Actor Deepika Padukone’s visit to the Jawaharlal Nehru University campus in New Delhi on Tuesday evening to attend a protest meeting has irked some Hindutva supporters. The meeting had been organised to protest Sunday’s attack on students and teachers by a masked mob. On January 5, a masked mob had entered JNU and brutally assaulted students who were protesting against an increase in the hostel fees.

Since then, strong evidence has emerged to warrant an investigation into the involvement of members of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s student wing, the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad, in the violence. WhatsApp messages planning the attack have been traced back to the ABVP. On television, a senior ABVP functionary admitted that people in the photos of the armed mob were from her organisation.


Padukone’s decision to attend the protest meeting, even though she did not speak at it, has riled up some people, who have called for a boycott of her movie Chhapaak. To back their claims that they had cancelled their tickets to the film, which opens on Friday, some social media users posted screenshots. However, it did not take the Twitter users long to figure that all these shots were of tickets from the same movie theatre in Vadodara – and the seat numbers and the show timings in several screenshots are identical.

They were of seats A8, A9 and A10 for the 6.50 pm seat at Cinemarc.

Of course, this inspired memes.