Fact Check: Was SRK's father one of the youngest freedom fighters in the Quit India Movement?
Bollywood actor Shah Rukh Khan has been in the news ever since his son Aryan was arrested in connection with a drug case.
By Tejal Sinha Published on 27 Oct 2021 2:30 PM GMT
Shah Rukh was born in 1965 and the Quit India Movement started in 1942.
According to one Twitter user, the news clipping claims that Shah Rukh's father was 30 years old when he was born. This means Mir Taj Mohammad Khan was born in 1935 and at the time of the Quit India movement he would have been around six years old.
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Fact Check
The claim is misleading.
NewsMeter read the newspaper clipping carefully. It said that before Partition, at the age of 16, Shah Rukh's father left Peshawar, moved to Delhi, and joined the freedom movement of Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan. However, nowhere was it mentioned that Mir Taj Mohammad was 30 years old when Shah Rukh was born.
The article was written by Affan Nomani for the Hind News newspaper and published on 6 October 2021. Nomani had shared the news clipping on his Facebook page and wrote, "Peshawar-born Mir Taj Mohammed Khan left Peshawar and returned to Delhi at the age of 16 before partitioning. Participated in the freedom war by joining the movement of Khan Abdul Gaffar Khan (sic)."
On 27 October 2014, on the occasion of his father's birth anniversary, Shah Rukh Khan had tweeted that had his father been alive, he would have been 87 (in 2014). This means that the actor's father was born in 1927 and hence in 1942 he would have been 15 years old.
A report by Times of India titled "Shah Rukh Khan: Lesser known facts about the Baadshah's family" said, "SRK's father was a prominent 'Quit India movement' activist".
Another report by Hindustan Times quoted Delhi-based Trilochan Singh, a freedom fighter who described himself as an "old colleague of Khan's late father", as saying, "Shah Rukh Khan's father got involved in the freedom struggle during the Quit India years when he was a school student. He was with me for a while in Peshawar Jail in 1943. He was an acclaimed and highly appreciated public speaker. Taj Mir's elder brother, Ghulam Mohd Gama, was a spirited freedom fighter and rabidly anti–Muslim League."
It is therefore evident that the claim made through the viral post is misleading. Shah Rukh Khan's father was born in 1927 and would have been around 16 years old during the Quit India Movement in 1942. The posts claiming that he was six years old during the movement are false.
