Shilpa Shetty - The Biography. Julie Aspinall
sight.
Inside the house, Shilpa said she thought the bullying was not racist; outside, meanwhile, Jade was dropped as the face of an anti-bullying campaign, while Debenhams and The Perfume Shop withdrew her scent from sale. Shortly afterwards, it was announced that the paperback edition of her autobiography was not going to be published on the expected date. Despite her quite despicable behaviour, Jade became a figure to be pitied. She was as manipulated as everyone else. The creation of reality television, she was now being savaged by the beast that made her famous.
Danielle’s career looked to be in equally dire straits, with urgent damage limitation going on outside. Angela de Fouw, her spokesperson, leaped to her client’s defence. ‘Danielle would be distraught to have been associated or linked with any form of alleged racism,’ she said. ‘Many of Danielle’s closest friends are from multi-cultural backgrounds and are of diverse races. Danielle is the last person who would condone any form of racism or bullying.’ But it was all too late.
Given the dignity and grace displayed by Shilpa within the house, it came as no surprise that her mother took an equally gracious view. ‘I actually fear for Jade’s safety,’ she said. ‘After the way she’s behaved, I know there are a lot of angry people out to get her – and not just Shilpa’s fans and fellow Indians. I’m getting calls from people all over the world, all colours and backgrounds who are disgusted by her comments. We are praying to God for Jade’s wellbeing, spiritually and physically. I have no rancour in my heart for Jade. She’s just an ignorant girl who knows very little about other people’s cultures. It’s sad, but I would not want to see anything bad happen.’
She was not, however, anything like as forgiving towards the programme makers, who she saw as putting Shilpa through an unforgivable ordeal. ‘It is an ugly and vulgar show which has run its course,’ she said. ‘It must end with this one. There is already enough conflict in the world. We don’t need to create it artificially and call it entertainment. This has been one of the most unpleasant events I have encountered on television. I don’t mind some friction – it is inevitable when you create this kind of environment. But the show is deeply flawed. They should have provided firm guidelines from the start to ensure a level of respect for other people’s culture. Instead, they turned it into a combat zone, which left my child exposed and vulnerable. Nobody warned us this could happen.’
No one had realised what could happen either and in time Sunanda was able to take reassurance from the fact that Shilpa was practically guaranteed a hero’s welcome on her return to her home country (to say nothing of the fact that she was now world famous). ‘It is already clear that she will be welcomed as a hero,’ she said. ‘Shilpa has always been adored here. She puts her fame in the country of her birth above everything. I want to march into the house and take her out. And if she leaves I will be there to hug her and tell her I love her.’
The message, as far as Jade was concerned, continued to be one of forgiveness. ‘Shilpa is such a positive human being she always bounces back and she cannot have anything to do with negativity,’ said her spokesman Dale Bhagwagar. ‘She believes in moving on and not having negative thoughts, and when she gets out of the Big Brother house she will want to meet up with Jade and her mother Jackiey, go to their houses and show she does not hold any grudges. She is just as likely to invite Jade to India to see the country for herself. Shilpa is a very warm and spiritual person. If someone really hurt her, all she would do is ignore them and treat them as if they never existed.’
Sunanda also, rather understandably, wanted to question her daughter’s tormentors. Whatever their motivation – racism, jealousy, class conflict – their behaviour reeked of the worst excesses of the school playground. Even allowing for the fact that Shilpa could come across as a mite high-handed, absolutely nothing could excuse their treatment of her, especially the way in which she, one person, was picked on by a gang that at times numbered five.
‘What I’d like to ask the members of the family who have been abusing Shilpa is why?’ she continued. ‘They have acted like school bullies. If I meet either when I come to London, I’d say the same thing but I am not going to hunt them down. I have always brought my daughters up to be respectful of others. That’s clearly not the case with Jade. The people who have racially abused Shilpa are jealous of her looks and are clearly ill educated. I don’t believe these opinions reflect that of the British public. We have been to London dozens of times and are always treated well.’
Shilpa’s father Surendra, 57, was also looking forward to seeing his daughter. ‘We are both looking to travel to London next week,’ he said.
Of course, the Shettys were not alone in their dismay at what had been done. Britain’s entire political establishment, never slow to leap on a bandwagon, had already had their say, with real concerns in many quarters about how Britain came across to the outside world. But many were upset on a personal level, too. Film director Ken Russell, initially himself a housemate, who had been driven out by the sheer vulgarity of the Goodys, was horrified at what had been going on. ‘Later, when her [Jade’s] mother was ignominiously sent off, I thought things might improve,’ he wrote. ‘Not a bit of it. I watched, appalled, as Jade vented her wrath at the most sanguine person in the house – the divine Shilpa. Not only that, but Jade also impressed two cohorts to join her in the persecution.’
Jade by now was well and truly aware of what she’d done. A mea culpa world tour ensued, as she desperately tried to backtrack – very ironically, she herself is of mixed race as her paternal grandfather was black – apologising for her behaviour and voicing utter regret. A visit to India to apologise to the entire nation was planned, as she went from one television studio to the next in an effort to exonerate herself.
‘No, I’m not a racist, but I accept I made racist comments,’ she said in one no-holds barred interview with a Sunday newspaper. ‘I don’t see people for the colour that they are, or where they come from. I’m mixed race myself and I speak to everyone of every colour, background and nationality. I don’t care about where people are from. I’m not going to justify my actions because they were wrong. I was shocked to see how I behaved. I was shocked and disgusted at myself.’
Indeed, she seemed absolutely determined to come up with every criticism of her own behaviour that she could think of before anyone else got the chance to say it for her. ‘I don’t know why I said those things to her or why those words came into my head,’ she said. ‘I wasn’t thinking in my head a nasty thought. I’m not making excuses because I know that it’s wrong. I now know that it’s offensive. Maybe I’m just really stupid and nasty at heart, but I really don’t think I am. My anger when I watched it on the screen shocked me. I didn’t like it; I didn’t know that my presence could be so intimidating or bullying.’
As a matter of fact, Jade did slightly understand the reason why she behaved in the way that she did, even though she had some difficulty enunciating it. Her background could not have been more different from Shilpa’s, and it was clearly that, combined with jealousy, that provoked her in the way that it did. One of the sad things about the whole affair is the way she demeaned herself so much. In some ways, she had been an admirable figure up until then – she used the only means available to her, reality television, to haul herself up out of poverty and resolutely failed to blame the system that had deprived her. But now, she clearly saw that her background had come back to haunt her, and she might as well confront that head on.
‘I’ve never blamed my past for anything I’ve done, but I don’t know any other way,’ she said (and what a condemnation of the way Britain has allowed an underclass to develop was there). ‘My only way to argue is to shout – to get louder and louder so that I can’t hear what they’re saying. It’s the way I am. I didn’t know it was a problem until I watched it. I don’t want people to be scared of me, or think that I’m intimidating. I hold my hand up to my comments and to people reading them or hearing them and thinking I’m a racist. I can understand why those words would look racist because I didn’t get on particularly well with Shilpa. It’s offensive to her and her culture. I didn’t think “poppadom” was a racist word. I now know that things that I may not think are racist can actually be racist. It’s my own fault for not knowing enough about other people’s