The actor said that neither him nor his wife are planning to leave the country.
After a furore was created for two days over Aamir Khan's remarks on 'growing intolerance in he country', the actor has come out and spoken against the protestors. Aamir Khan in a statement has said that those who are shouting obscenities at him are only proving his point further. He also said that neither he nor his wife have any intention of leaving the country.
The actor on Monday had said that his wife had once contemplated moving out of the country fearing their son's future. On Wednesday morning, Aamir Khan was slapped with sedition charges in Kanpur sessions court for his 'intolerance' statement and the hearing is set to take place on December 1. Advocate Manoj Kumar Dixit, who filed the case against Khan, said his 'anti-national' statement amounts to sedition. The case has been filed under IPC section 124 A (sedition), 153 A (promoting enmity between different groups on religious grounds) 153 B (Imputations) and 505 (statements conducing to public mischief).
First let me state categorically that neither I, nor my wife Kiran, have any intention of leaving the country. We never did, and nor would we like to in the future. Anyone implying the opposite has either not seen my interview or is deliberately trying to distort what I have said. India is my country, I love it, I feel fortunate for being born here, and this is where I am staying.
Secondly, I stand by everything that I have said in my interview.
To all those people who are calling me anti-national, I would like to say that I am proud to be Indian, and I do not need anyone's permission nor endorsement for that. To all the people shouting obscenities at me for speaking my heart out, it saddens me to say you are only proving my point.
To all the people who have stood by me, thank you. We have to protect what this beautiful and unique country of ours really stands for. We have to protect its integrity, diversity, inclusiveness, its many languages, its culture, its history, its tolerance, it's concept of ekantavada, it's love, sensitivity and its emotional strength.
I would like to end my statement with a poem by Rabindranath Tagore, it's a prayer really :
Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high,
Where knowledge is free,
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments,
by narrow domestic walls,
Where words come out from the depth of truth,
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection,
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way,
Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit,
Where the mind is led forward by thee,
Into ever-widening thought and action,
Into that heaven of freedom, my father, let my country awake.
Jai Hind.
Aamir on Monday night speaking at the Ramnath Goenka Awards event had said, "When I chat with Kiran at home, she says 'Should we move out of India?' That's a disastrous and big statement for Kiran to make. She fears for her child. She fears about what the atmosphere around us will be. She feels scared to open the newspapers every day. That does indicate that there is this sense of growing disquiet, there is growing despondency apart from alarm. You feel why this is happening, you feel low. That sense does exist in me."
The actor's comments garnered a lot of controversy, with even Bollywood stars lashing out at him.
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