Bollywood actress Kangana Ranaut accuses Twitter of racism after her account is suspended

Leading Bollywood actress Kangana Ranaut has accused Twitter of racism after her account was permanently suspended for abusive behaviour on Tuesday.

The company said Ranaut – known for her ardent support of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi – had been blocked from the platform after she violated its rules on hateful conduct and abusive behaviour. 

The actress, who has won several national film awards, railed against Twitter’s action in a statement, accusing the social media company of racism.

‘Twitter has only proved my point. They are Americans, and by birth a white person feels entitled to enslave a brown person,’ she said later on Tuesday.

‘They want to tell you what to think, speak or do, fortunately I have many platforms I can use to raise my voice, including my own art in the form of cinema but my heart goes out to the people of this nation who have been tortured, enslaved and censored for thousands of years and still their is no end to the suffering.’

Ranaut’s account suspension came after she issued a tweet on Monday in which she urged Modi to resort to gangster tactics to ‘tame’ West Bengal’s chief Minister Mamata Banerjee. 

Banerjee’s regional party defeated Modi’s Hindu nationalists in elections over the weekend to retain control of the state government in Kolkata.

Following the election, Banerjee’s party was accused of violent attacks on its defeated opponents, which it denies.

Swapan Dasgupta, an influential right-wing journalist and politician in India who writes columns for leading English-language newspapers espousing Hindu nationalism, wrote about the situation on Twitter after the election.

‘Alarming situation in Nanoor (Birbhum distrct) with more than a thousand Hindu families out in the fields to escape marauding mobs seeking to take it out against BJP supporters. Reports of molestation or worse of women,’ Dasgupta wrote.

In response to Dasgupta’s claims, Ranaut called Banerjee an ‘unleashed monster’ and called on Modi to ‘tame her’. 

Quote-tweeting Dasgupta’s tweet, Ranaut wrote: ‘This is horrible… ‘We need super gundai (hooliganism in Hindi) to kill gundai… Modi ji (a honorific) please show your Virat roop (larger-than-life form) from the early 2000s,’ she wrote.

Her post was seen to be calling on Modi to replicate the 2002 Gujarat riots that took place when he was the state chief minister in the region.

Official figures say the riots ended with 1,044 dead, 223 missing, and 2,500 injured. Of the dead, 790 were Muslim and 254 Hindu. However, experts believe the true count could have been higher.

Confirming that Ranaut’s account had been suspended, Twitter explained its policy.

‘We’ve been clear that we will take strong enforcement action on behaviour that has the potential to lead to offline harm.

‘The referenced account has been permanently suspended for repeated violations of Twitter Rules specifically our Hateful Conduct policy and Abusive Behaviour policy.’ 

This is not the first time Ranaut has fallen foul of Twitter’s rules. 

Earlier this year, the platform imposed some restrictions on her account after she posted an inflammatory tweet against Amazon Prime Video series ‘Tandav’.

In the earlier tweet, she said it was ‘time to take (the creators’) heads off’ for hurting religious sentiments.

A twitter spokesperson at the time told NDTV that the actress’ tweet was in violation of the social media site’s Abusive Behaviour Policy, which prohibits ‘targeted harassment of someone, or (inciting) other people to do so’.

‘We prohibit content that wishes, hopes or expresses a desire for death, serious bodily harm against an individual or group of people and take enforcement action when we identify violations which could include placing an account in read-only mode,’ Twitter said at the time. 

In response to her first Twitter penalty, she tagged the company’s CEO Jack Dorsey, writing: ‘My account and my virtual identity might get martyred for the country anytime.’