In the past week, ever since Bollywood’s once-outlier star Kangana Ranaut endorsed Prime Minister Narendra Modi as her candidate for prime minister in 2019, it swiftly put off a lot of people—from feminists to snarking Twitter users, on both sides of the Modi fan club.

The star’s dismayed lib-fem fans—who had leapt to her side in the Bollywood stardom nepotism fracas, and in her ex-boyfriends’ messy outings (including Aditya Pancholi, Adhyayan Suman and Hrithik Roshan)—are horrified that Kangana can endorse a prime minister, they say, whose four-year reign has been marked by Hindutva hate politics of murderous lynchings, Dalit violence, and misogyny and bigotry from ministers and party leaders. But this isn’t about Ranaut’s choice of prime minister for the country. She is not obliged to any of her femi-allies and companions to follow their mandate. It’s her choice of words that is disquieting and misplaced.

Here is what she said when asked about her views on the Modi government over the last four years: “He [Modi] is the most deserving candidate. It’s not like he’s reached this place because of his mummy-papa. He is the rightful leader of this democracy. We have voted him as our prime minister. This cannot be taken away from him. This is his well-deserved place, which he has earned after sheer hard work. So, there shouldn’t be any doubt about his credibility as prime minister.”

Ranaut very correctly gave Modi her approval by crediting the democratic process.

It’s not the first time Ranaut has come out in praise of Modi. In March this year, she declared at a news television company event that she was a “big Modi fan” and that Modi “was the right role model for beginners with his ambition and success story, of being a chai-wallah”. She once again underlined that Modi’s success is “the success of our democracy”.

Ranaut has had several fan moments with the prime minister—this event in March, and a high-profile dinner on the eve of Valentine’s Day, along with Aamir Khan and corporate and diplomatic heavies at the Turf Club in Mumbai. Ranaut has also had a couple of government-sponsored invitations: she was an invitee at the India Pavilion in Cannes, where she made her debut on the red carpet as Grey Goose’s representative to celebrate Indian cinema. Censor Board chairperson Prasoon Joshi was in conversation with the star at the French Riviera; he also escorted her at the screening of a film based on Modi’s childhood, Chalo Jeete Hain, in Mumbai last week where Ranaut endorsed Modi.

However, it’s a gloomy prospect that the opposite of an entitled dynast is a divisive bombast. Ranaut need not even hark back to the 1970s and 1980s when nepotism and dynasts in politics were challenged and won by champion disruptors—like the Jayaprakash Sampoorna Kranti movement, Janata Party stalwarts like Morarji Desai and Jagjivam Ram, socialist leaders like Charan Singh, trade union leaders like George Fernandes. Not to mention firebrand caste leaders of the 1980s, like Lalu Prasad Yadav and Mulayam Singh Yadav, and Dalit messiah Kanshi Ram.

Ranaut’s utterances about the wondrous ways of our democracy should have instead led her to Aam Aadmi Party’s Arvind Kejriwal. After all, Kejriwal blazed on to the political stage as a challenger, just as Ranaut herself was calling out Bollywood’s nepotism and favouritism, and asserting her rightful place in its star system. Her endorsement of Modi flies in the face of her exhortations.

Consider this: Modi belongs to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) Parivar that was birthed in the 1930s. He joined the Sangh when he was barely eight years old, attending the local RSS shakha as a bal swayamsevak. He rose to become regional organiser (sambagh pracharak), overseeing and propagating Hindutva and its tenets. He then joined the Bharatiya Janata Party, and became national general secretary.

Modi was no outsider when he swooped back to Gujarat in the mid-1990s. He oversaw a fractious state party leadership, ousted his colleague and then chief minister Keshubhai Patel, and grabbed his chair in October 2001. Within a week of being duly elected as an MLA in February 2002, Modi as chief minister oversaw the worst communal carnage in the country, after the Godhra train burning, and the following riots.

Modi went on to win three more state Assembly polls to become chief minister four times in 12 years, despite allegations and accusations of state-sponsored riots, with many cases even being taken out of Gujarat to ensure a free and fair trial. So far, the courts have found no evidence to suggest that Modi was involved in the riots.

On the other hand, Kejriwal had no Parivar or political party—not even a political ideology—when he stormed into the public eye, wearing a Gandhi topi and holding a broom, promising to clean the country of rampant corruption, exploitation and entitlement. Like Ranaut, Kejriwal was the outsider. He dug in his heels to expose entrenched political privileges, prejudices and corruption. He was audacious enough to challenge both the Congress and the BJP, favouritism and partisanship, and the clubby network of inheritors, beneficiaries, dynasts and heirs.

Like Ranaut, who sashayed into stardom with grit and determination, Kejriwal too went on to win—in his case, the Delhi state Assembly election. As Ranaut once said, “Today in the industry we have a lot more democratic environment is also because of people like us who have been working at it…We are going to make outsiders feel and appear cool.”

Modi brings in an authoritarian political ideology of Hindutva, a conservative world of traditional values, an imaginary golden past, and a pure Hindu race—with intense and aggressive nationalism, militarism, expansionism, and conspiracy theories.

Did you really mean Modi, Kangana Ranaut?