Bollywood actress Pooja Bhatt has responded to BJP leaders’ claims that actors are paid to walk with Rahul Gandhi on the Bharat Joro Yatra. Quoting from Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, the actor wrote: “They’re certainly entitled to think that, and they’re entitled to full respect for their opinions… but before I can live with other folks I’ve got to live with myself. The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience” — discharge of claims. Actor Sushant Singh, who walked with Rahul Gandhi and claimed it would be his first appearance at a political rally, was Pooja Bhatt’s tweet.
Apart from Pooja Bhatt and Sushant Singh who joined the Hyderabad yatra, several Bollywood personalities including Amal Palekar, Sandhya Gokhale, Ria Sen, Rashmi Desai, Akanksha Puri joined the Bharat Joro Yatra in Maharashtra. BJP leader Nitesh Rane shared a WhatsApp forward and claimed that Congress was paying the actors to walk. BJP IT cell chief Amit Malviya also shared the screenshot and questioned the credibility of those who are “willing to associate with Rahul Gandhi even for some money”.
The shared screenshot was supposed to be a brief of the actors joining the journey to Madhya Pradesh. Asking the ‘best possible cost for a 15-minute guest appearance’, the message said actors could choose their own time slots and travel and logistics would be taken care of.
The Congress rejected the claims and said such ‘fake WhatsApp’ forwards with no name and no number only proved how desperate the BJP was to discredit the Yatra. “It is the BJP that has mastered the art of arm-twisting celebrities to portray artificial support for them, not the Congress,” said Maharashtra Congress leader Sachin Sawant.
