Vijay Devarakonda, Sonu Nigam draw flak for their statements

There is a particular cruelty to comparison. It often masquerades as empathy, but in the hands of public figures, it is more often a failure of proportion—a flattening of history into interchangeable hurts, each offered as proof that the speaker, too, has suffered. But the architecture of violence—its agents, motives, and consequences—demands discernment.

On April 22, 2025, in the serene Baisaran meadow near Pahalgam, Kashmir, a horrific act of terror unfolded. Five armed militants opened fire on a group of tourists, killing 26 civilians and injuring over 20 others. The attackers, affiliated with the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba, specifically targeted non-Muslim tourists, asking victims about their religion before shooting. This calculated act of violence was the deadliest attack on civilians in India since the 2008 Mumbai attacks.

In the aftermath, two celebrities—actor Vijay Deverakonda and singer Sonu Nigam—made public statements attempting to contextualise the tragedy. Deverakonda, at a film event, likened the attack to “tribal fights,” suggesting a parallel with fan rivalries in the Telugu states. Nigam, during a concert in Bengaluru, responded to a fan’s request for a Kannada song, saying, “This is why the Pahalgam attack happened — for such kind of an attitude (sic). At least see who is in front of you before making such demands.”

These comparisons are not just tone-deaf; they are a profound misreading of the nature of violence. Deverakonda’s analogy reduces a premeditated terrorist attack to spontaneous fan rivalries, ignoring the ideological and geopolitical complexities involved. Nigam’s remark equates a fan’s linguistic pride with extremist violence, a false equivalence that trivialises both the fan’s cultural assertion and the victims’ suffering.

Such statements reflect a broader issue: the tendency of public figures to draw parallels between personal grievances and systemic violence without understanding the underlying contexts. This is not a new phenomenon. In the past, celebrities have made similarly off-key remarks. For instance, during the 2018 Kerala floods, actor Payal Rohatgi claimed that the disaster was divine retribution for cow slaughter in the state. Such analogies not only diminish the gravity of real tragedies but also reveal a lack of sensitivity and awareness.

There is also something to be said about the airlessness of celebrity discourse: the way it hovers just above the news cycle, scavenging for analogies, yet never quite grounded in study or seriousness. The impulse is not unique to India—American celebrities, too, are routinely lampooned for their tin-eared takes on war, race, and famine. The instinct, one supposes, is to appear politically sensitive, involved, pained. But performative equivalence rarely serves the public—it only serves the performer. What emerges, instead, is a grotesque theatre of grievance displacement, where the speaker becomes the victim, and the real victims are repurposed as metaphors.

But the most jarring dissonance lies in Sonu Nigam’s invocation of Kannada identity—as though a plea for linguistic recognition were akin to the bullets in Baisaran. For decades, the Kannada language movement has been an uphill negotiation with a centralised media culture that reflexively prizes Hindi. If a member of the audience demanded a Kannada song at a concert held in Karnataka, it was not a declaration of war—it was a cry for linguistic representation in a public space dominated by the North Indian cultural template. Nigam’s failure to recognise this history, even after decades of performing in the South, is not just a personal shortcoming—it is a symptom of how pan-Indian celebrities often parachute into linguistic geographies without understanding their terrain. What he reads as hostility was, more likely, frustration. A desire not to be erased.

To deploy that experience as a proxy for the Pahalgam attack is, then, a double error: first, of scale, and second, of content. One was a pushback against cultural hegemony, the other, an act of terror committed by a group whose motivations are rooted in transnational jihadist ideology, strategic destabilisation, and decades of complex geopolitics. There is no equivalence. None.

Vijay Devarakonda’s statement is no less troubling. His evocation of “tribal fights” to explain what happened in Kashmir reveals a folkloric reduction of real-world politics to macho parables. He might have been referring to factionalism in Telugu political or fan culture—a genre unto itself—but in the context of a terrorist attack, his language smacks of ethnographic trivialisation. “Tribal” becomes shorthand for irrational, emotional, and cyclical—precisely the kind of description that has long been used to dismiss non-modern societies as incapable of reasoned self-governance. Inadvertently, Devarakonda revives that trope.

The backlash against Devarakonda and Nigam was swift. Tribal associations condemned Deverakonda’s remarks, leading to a police complaint under the SC/ST Act . Nigam faced an FIR for his comments, with accusations of inciting linguistic hatred. Both celebrities issued apologies, stating that their intentions were misunderstood. However, the damage was done.

These incidents underscore the importance of responsible public discourse, especially when addressing issues of violence and cultural identity. Celebrities wield significant influence, and their words can either foster understanding or deepen divisions. In a diverse and complex society like India, where regional, linguistic, and religious identities intersect, sensitivity and context are paramount.

And yet, we live in an age where scale-blindness has become endemic. Where every personal slight is elevated to a universal wound, and every complaint is a cause célèbre. When entertainers co-opt tragedies to score rhetorical points about their own travails, what they offer is not solidarity—it is solipsism.

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