Hindu Rajput women's collective self-sacrifice to escape sexual enslavement by Islamic tyrant mocked by Bollywood actor, reduced to rape and suicide
Delhi, India 
30 August, 2026
Case Summary
Indian film actor Swara Bhaskar, who has consistently expressed left-leaning political views and faced criticism over remarks concerning Hindu religious and cultural issues, once again stirred controversy after she mocked and vilified Jauhar, a medieval Hindu practice in which Hindu women chose self-immolation to protect themselves from capture, sexual violence, enslavement and dishonour at the hands of invading Muslim armies. Bhaskar is the same actor who previously remarked that the film Padmaavat's climax scene depicting Jauhar made her feel "reduced to a vagina". Bhaskar made the remarks while discussing the Jauhar sequence in the 2018 Hindi epic period drama Padmaavat at the “Woman, Life, Freedom” talk held at the India International Centre in Delhi on 31 August 2026. Directed by Sanjay Leela Bhansali, the film starred Deepika Padukone as Rani Padmavati, Shahid Kapoor as Maharawal Ratan Singh and Ranveer Singh as Sultan Alauddin Khilji. It depicted the story of Rani Padmavati and Maharawal Ratan Singh of Mewar and the attack on Chittor by the Islamic invader Alauddin Khilji. In the film, Alauddin Khilji attacks Chittor after becoming determined to obtain Rani Padmavati, leading to a battle between his forces and the Rajput defenders of Mewar. Towards the climax, after Khilji’s forces defeat the Rajputs and breach the fort, the film depicts Rani Padmavati leading around 800 Rajput Hindu women of Chittor in Jauhar. The women collectively decided to end their lives by entering the firepit rather than face capture and sexual brutality at the hands of the invading Muslim forces. The sequence therefore portrays the immense sacrifice made by the brave Hindu women who chose death to preserve their honour and protect themselves from the barbaric Islamic invaders. While discussing the sequence, Bhaskar mocked and vilified its portrayal and said that it sent a harmful message to survivors of sexual violence. She said that if she were a rape survivor, watching the sequence could make her feel like a coward for not having killed herself to preserve her honour. She questioned whether the film was telling rape survivors that they did not deserve to live and whether it suggested that a woman had to kill herself to be considered honourable or brave. She described the scene as “problematic” and questioned whether rape should be portrayed as the end of a woman’s life. She further questioned whether survivors were being told that they were not entitled to live and whether being a brave and honourable woman meant killing oneself. Bhaskar also vilified a close-up shot of a pregnant woman during the Jauhar sequence. She said that the shot made her angry and disgusted. She said that the scene suggested that a foetus that might be female did not deserve to be born because the girl could potentially be raped by a Muslim ruler. She further said that the scene stayed with her for five days and recalled that, while watching the film in a theatre, she was so angered by the shot that she exclaimed “chhi!” before eventually deciding to write an open letter to Bhansali. She said she did not write the letter immediately out of anger but spent about 5 days processing her thoughts and emotions before writing it. This was not the first time Bhaskar had condemned the depiction of Jauhar in Padmaavat. Following the film’s release in January 2018, she wrote an open letter to Sanjay Leela Bhansali in which she criticised the film’s portrayal of Jauhar and accused it of glorifying the practice. In the letter, she specifically referred to the women entering the Jauhar fire, including a pregnant woman and a young girl, and argued that the sequence conveyed a message that choosing life after sexual violence was wrong. She had said that Her remarks on 31 August 2026 revisited the same criticism and reaffirmed the position she had expressed following the film’s release. Bhaskar also recalled a line from her 2018 open letter in which she wrote that watching the film had made her feel as though she had been reduced to “just a vagina”. She claimed that she had intended the statement to convey that women should not be reduced to their bodies or private sexual organs, but that the line was made into a headline by The Wire and that people reacted to the headline without reading her entire letter. She maintained that her original criticism was presented differently from the argument she had intended to make. Notably, Bhaskar had previously made hateful remarks concerning Hindus and Hindu religious and historical figures. Hinduphobia Tracker has documented multiple such instances. On 19 February 2025, following the release of Chhaava, which depicted the torture and killing of Chhatrapati Sambhaji Maharaj by Aurangzeb after his refusal to convert to Islam, Bhaskar wrote on X that a society more enraged by the film’s 'fictional depiction' of the torture of Hindus 500 years ago than by a contemporary stampede and the mishandling of corpses was a “brain & soul-dead society”. Her remarks dismissed the persecution, torture and brutal killing of Chhatrapati Sambhaji Maharaj and the historical suffering of Hindus depicted in the film. Similarly, following the March 2026 religiously motivated killing of Hindu youth Tarun Kumar by a Muslim mob in Delhi’s Uttam Nagar, Bhaskar dismissed the religious dimension of the crime and argued against viewing the incident through a communal lens, describing it instead as a reflection of “brittle social relations”. Her remarks downplayed the communal dimension of the killing and became part of the wider discourse surrounding the case. In another instance in 2018, Bhaskar maliciously compared Hindutva, a pro-Hindu political and civilisational movement, with the Taliban. In a post on X, she wrote: “We can’t be okay with Hindutva terror & be all shocked & devastated at Taliban terror.. & We can’t be chill with #Taliban terror; and then be all indignant about #Hindutva terror! Our humanitarian & ethical values should not be based on the identity of the oppressor or oppressed.”
Why it is Hate Crime ?
This case is being added to the tracker under the primary category: Hate Speech against Hindus. The subcategory selected is: Anti-Hindu slurs, mocking faith. Anti-Hindu slurs and the deliberate mocking of the Hindu faith owing to religious animosity involve the usage of derogatory terms, stereotypes, or offensive references to religious practices, symbols, or figures. One of the common anti-Hindu slurs used against Hindus is “cow-worshipper” and “cow piss drinker”. The intention of using this term is to demean and mock Hindus as a group and their religious beliefs since Hindus consider the cow holy. Additionally, some symbols and the slurs attached to them have a historical context that exacerbates the insult, hate, stereotyping, dehumanisation and oppression against Hindus. Cow worship has been used for centuries to denigrate Hindus, insult their faith and oppress Hindus specifically as a religious group. There has been overwhelming documentation about how cow slaughter has been used to persecute Hindus with cow meat being thrown in temples and places of worship. There has also been overwhelming documentation where cow meat (beef) has been force-fed to Hindus to either forcefully convert them to Islam or denigrate their faith. Apart from cow worship, the Swastika – which holds deep religious significance for the Hindus – has also been misinterpreted and distorted to use as a slur against Hindus. Similarly, the worship of the Shivling has been used by supremacist ideologies and religions to denigrate Hindus owing to religious animosity. Such slurs and denigration stem out of inherent animosity and hate towards Hindus and their faith, therefore, it is categorised as hate speech targeted at Hindus specifically owing to their religious identity. This case constitutes a clear example of religiously motivated hate speech because Swara Bhaskar publicly mocked Jauhar, a practice historically associated with Hindu Rajput women, while stripping away the extreme circumstances in which it took place. Jauhar emerged in periods of war and siege, particularly when Hindu kingdoms faced imminent defeat, and women faced the prospect of captivity, sexual violence, enslavement, forced conversion, and loss of autonomy. Bhaskar instead reduced the practice to a question of suicide after rape, questioning whether rape survivors should have died to preserve their honour. By applying this modern framing to Jauhar, she erased the historical circumstances behind the practice and trivialised the suffering and choices of Rajput women. It is important to understand that some of the most prominent Jauhar episodes, including those associated with Chittorgarh, took place during invasions and sieges by Muslim tyrants and their barbaric armies. When a fort was on the verge of falling, the Hindu women and children would be exposed to capture by the Muslim army. Jauhar was therefore understood as a collective decision to reject surrender and choose death rather than captivity, sexual violence, enslavement, forced conversion, and humiliation. It was not an act of cowardice, but an extreme act of resistance in the face of defeat and the loss of personal and religious autonomy. Bhaskar's remarks, therefore, relied on semantic reframing and wordplay to alter how Jauhar is understood. Instead of discussing it within the context of siege and impending capture, she recast it as an individual woman's decision about whether to kill herself after rape. Her comments about the pregnant woman approaching the funeral pyre followed the same approach, interpreting the scene as a message that girls should not be born because they might one day face sexual violence. This transformed a historical episode rooted in war and collective resistance into a modern narrative about suicide and rape. The distinction is important because the criticism was not simply directed at the morality of a historical practice. Bhaskar's framing effectively reduced the Hindu women who chose Jauhar to victims of a supposedly oppressive social custom, while overlooking the violent circumstances confronting them. By presenting their decision without its historical setting, she reduced an episode associated with the suffering, resistance, and sacrifice of Hindu women to a simplistic and contemptuous narrative about suicide. This amounted to a denigration of a significant part of Hindu Rajput history and collective memory. This remark, however, does not come as a surprise, as Swara Bhaskar has a long history of making controversial remarks concerning Hindus and their faith. Her previous remarks concerning Hindu religious, historical and civilisational subjects, as documented by Hinduphobia Tracker, demonstrate a recurring pattern in which Hindu suffering is dismissed, Hindu historical figures and experiences are denigrated, and Hindu beliefs and movements are subjected to hostile or contemptuous comparisons. Taken together with her remarks on Jauhar, these instances indicate that her rhetoric has repeatedly shown a disregard for Hindu historical memory and for the persecution, suffering and experiences of Hindus. Her latest remarks therefore form part of a broader pattern of religious hostility rather than representing an isolated criticism of a particular film or historical practice, and therefore warrants inclusion in the tracker.
Case Status
Unknown
Perpetrators Details
Perpetrators
Others
Perpetrators Range
One Person
Perpetrators Gender
female
Sources 
