On October 3, 2021, the Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB) raided a cruise off Mumbai and made a high-profile arrest of Aryan Khan, the son of Bollywood superstar Shah Rukh Khan.

No sooner did the NCB arrest Khan’s son, the left-leaning liberal rushed to his defence, declaring him to be the victim of Centre’s alleged bias against Muslims. Countless opinion pieces were penned hypothesising that Khan was arrested because his father, SRK, had made some obscure remarks over rising intolerance 5-6 years ago. 

Assorted leftists fell over themselves to assert that Aryan Khan’s arrest was a vindictive move by the central government, a warning to Muslims around the country to fall in line or endure the consequences. The fact that Aryan Khan could have been culpable of committing the crimes pressed against him was cunningly swept under the carpet as liberals shifted the focus to his religiosity being the motive behind his arrest. 

The Muslim victimhood narrative was always a tenuous defence, to begin with. But that narrative was delivered a body blow on October 21, when the NCB summoned actor Ananya Panday in connection with the ongoing probe in the drugs case involving Aryan Khan. Reports claim Aryan had allegedly sought drugs from Ananya, to which she had responded in the affirmative. 

Panday, ostensibly a Hindu, was summoned once again on Friday, October 22, to the NCB office in Mumbai for her alleged involvement in the case. As the ‘Student of the Year 2’ got embroiled in the case, the liberals saw their assiduously crafted narrative of Khan being cornered because of Muslim identity falling apart in all its glory. One would have expected such a body-blow would have knocked some sense into deluded liberals who were fishing for a cause to fault the government when none existed. 

However, instead of yanking them back from their insanity bouts, the trauma of the realisation that there was no religious angle in NCB’s probe into the cruise ship drugs case seems to have plunged the usual suspects deeper into the abyss of mental derangement. As a result, they have come up with even more preposterous takes on the motivations behind the arrest of Shah Rukh Khan’s son.

Here are 4 instances when left-leaning liberals seem to have lost their mind over the ongoing drugs probe in the Aryan Khan case

“Sanghis will never be able to manufacture a Brahmin equivalent of Shahrukh Khan. Some Sharma, Chaturvedi, Trivedi, Dwivedi with janeu & six packs won’t cut it. In the words of Raees, “Miyan bhai ki daring or baniye ka dimag” nahin milega,” an unremarkable and lesser known leftist Anubhav Sinha tweeted. 

Evidently, Sinha appears to live in a parallel universe where Ajay Devgn, Hritik Roshan, Amitabh Bachchan, Akshay Kumar and other Hindu actors do not exist and are not a part of Bollywood. It is also interesting to note how casual Brahmin and Hindu hate is peddled with impunity by these characters who scream Islamophobia the first chance they get.

Similarly, another left-leaning liberal said she had stood outside Shah Rukh’s residence for a staggering 10 years, talking to tourists, fans, dejected students and jilted lovers. According to her, standing outside SRK’s house was a therapeutic experience for a lot of people.

She said people sought “healing” from standing outside Mannat staring for hours on the trot to catch a glimpse of their hero. For this reason, she extended her solidarity with the actor and desperately wished that she could stand outside his residence. One does not really know how looking at a building of an actor was therapeutic for ones defected by exams. Perhaps if these mythical students who randomly stand in front of Mannat had concentrated on their books more than SRK’s building, they would not have been dejected by exams in the first place.

TV journalist Bhupendra Chaubey was more concerned with the drugs probe undermining the soft power of Bollywood. In what has become a trademark left-leaning method, Chaubey equivocated on the ongoing investigation in the case, alleging that Aryan Khan should be scrutinised but what NCB was doing is ruining the soft power of Indian cinema. 

“Can u imagine Tom Hanks / Bruce Willis/ Al Pacino being targeted like this?” Chaubey presumptuously asked in a tweet, implying that NCB’s action against Aryan Khan would have been justified only if similar action was taken against Hollywood actors such as Tom Hanks, Bruce Willis etc. 

Of course, Chaubey, who has proved, over the years, that he is not exactly the brightest cookie, forgets that stalwarts in their fields like John Lennon, Matthew McConaughey, Jimi Hendrix, Robert Downey JR, Paul McCartney, Snoop Dogg and several Hollywood star kids have been arrested on drug charges in the past.

Aniruddha Guha, whose Twitter bio says he is a screenwriter, declared Shah Rukh Khan to be the nation’s son, brother, husband and father. He said the more establishment messes with the actor, the more it will unite his well-wishers in their stand against the “injustice”. He then, embarrassingly, declared Shah Rukh Khan the “(Zo)Khan”.

Interestingly, the Islamophobia angle sort of, unironically, falls flat even in this embarrassing tweet. In the movie, Zohan was a promiscuous, superhuman Israeli counter-terrorist officer of the Israel Defense Forces who used to hunt down Palestinian terrorists and later turned to cutting hair.

Perhaps, Guha knows more about the case than the probing agencies themselves to declare Aryan innocent and label a routine procedure as injustice. 

Anyway, there’s a pattern to this serious delusion harboured by left-leaning liberals. None of those has demonstrated a minutest of regard for the law of the land. Their faith in constitutional bodies is so frail that they believe there exists no mechanism to check the abuse of power by governments or their appointed agencies. 

Even before the investigation findings are out in the public domain, it is an article of faith for them that the probe would be jaundiced against Shah Rukh’s son. They have completely blocked out the possibility that Aryan could well be one of the culprits involved in the case. He is declared innocent, not because the evidence suggests so but because he is the son of a Bollywood actor who happens to be a Muslim.

The liberals seemed to be unconcerned about the facts of the case. For them, Aryan is innocent, no matter what. Initially, it was because he was a Muslim and now that the devious narrative has been debunked, they consider him to be a victim of vendetta because he is the son of a Bollywood superstar and according to their worldview, kins of Muslim superstars in the Indian film industry are infallible.