Bollywood nepo-kids and star couple Ranbir Kapoor and Alia Bhatt are currently on a temple run to bolster their falling popularity with Hindu masses, whom they desperately want to watch their upcoming movie Brahmastra.

Social media has been rife with multiple reasons for why Brahmastra, despite its Hindu packaging and storyline, should be boycotted by Hindus. The elitist, anti-Hindu comments and positions taken by some of the key personnel involved in the movie have played a large part. We will get into all those reasons in a separate article, but one thing which has especially rankled Hindus is an old clip of Ranbir Kapoor on a food show boasting that he is a “big beef guy”.

“My family used to have paya (dish made from hoofs of animals) for breakfast, that’s a bit hard core, you know. My family is from Peshawar, so a lot of Peshawari influences in food has come with them. I am a mutton, paya, beef, red meat fan…yeah, I am a big beef guy,” Ranbir said on the show.

Before social media, Bollywood celebs and other elites could maintain disdain towards ordinary Hindus in private while appearing congenial in public. Or they could depend on their media friends to bury awkward stories. Not anymore. Thanks to the internet, even things from the past that our deracinated and arrogant celebs would have hoped were long forgotten are being re-discovered by awakening Hindus.

Despite their diversity in customs, culture, food and language, one of the things which binds all Hindus together apart from the fundamentals of Dharma, it is our reverence for the cow and resultant revulsion for beef eating. Hindus bear no ill-will for those countries where eating beef is part of their local tradition, although even those in the West are now realizing that beef is neither good for health nor the climate.

We don’t want to impose our worldview or lifestyle on Europe, for eg., but what we won’t accept is people trying to make it the norm in Bharat, and people who boast about eating beef in public then demanding access to our temples. If you eat beef, don’t call yourself a Hindu and please stay away from our temples.

Alia Bhatt and Ranbir Kapoor were in Ujjain on Tuesday to visit Mahakaleshwar temple. But they faced protests from local Hindus, who were upset with Ranbir’s “I am a big beef guy” comment. Police who were on ‘VIP duty’ assaulted the peaceful protestors and even resorted to a lathi charge. Despite this, eyewitnesses said that protesters did not allow the star couple, who got married in April in a pseudo-Hindu ceremony, to enter the temple premises.

Such police brutality on peaceful Hindus standing up for their Dharma is de rigueur in the secular Indian state. However, when confronted with a mob of violent Islamists, the same police often surrenders abjectly and starts appeasing those demanding public beheadings, as we saw in Telangana recently when ‘sar tan se juda’ protests broke out for MLA Raja Singh’s arrest.

Besides husband Ranbir, Alia Bhatt too has seen her stocks falling with movie goers due to her flippant “If you don’t like me, don’t watch me” comment, mimicking Kareeena Kapoor Khan’s words (the audience did just what Kareena had dared them to do, by boycotting Laal Singh Chadha). Alia’s father Mahesh Bhatt is a known Hindu hater and pro-Islamist, her mother Soni Razdan has said she would be “happier in Pakistan”, and Alia herself has opposed the humanitarian pro-Hindu CAA law and hobnobbed with Rana Ayyub, a rabid Islamist fraud-accused ‘journalist’ known for manufacturing fake news to defame Hindus and Bharat across the world.