A viral graphic on Instagram claiming Swara Bhasker said she gained weight to avoid being killed by her husband politician Fahad Ahmad, is fake and has been falsely attributed to the actor.
Bhasker in a message to BOOM confirmed that the quote is false. She said, "It is totally fake and the right-wing handles are amplifying it."
An Instagram post claimed that in a candid interview Bhasker said she gained weight so that Ahmad could not fit 'her into a suitcase or fridge' (after killing her). See the post here and the archive here.
The misattributed quote is a cryptic reference to the 2022 Shraddha Walkar murder case. Walkar was killed by her live-in partner Aaftab Poonawala who stored her dismembered body parts inside a fridge in the house they stayed at in Delhi. BOOM has debunked misinformation surrounding the crime.
Quote is totally fake: Swara Bhasker
We first ran a related keyword search but did not find any recent interviews of Bhasker where she has spoken about gaining weight and linking the same to Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) Sharad Pawar faction member and her husband Fahad Ahmad.
In June, 2024 she called out Amar Ujala, a Hindi news outlet, for an article which linked her postpartum weight gain to not getting acting roles in the film industry.
We then reached out to Bhasker, who rubbished the graphic. "This is totally fake. Right wing handles are picking up and circulating the same."
In the past, while sharing photographs of her court marriage, Bhasker had taken a dig at trolls who linked the interfaith wedding to incidents of intimate partner violence. She had referred to 'suitcase, fridge, illegitimate, conversion' in an X post aimed at bigoted comments about her relationship.