‘Rannvijay told me the slap should be heard till Petronas Towers’: Ex-Roadies winner Ashutosh Kaushik defends slapping Shambhavi in finale

Also read – Roadies winner Ashutosh Kaushik recalls how he always clashed with Raghu, refused to take his abuses: ‘You’re respected till I don’t abuse you back’

Ashutosh said that he even agreed to get slapped in return, although he didn’t have to. The fault, he said, was of the producers who came up with the task, and of his opponent, who sent a woman to be slapped by him. He said that he didn’t feel any backlash from the public; in fact, most people told him that he’d done the right thing. Questioning Shambhavi’s character, he said that she would flirt with male contestants in order to get ahead in the show, and that he wanted her to stop calling him her brother because of this. He said that there were no hard feelings between him and Shambhavi after the task, and that they would probably greet each other warmly if they crossed paths today.

Previously, Raghu addressed the controversy around the slap, and admitted that the task wasn’t well thought out. He told Rediff.com, “It was a mistake. In the finale, there were two boys left, and we brought back the rest of the Roadies for the last bit. And the point was for each of the boys to convince his teammates to do tasks that would make him win… Our guess was that people would not come forward to do the task, because there was enough animosity between them… But we were surprised when people started falling over themselves to do the tasks.”