A poster of upcoming Bollywood film “Madam Chief Minister” featuring the film’s lead actress Richa Chadha (Masaan) smeared with dust and holding a broom with captions “Untouchable Unstoppable” has evoked mixed reactions and stirred up casteism debate on social media.

The political drama, directed by Subhash Kapoor (Jolly LLB 2) and co-produced by T-Series Films (Ludo), is set to release in cinemas on 22 January.

Many Twitter users praised the poster and appreciated the actress for playing the role of a woman from a marginalised community, however some netizens criticised the makers for not casting an actress from the marginalised community for the lead role and accused Ms Chadha of stereotyping the marginalised community by portraying them as street sweepers in the image. Some social media users also commented that the actress was “glamourising” the marginalised in the poster.

The actress defended the poster in her responses to the criticism levelled at her and labelled her critics as “people that haven’t the faintest clue about how films are made and cast” whilst terming the criticism as “ridiculous”, “misdirected” and “premature.”

In a series of follow-up tweets, the 34-year-old Filmfare Award-winning actress gave her critics an option to “cancel” her and instead watch “nubile starkid play this part with brownface and Bandra-accented Hindi and outrage properly next time.”

“Madam Chief Minister” follows a young women from the lowest class of the Indian caste system who fights her way up the political ladder and becomes the Chief Minister of an Indian state.

The caste system in India is a birth-based stratification of the society into social classes where people on the lowest rung of the social hierarchy are regarded as “untouchables” and have been marginalised and discriminated against by the upper classes for centuries. Followers of the caste system believe that the caste that people are born into is based on the good and bad deeds that they have performed in their previous birth.

The Indian government officially outlawed the caste system in 1949, however Indian politicians have been guilty of taking advantage of the ancient process and applying divide-and-rule tactics for political benefits.