Bharatiya Janata Party General Secretary Kailash Vijayvargiya wants Bollywood to be renamed. He has started an online campaign #DontCallItBollywood, and said that he will write to Information and Broadcasting Minister Rajyavardhan Rathore to order a ban on the use of the word.
“A few days ago, filmmaker Subhash Ghai came to see me in the BJP headquarters,” Vijayvargiya told The Indian Express. “He [Ghai] told me that the Hindi film industry got the term Bollywood after the BBC called it so, to show that the films made here were just copies of Hollywood movies. We just adopted the term used to ridicule our film industry. We should stop it.”
The BJP leader said variants of Bollywood used to refer to the cinema of other Indian language film industries such as Kollywood, Mollywood, Tollywood should also be discontinued. Vijayvargiya said they would be referred by the name of the language instead.
“In 1998, the then National Democratic Alliance government under Atalji [former Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee] conferred industry status on the Indian film industry, and freed it from the shackles of the mafia and its illegal finances,” The Hindu quoted Vijayvargiya as saying. “Now, institutional finance is available to make films, and the change is showing in terms of the clean-up that has happened. This NDA government could also contribute to the change in the way the industry is named, something that will reflect self-respect and pride.”
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