It’s a measure of the degree to which religious communalism and identity poison is spreading within Indian society under rule of the BJP/NDA government, that the Supreme Court mandated CBI investigation into the alleged suicide/murder of rising Bollywood star Sushant Singh Rajput on June 14 has morphed into a covert anti-Muslim and anti-liberals witch-hunt in Bollywood, the world’s largest feature films factory. Led by prime-time English television news proconsul, Arnab Goswami who has attained national fame for conducting a nightly witch-hunt on the Republic TV news channel which slavishly toes the BJP line, the Rajput investigation has gradually mutated into a covert campaign to end the perceived domination of Bollywood by liberals and the Muslim community, and in particular to dethrone the ‘4 Khans’ — Salman, Aamir, Shahrukh, and Saif Ali — box office male stars of the Bollywood fantasies factory.

With the weight of emerging evidence indicating that Rajput, a troubled and insecure young (33) individual who often used soft drugs, had made his own quietus, Goswami has widened the ambit of the investigation to the alleged drugs addiction of Bollywood celebrities i.e, the 4 Khans and popular actress Deepika Padukone who has often embraced Left-liberal causes.

Backing whistle-blower and blatantly pro-Hindutva actress Kangana Ranaut who alleges that 99 percent of top Bollywood stars are drug users, the RSS/BJP chorus orchestrated by the self-righteous Goswami is hell-bent on religious cleansing of Bollywood, whose stars are demi-gods of the country’s largely illiterate population.

Besides, the national focus on the Narcotics Control Bureau investigating the country’s most revered movie stars serves the useful purpose of distracting public attention from government mismanagement of the economy, the sweeping Covid-19 pandemic, the India-China border standoff and other embarrassing issues. Indeed an ingenious tangled web woven to deceive.