Sonu Sood,the Bollywood actor, who has been helping thousands of stranded migrants reach home, said that he has no intentions of joining any political party.

Actor Sonu Sood has been trending on the news and social media for several weeks now since he began his efforts to send home migrants stranded due to the lockdown. His growing popularity and the praise he has been receiving from various political quarters led to rumours that he would capitalise on this and might soon enter public life. In an interview with Gulf News, the actor put these rumours to rest saying he had no intentions to join politics.

In the interview, he said while he has been offered the chance to join political parties, he is happy being an actor. He is doing well in his career and wouldn’t trade it in politics, he said. The rumours had intensified over the past few days in the wake of his meeting the governor of Maharashtra. But he maintained that it was merely a goodwill gesture to acknowledge his efforts to transport stranded migrants back to their home.

There had been many rumours of him planning to join the BJP, specifically after he lent his support to Delhi BJP’s Mission Anivarya. Launched on May 16, the programme is working towards distributing free sanitary pads for poor urban women impacted by the coronavirus lockdown. But the actor has made it clear that he is not laying the foundations for a political career, in BJP or otherwise, through his charitable work. He has denied that there was no quid pro quo in the help he was given in this regard by governments and individuals.

Since the enforcement of the lockdown, millions of workers have been stranded thousands of kilometres from their homes and families. With no train or road transport available, desperate workers started walking the highways and crossing state lines in order to reach their villages. Sood has said that the plight of these people, who had worked tirelessly building homes and serving the middle class and elites in the city, moved him and he couldn’t sit back and do nothing.

He has been working towards organising those stranded, arranging transportation to their homes, and facilitating their return by working with various state governments. While he has been continually running buses to UP, Bihar, Jharkhand and Karnataka, he recently even started working with government to facilitate their return via trains. Over 1000 migrants who had reached out to him were put on two special trains to Bihar and UP, providing them with meal kits and sanitisers. He also arranged for a private flight to airlift 117 women from Odisha who were stranded in Kerala. He has set up a toll-free number where migrants can contact his team for assistance and has been fielding requests continually over the past weeks.