“Murakh Hriday na chet ko, jau guru milahin Biranchi sam”. This couplet by Goswami Tulsidas means that a foolish heart does not gain wisdom even with a master as great as Lord Brahma. Such has been the story of Bollywood entertainer Swara Bhasker, who had stirred a row in 2018 with her “I felt like reduced to a vagina” open letter to Sanjay Leela Bhansali, the maker of the film Padmavat, over the Jauhar climax. Despite being told why her assessment of Jauhar was wrong, Swara Bhasker has reiterated her retarded take on Jauhar.
Swara Bhasker suggests Rajput women should not have committed Jauhar, as rape by Muslim rulers would not have meant the end of their lives
Speaking at the India International Centre event in Delhi on 31st August, Swara Bhasker recapped her 2018 open letter to film director Sanjay Leela Bhansali. Bhasker described watching hundreds of Rajput women, led by Rani Padmavati (portrayed by Deepika Padukone), walk into the fire in red as a visually spectacular, musically anthemic and emotions-heavy sequence that left her feeling “reduced to a vagina”.
“I was watching this…all these women committing Jauhar…I was like, you know, if, god forbid, been a rape survivor, what would this film tell me? I would feel like a coward. That I didn’t kill myself to save my honour. Is that what you want to tell in a society like ours, where I feel like anyway there’s a rape epidemic? Is this what you want to tell our survivors? That you don’t deserve to live. That if you were actually honourable before rape, you would have killed yourself,” Swara Bhasker said.
Swara Bhaskar speaks about her letter to filmmaker Sanjay Leela Bhansali on the scene of Jauhar in the movie Padmavat pic.twitter.com/6X4Z0SvFtC
— Yeshi Seli (@YeshiSeli) August 31, 2026
“Are we saying that rape is the end of a woman’s life? I was particularly disgusted over the close-up scene of a pregnant woman’s belly, and she is heading towards the massive funeral pyre…you’re telling that the foetus that might be female doesn’t deserve to be born because she might be raped by a Muslim ruler? I was so mad. I came out…I wrote that letter, but The Wire made ‘felt like vagina’ its headline…” Bhasker added.
Swara Bhasker was wrong about Jauhar then, is wrong now
Swara Bhasker’s remarks are a reiteration of her 2018 open letter that contended that film Padmavat treats Jauhar as the honourable and dharmic choice rather than a ‘tragedy’. She describes the spectacular and courageous depiction of Jauhar by Rajput women as ‘glorification’ of a ‘misogynistic practice that somehow denies women individuality and personhood, in addition to the denial of the right to live after rape.
Bhasker made a 14th-century practice driven by necessity, about presentism and genital politics.
There is no doubt that a rape survivor has the right to live and live with dignity in society. Nobody expects a rape survivor to or forces them into committing Jauhar or self-immolation. The Jauhar climax of Padmavat did not send any message to the rape survivors in present times to commit self-immolation or kill themselves.
If we analyse Jauhar not with a reductive understanding but with a complete understanding of the context, then and only then would one be able to comprehend that Jauhar was not a regressive practice stripping women of their right to live.
Jauhar was not a random ‘purity’ ritual. Hindu women committed Jauhar during sieges when Rajput Hindu men had fallen against barbaric and bloodthirsty Islamic invaders like Alauddin Khilji. For Islamic barbarians, rape and sexual enslavement of non-Muslim women was a way of boasting religious dominance over Kafirs persistent humiliation of the faith of Kafirs, Hindus in this context.
The Scene which saved whole movie!!
— Karthik🏹 (@imrkartik) August 13, 2025
Bhansali really fucked up in "Khilji vs Ratan Singh" climax fight scene but then this Jauhar scene saved film
"Hindu women preferred to die with dignity than to be devou®€d by mlechchhas
Can't wait for Love & War. pic.twitter.com/3vu2QBj62a
For Rajput women, the alternative was capture by invading Islamic fanatic armies, repeated mass rapes, enslavement in harems, forced conversion to Islam, and total stripping of their individuality and dignity, if they managed to survive the horrific cycle of repeated rapes.
What even makes Swara Bhasker think that Khilji’s campaigns were some polite occupations, that Islamic barbarians would take Kafir women as war booty in accordance with the Islamic concept of Maal-e-Ghanimat, rape them once, and then tell the rape survivors that ‘see we raped you, but this is not the end of your life’?
In fact, Rajput women not committing Jauhar and letting Muslim barbarians led by Alauddin Khilji would have amounted to them being reduced to a vagina. From the medieval era of Islamic invasions, destruction and rapes, to the present times wherein the fifth- or sixth-generation descendants of Hindus forcibly converted to Islam by Muslim invaders continue to harbour bringing back the era of enslaving Hindu women, throwing them in harems as concubines.
OpIndia has reported earlier how a section of Muslim men openly uses various social media platforms to express their rape fantasies involving Hindu women and even Hindu goddesses. They create images showing Hindu women wearing explicit religious markers like Sindoor, Mangalsutra, Bindi, Om tattoos or lockets, in intimate positions with Muslim men wearing Islamic skullcaps.
The online Muslim perverts pick images and videos of those actresses who have portrayed Hindu Goddesses in TV dramas based on the Mahabharat, Puranas or Ramayana, with their religious-sexual degradation-laden captions.
This Islamist mindset that women are mere objects for sexual pleasure and infliction of humiliation on Kafirs and their faith is what actually reduces women to just a vagina.
However, one cannot expect a performative ‘feminist’ like Swara Bhasker to criticise or question the Islamist mindset that reduced women, be it in the medieval era of Islamic invasions or modern times, to mere objects, rather, a vagina.
In 2024, Swara Bhasker and her Muslim husband Fahad Ahmed met Islamic cleric Sajjad Nomani, who publicly declared that sending girls to schools and colleges alone is forbidden (Haram) in Islam. The Taliban-loving maulana also opines that Muslim girls were somehow giving up on purdah and modesty and urged parents not to send their daughters to schools and colleges.
Rajput women embracing death of their choosing over the fate of being reduced to a sex slave of a foreign barbarian and losing their bodily autonomy was, as Bhansali rightly described, an act of war. Swara Bhasker or any ‘feminist’ treating this difficult but necessary choice as ‘nothing more than patriarchal vagina-policing’, its either indifferent to the civilisational stakes that Hindus in that time actually faced, or harbours a fetish for sexual enslavement.
In contemporary times, the ISIS has been doing to Yazidi women what Islamic barbarians like Khilji wanted to do with Rajput women in the 14th century. During the 2014 Yazidi genocide, the Islamic terrorists belonging to the ISIS subjected Kafir Yazidi women to systematic, widespread sexual violence, enslavement, and torture.
There are documented accounts from aid workers and survivors indicating significant spikes in suicides among rape survivors and displaced women as they could not withstand the physical and psychological trauma inflicted by the horror they endured.
In the book The Last Girl by an ISIS survivor Nadia Murad, she described her experience as a “slow, painful death – of the body and soul”. Murad recounts that she was subjected to repeated rapes, humiliation and torture, including her body being burnt with cigarettes. She also mentions that many women captives killed themselves.
During the Yazidi genocide, numerous Yazidi women and girls chose to take their own lives, either by hanging, slitting their wrists, or jumping from buildings to escape impending rape, perpetual torture, and sexual slavery. Would Swara Bhasker sermonise to Yazidi women that the continuous cycle of rape and torture by ISIS Jihadis is not the end of their lives? Would she call their decision to embrace death over dying slowly and painfully in instalments every day ‘cowardice’?
Back in 2010, Tunisian street vendor Tarek al Tayeb Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire to protest police harassment, corruption, and the seizure of his cart. Bouazizi was not a coward; he knew that he lacked the resources to wage a fight against his oppressors alone. He thus chose the path of self-immolation in public to awaken the hibernating conscience of society. While Bouazizi died outside a government building due to self-immolation, he lit the fire that triggered the Arab Springs. If Bouazizi was a coward, by Swara Bhasker’s logic, would the European Parliament award him the Sakharov Prize posthumously in 2011? Would she turn his sacrifice into a paralogistic debate about his right to live?
A film about 1303 Chittor is not going to restart Jauhar in 2026. Swara Bhasker’s ‘vagina-only’ rhetoric is disgustingly reductive and is aligned with the broader Islamo-leftist pattern of critiquing the response of Hindus to Muslim atrocities as the Muslim atrocities themselves. Basically, horrific action by Muslims is not subjected to criticism and scrutiny, but courageous self-defence by Hindus is labelled ‘misogynistic’, ‘coward’, ‘regressive’ and whatnot.
Honour, community survival, religious identity, and refusal of Hindu women to become trophies are synonymous with just vagina. In fact, reducing the entire decision of committing Jauhar to genital ownership reflects the very objectification Swara Bhasker claims to oppose.
While suicide by any means is not encouraged in present times for rape survivors or anyone, in an era where Islamic barbarians weaponised sex slavery as a means of asserting religious dominance and humiliating enemies, Jauhar was not ‘cowardice’; it was not an escape, but a protest that demanded sacrifice.
The medieval era was not like modern times wherein women have the option to approach the police and seek legal remedy against their rapists; they lived in an era of siege warfare, wherein the fall of their dynasty in a war against Islamic barbarians meant total executions, destruction, plunder, subjugation, religious conversions, and mass rapes. Applying 21st-century individualist feminism to a medieval-era siege warfare-resulted decision is totally anachronistic.
Hypocrisy comes naturally to performative feminists like Swara Bhasker. In 2021, she wrote an op-ed for The Hindu wherein she described the 2013 film Ranjhana as an “unapologetic celebration of crazy love”, even as the film glorified stalking and destructive one-sided obsession and portrayed the stalker, Kundan, as a tragic hero.
India International Centre and its knack for platforming Hinduphobic Islamo-leftists
The India International Centre has long been in controversy over platforming notorious Hinduphobes and Islamo-leftists. Although the India International Centre, Delhi, is an NGO, it has been heavily supported and involved with the Indian Government since its inception in 1958 (Nehruvian-Congress era of politics).
Interestingly, the India International Centre was founded & funded by the Rockefeller Foundation. The Rockefeller Foundation & Rothschild Foundation are partners in many projects.
The IIC’s ‘About’ section lists its past and present Presidents, Vice Presidents, Life Trustees and Trustees mostly belonging to the elite coterie of ‘Lutyens’ and Khan Market cabal. The NGO hosts an annual C.D. Deshmukh Memorial Lecture on the birth anniversary, which is 14th January, in memory of its Founder President, C. D. Deshmukh.
In 2022, the IIC invited MK Rasgotra, who was the Foreign Secretary during the Bhopal Gas Tragedy, who secured the release of accused Warren Anderson. Ironically, he spoke on “Foreign Policy: Past and Future”.
In 2018, the IIC invited Rohinton F. Nariman, who passed incorrect remarks on the Rig Veda & termed Babar and Akbar as secular. He spoke on, hold your breath, “Great” Contemporaries: Akbar, Suleiman I and Elizabeth I.” OpIndia has earlier reported on Nariman’s anti-Hindu comments over the years.
Back in 2012, the IIC invited judge B. N. Srikrishna, whose Srikrishna Report on Bombay riots of 1992-93 dragged on for more than 5 years and blamed the Shiv Sena as being largely responsible for it, to deliver a “Beyond Federalism” speech.
In fact, the IIC’s President Shyam Saran himself is a well-known Congress supporter & Nehru dynasty loyalist. In 2020, he criticised Prime Minister Modi for attending the Ayodhya event in an article in the Business Standard newspaper.
In 2023, Shyam Saran invited the infamous “distorian”, Romila Thapar, for a C.D. Deshmukh Memorial Lecture on “Our History, Their History, Whose History?” It claimed that there was some ‘current crisis that has engulfed the teaching and writing of history as reflected in the new syllabuses for educational institutions of all levels’.
Unsurprisingly, back in July 2021, when an IIC member, Dr Daksh Lohiya, requested that a colloquium be hosted by Indic scholar Sandeep Balakrishna to mark the centenary of the Moplah massacres, but lo & behold, the IIC refused to allow it even as a ‘private event’.
