BHOPAL: Actress Deepika Padukone’s visit to JNU and expressing her solidarity with the students protesting against the brutal attack by masked hoodlums on the university, stoked up fire across the country.
The city appeared thrilled and excited on Wednesday when NSUI spokesperson Vivek Tripathi promised free movie tickets to writers of best tweets supporting the actress and on her film Chhapak, scheduled to be released on Friday across country.
Soon after Tripathi’s promise, his twitter account flooded with 1000-plus adulatory messages in less than 12 hours, speaking in support of the actress and her film.
“Our team is working on selecting the best tweets and then we would reward the writers with movie tickets,” Tripathi told Free Press.
Tripathi tweeted the offer in the wake of calls for boycotting the film surfacing on social media that rose after Deepika Padukone’s visited the JNU to express her solidarity with the students protesting against the brutal attack.
Taking a dig at film actor Akshay Kumar, Tripathi wrote in his tweet that Deepika is better than the “fawning actor who asked Modiji, ‘how do you eat mangoes’”. He invited the Twitter users to post their comments #ISupportDeepikaPadukone, #SupportChhapaak and #BoycottChhapaakSeKutcchNa Hoga@NSUI@IYC@INCIndia.
One of them tweeted ‘Padmavati aaj bhi Alauddin Khilji se nahi darti…’.
“Not only from MP but also we are getting support from other states like Chhattisgarh, Delhi and Rajasthan. They also want to run the campaign in support of Deepika and the movie on social media,” he added.
Tripathi said that NSUI will also appeal to CM to make the movie tax-free.
However, the state unit of the ABVP denied that it had given any call for boycott of Chhapaak. “Who goes where is his or her personal decision and we respect it. We have no quarrel with Deepika Padukone,” said state general secretary Abhishek Tripathi.
District secretary of Student Federation of India, Deepak Paswan said “We are neither against Deepika Padukone nor boycotting her movie ‘Chhapaak’. In fact, we are supporting her. I see nothing wrong in Deepika supporting victims of violence at JNU,”
