from Mars,” she added.
