Facing criticism from the BJP and a section of the film fraternity over his remarks against the rising acts of “intolerance” in the country, Bollywood star Aamir Khan said on Wednesday that he and his wife Kiran had no plans of leaving the country and that he was a proud Indian, for which he did not need endorsement from any quarter.
“First let me state categorically that neither I nor my wife Kiran has 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,” Aamir said in a statement released to the media here.
“India is my country, I love it, I feel fortunate for being born here, and this is where I am staying,” the 50-year-old actor said.
Maintaining that he stood by everything he had said in his public interview at a media event on Monday, Aamir hit out at his critics saying, “To all those people who are calling me anti-national, I would like to say that I am proud to be an Indian, and I do not need anyone’s permission nor endorsement for that”.
A day after the BJP and Hindu groups singled him out for a vicious attack for his expression of “alarm” and “despondency” over the rise in the acts of “intolerance” in the country, Aamir stated, “To all the people shouting obscenities at me for speaking my heart out, it saddens me to say you are only proving my point”.
Thanking all those who have stood by him for his matter-of-fact views on growing intolerance about the “growing intolerance” in the country, the actor said, “To all the people who have stood by me, thank you.”
He added, “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, its concept of ekantavada, its love, sensitivity and its emotional strength”.
Aamir concluded his statement with a poem by Rabindranath Tagore that reads thus:
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.