Piyush Mishra has posted a sharp video calling out Naseeruddin Shah for what he describes as selective activism. The clip comes after Shah was seen with Abhijeet Dipke at The Cockroach Janata Party (CJP) protest in Mumbai’s Shivaji Park, where demonstrators demanded the resignation of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar.
Mishra, who opens the video by describing himself as an old acquaintance of Shah, does not question the protest appearance itself. Instead, he asks why Shah’s public support has not extended to three other incidents that also drew national attention.
Three silences Mishra wants addressed
The first concerns Captain Smit Machchhar, the Flydubai pilot on Flight 1073 from Dubai to Tel Aviv who is credited with saving 174 lives after being stabbed by his co-pilot. Mishra asks Shah to acknowledge Machchhar’s bravery and send a word of appreciation.
He then moves to the incident at Lovely Professional University, where he says students faced a difficult situation, and asks Shah to speak to them as well.
The third is the Jharkhand student protest. Mishra says he had personally sought Shah’s support for the protesters but received no meaningful backing.
- Flydubai pilot Smit Machchhar, hailed for saving passengers mid-flight.
- LPU students, after the campus incident he described in the video.
- Jharkhand student protesters, who he says needed practical help.
Poems, not pizza or burgers
Mishra says that when he asked Shah for help on Jharkhand, the actor sent him a poem by a Pakistani poet. His response in the video is blunt: the protesters wanted flour, lentils, bread and jaggery. “They didn’t want pizza or burgers,” he adds.
That contrast is the emotional centre of the video. Where the CJP protest drew online food deliveries from across the country, Mishra claims the Jharkhand protest did not receive the same kind of support.
An older disagreement, now in public
This is not the first time the two have clashed. During the NEET protests in Delhi, Shah had questioned the silence of Bollywood celebrities. He told The Wire that celebrities speak “when their conscience tells them to,” and used the saying about a dog with a bone in its mouth.
Mishra, who attended the Jharkhand protest, had flipped that line back at him, asking who the dogs with bones in their mouths were at that moment. The new video gives that argument a wider social media stage.
Why the call-out matters to fans
For an audience that follows Bollywood as closely as it follows the news, this is a test of consistency. Shah has long been one of Hindi cinema’s most prominent voices on public issues, but Mishra’s argument is that a platform can look selective when it amplifies some causes and not others.
Whether Shah responds or stays quiet, the video has already turned a single Mumbai protest appearance into a wider question about whose struggles get celebrity attention.
Source: Hindustan Times
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