SP's Abu Azmi fumes at MNS over 'Taarak Mehta' row, calls it goondaism & demands action

Taarak Mehta Ka Ooltah Chashmah has been a household name in India for a number of years. The SAB TV show which has been running since 2008 has a massive fan following. However, it recently landed in controversy as Raj Thackeray's Maharashtra Navanirman Sena (MNS) on Tuesday issued a warning to the makers of Indian daily soap over an episode that claimed that Hindi was the common language of Mumbai, rather than Marathi. 

READ:  MNS Threatens Makers Of Taarak Mehta For Calling Hindi 'language Of Mumbai'

SP MLA Abu Azmi lashes out at MNS 

In an exclusive conversation with Republic TV, Samajwadi Party's (SP) MLA Abu Azmi slammed Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS). Tagging the threats as 'wrong' & 'goondaism', he said, "You can tell them with love and care that this is Maharashtra and Marathi should be used as a dialect here. But then if you do a survey then there are a lot of people who speak Hindi and Urdu". He further added that none of the politicians to date have made it compulsory and informed that in several schools, students, when asked to pick a foreign language, choose French. 

While his assertion of nobody having made Marathi compulsory no longer stands - owing to a recent endeavour of the Uddhav government - when asked if action should be taken in such situations, i.e. against the MNS' goondaism, Azmi said, "Definitely, these people have no right to do this. They are insulting the country's language and they don't understand that nobody is insulting the Marathi language, but there are so many people who come here from different countries and states who do not know the dialect so there's nothing that can be done" 

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Earlier on Tuesday, MNS Chitrapat Sena workers landed up at the house of Amit Bhatt and asked him to apologise over the dialogue. The actor plays the character of protagonist Jethalal’s father in the TV episode. Maharashtra Navnirman Film wing’s Chief Ameya Khopkar also accused the makers of spreading ‘propaganda’ though the dialogue and how Maharashtrian artists working on the show might have felt it as an ‘insult’. He even threatened to teach them a lesson. 

General Secretary of MNS, Shalini Thackeray threatened to give Marathi ‘suvichar’ below their ears, referring to a slap. 

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