Bollywood between the devil and deep sea

Published 29 July 2026 · india

When the Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan finally caved in to the protest and resigned, protestors around the country were quick to appropriate Salman Khan’s It’s

When the Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan finally caved in to the protest and resigned, protestors around the country were quick to appropriate Salman Khan’s It’s done bro as the defining meme of the moment. The students are at top priority, educationally n security-wise, so they need not worry and have their parents worried for them. The Honorable Prime Minister has tweeted, and I am sure that he will take strict action against all those people who are responsible for this leak. So… pic.twitter.com/89Ykfs5r4k — Salman Khan (@BeingSalmanKhan) July 23, 2026 Khan’s first message praised the students, called the paper leak “a very serious issue”, described their agitation as “the right way to go about it” and urged that it not be “hijacked politically”. Less than 24 hours later, after the Prime Minister had responded, Salman expressed confidence that the government would take strict action and asked to students to return home with an appeal to the activist Sonam Wangchuk 25 days into his fast: “Sonam, it’s done, bro… If you want, will send you food from home.” Both posts came under fire — from both sides. Superstar Salman Khan’s posts on the recent student protests perfectly capture Bollywood’s swinging tightrope walk. Silence is seen as complicity and middle ground fence-sitting as rage unfolds on the streets and outrage on our feeds. Yet the story of Bollywood’s political engagement over the last decade and a half is far more complicated than the accusation that it has been silent. Take Amitabh Bachchan. During the Nirbhaya protests in 2012, Mr. Bachchan tweeted that he was “pained and horrified” to see peaceful protesters being met with tear gas and water cannons. Last week, as students once again took to the streets, Mr. Bachchan’s public timeline was occupied instead by cryptic Hindi aphorisms, which he later clarified were not about him (or his hospitalisation and surgery) but inspired by Argentina’s loss in the World Cup, moments after they went viral speculating his support to the movement.

Aamir Khan’s remarks on intolerance in 2015 triggered years of boycotts, political attacks and eventually cost him the Incredible India campaign. By 2020, the actor deleted his social media accounts. Shah Rukh Khan rarely comments directly on politics anymore, though he did ask India to “be democratic” as part of his New Year message before the pandemic. He leaned more towards it in Jawan, with an appeal asking citizens to vote thoughtfully. Around the same time, the arrest and eventual exoneration of his son Aryan Khan turned the actor into the centre of one of India’s most polarising media trials — which the younger Khan lampooned in his Netflix show The Ba****ds of Bollywood. Salman Khan has chosen another route — speaking rarely, carefully. During the farmers’ protest, struggling for adjectives, he said: “The right thing should be done, the noble thing should be done, the correct thing should be done…” Cozying up to Modi During the 2019 elections, Akshay Kumar’s interview with Prime Minister Narendra Modi — remembered as much for its conversation about mangoes — became symbolic of Bollywood’s changing relationship with the establishment. His meetings with Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath over the proposed Noida Film City only reinforced that perception, even as questions over his Canadian citizenship complicated his image as one of Hindi cinema’s loudest on-screen nationalists. In 2019, an entire delegation of Bollywood’s biggest names — Karan Johar, Ranbir Kapoor, Ranveer Singh, Alia Bhatt, Rajkummar Rao, Ayushmann Khurrana, Ekta Kapoor, Vicky Kaushal, Rohit Shetty and Imtiaz Ali and several others — posed with Prime Minister Modi in photographs that came to symbolise the industry’s growing proximity to political power. Politics, in turn, borrowed freely from cinema. Uri‘s “How’s the Josh?” became an election slogan. More recently, Prime Minister Modi even invoked Dhurandhar in a speech, to attack those who didn’t like the film.