For weeks after Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi Season 2 returned to Star Plus on July 29, Indian television was buzzing with one question — has Anupamaa finally met its match?
TRP comparisons were flying. Fan armies were clashing online. And the media was serving up a full-blown saas-bahu showdown between two of the biggest shows in Indian TV history.
But Anupamaa producer Rajan Shahi just sat down with Film Window and told a very different story. One where there is no rivalry, no bitterness — and one very uncomfortable truth about who was actually trying to stir the pot.
The Message That Started It All
When Kyunki came back, Shahi did not fire back at the competition. He picked up his phone and wrote Ekta Kapoor a message.
Not a short one, either. According to Shahi, the message ran 30 to 40 lines long. In it, he told Ekta that he and his mother had been among the original show’s biggest fans, and that he was genuinely happy his daughter would now grow up watching it the same way they did.
Ekta replied warmly. And then, sometime later, she went a step further.
She called him.
“Rajan, I always want Anupamaa to be number one,” she told him over the phone.
Shahi described it as one of the sweetest things anyone has said to him in the industry. And considering the noise swirling around at the time, it clearly meant a lot.
So Who Was Actually Creating The War?
Here is where the story gets sharp.
Shahi confirmed that in the first week of Kyunki 2’s launch, both shows had clocked a TRP of 2.3. He was fine with that — two strong shows doing well at the same time felt like a good thing for Indian television overall.
But then something else started happening.
He revealed that certain unnamed agencies began calling journalists directly and telling them not to mention Anupamaa as a number one show — even when the numbers clearly showed it was. This happened not once, but two to three times, and Shahi says it was a deliberate attempt to make it look like Anupamaa had been dethroned.
In his own words: the whole thing was being “designed.”
What made it worse was the timing angle. Kyunki 2 had launched mid-week, so its TRP was calculated over four days while Anupamaa’s was averaged over the full seven. A shorter window naturally inflates numbers — and yet the projection being pushed out was that both shows had tied, and soon after, that Kyunki had taken the top spot.
Shahi says what genuinely upset him was not the competition itself — it was the dishonesty of how the narrative was being shaped. And Ekta Kapoor, once again, was the one who cleared the air.
“Rajan, mujhe bilkul pasand nahi hai yeh cheez jo ho rahi hai,” she told him — making it clear she had nothing to do with the manufactured rivalry and did not want any part of it.
His Verdict On Ekta And Smriti
Whatever anyone says about TRPs, Shahi’s respect for Ekta Kapoor comes through unmistakably.
He credited her with being the person who gave Indian television the respectability it deserved — saying that without Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi and Ekta’s body of work, shows like Anupamaa would not even exist. The same respect extends to Smriti Irani, who led the original Kyunki as Tulsi Virani and is back for the reboot.
“She is a legend. The shows Ekta ji has made are landmarks,” he said, adding that when TRPs fluctuate between the two shows, it is not a battle — it is a tribute to what both shows represent.
The Rupali Ganguly Revelation That Hit Differently
Just when the interview seemed like it was wrapping up, Shahi went somewhere nobody expected.
For a long time now, there has been chatter that actors have been exiting Anupamaa because of lead actress Rupali Ganguly — that on-set tensions with her were driving cast members away. Several prominent names including Sudhanshu Pandey, Gaurav Khanna and Madalsa Sharma have left the show over the past year or so, and Rupali’s name kept coming up in the whisper network.
Shahi shut all of that down — but not just by defending her. He revealed something far more serious.
Rupali, he said, was not the problem. She was the target.
He described her as a “soft target” — someone certain insecure actors chose to aim at because she was the most visible person on set. And then he said something that stopped the conversation cold: there were moments on the sets of Anupamaa where Rupali Ganguly was body shamed by certain people.
He called it wrong. Completely wrong. He acknowledged that incidents did take place, that a lot of conversations happened around them — but that things were resolved by the next day each time.
The picture it paints is of a lead actress who has been quietly carrying far more than her on-screen role while continuing to show up and deliver, every single episode, for years.
