Manu Joseph: Why Kangana Ranaut could be seen as India’s Trump

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Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. In June, a female constable at Chandigarh airport slapped the actor and politician Kangana Ranaut. The constable said it was in response to Ranaut’s past statements on people who participated in the farmer protests, calling them “Khalistani terrorists." A few weeks ago, Ranaut got a legal notice for stating that India’s independence was not real, that it actually got its freedom in 2014 when Narendra Modi took over as Prime Minister.

She has also said that the Hindi film industry is run by a small cartel of privileged children. This is not the sort of thing an actor can say and survive in the industry. She has probably not survived as such, at least the way she could have if she did not speak her mind.

But she has become a far bigger public figure by doing just that. She is India’s Donald Trump, a person who says things others would not. For this reason, her political future is underestimated the way Trump’s was.

Her success in the recent general elections, when she was elected a Member of Parliament for the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party may turn out to be just the start. Every country has its own Trump. Every profession has its own Trump.

And being Trump is about taking a gamble in a world stifled by decorum and saying things nobody else wants to say, which can be rude in a way many truths are. Trumps were around before the rise of Donald Trump, but they could not succeed as well as him before the age of social media because a cultural elite controlled public opinion. According to the political theology then, a person had to maintain some sort of decorum to win votes.