Bollywood celebrities and fans have come out in support of the Punjabi singer Diljit Dosanjih. Earlier this week, Ranaut misidentified a woman farmer from Punjab as Bilkis Bano, the octogenarian who made international headlines during the anti-CAA protests earlier this year in the Delhi neighbourhood of Shaheen Bagh. She shared a tweet alleging that the ‘Shaheen Bagh dadi’ also joined the farmers’ agitation over the new agri laws at various border points of the national capital. She retweeted the post with pictures of two elderly women, including Bilkis Bano, and wrote that the “same Dadi” who featured in Time Magazine was “available in 100 rupees”.
When Twitter users pointed out that both the women were different, Ranaut reportedly deleted her tweet. The floodgates opened after that.Dosanjh shared a BBC interview of the woman who Ranaut had wrongly identified as Bilkis Bano and tweeted on Wednesday that her name is Mahinder Kaur. “Listen to this with proof, Kangana. One shouldn’t be so blind… You are saying just about anything,” the actor, who hails from Dosanjh Kalan village near Jalandhar, Punjab, said in Punjabi.In the vitriolic exchange that followed, Ranaut called Dosanjh filmmaker Karan Johar’s “pet”, a bootlicker and asked if he wasn’t ashamed of defending somebody who instigated the Delhi riots earlier this year. She also said her comments were directed towards Bilkis Bano and not Mahinder Kaur, someone she said she didn’t even know.
