Mumbai: The 70-year-old actor made the comments in a video interview with Karwan-e-Mohabbat India, shared on its YouTube channel on Sunday.
”I am really furious with the way divisions are being created, like the love jihad tamasha in UP. Firstly, the people who coined this phrase don’t know the meaning of the word jihad.
”I don’t think that anyone would be so stupid to actually believe that Muslims will overtake the Hindu population, it is unimaginable. For that, Muslims will have to have so many babies. So, this whole notion is unreal,” Shah said in the interview.
Last year in November, Uttar Pradesh became the first state in India to pass an ordinance against forcible or ”dishonest” religious conversions.
In the last few months, states like Haryana and Madhya Pradesh have also revealed plans to enact laws to counter alleged attempts to convert Hindu women to Islam in the guise of marriage, which political leaders often refer to as “love jihad”.
The ”Bandish Bandits” actor believes the term ”love jihad” stems from the idea of stigmatising inter-faith marriages and stop social interactions between Hindus and Muslims.
“They not only want to discourage inter-faith marriages but also curtail social interactions between Hindus and Muslims,” he added.
Shah, who is married to theatre-film actor Ratna Pathak Shah, said he always believed that his marriage to a Hindu woman would set a ”healthy precedent”.
“We have taught our children about every religion. But we have never told them that they belong to any particular religion. I always believed that these differences would slowly fade away. I believed that my marriage to a Hindu woman would set a healthy precedent. I don’t think this is wrong,” he said.
The actor said when he was about to tie the knot with the Ratna Pathak Shah, his mother had asked if he would want his would-be wife to convert to his religion and his answer was no.
