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Do you remember the time Ramsha and Khushhal Khan got married and everyone on the internet made it their business? Well, Ramsha and Khushhal do, and it’s apparently what pushed Ramsha to quit social media.

Khushhal, in an interview with Hassan Choudary on Friday, explained that the pair weren’t intent on keeping their marriage secret — they simply wanted to announce it in a “decent, respectable way”.

“We’d personally decided to make it our private moment… On its due time, it was supposed to be announced, which it was.”

The actor maintained that the announcement from his side went out on the same day he married Ramsha, but not before visuals of the ceremony were leaked without their consent, which the then-bride called “invasive, disrespectful and completely unethical”.

Rejecting allegations that he made his wife quit social media, Khushhal said, “The internet thing, that decision, she took on her own after everything that happened and after the reaction that she saw.”

“I’ve had nothing to do with this whole thing. And I asked her, ‘Are you sure about this? Are you sure about the internet? Are you sure about the dramas?’ She was like, ‘I want this.’”

Khushhal said there wasn’t much on the internet that could hurt him because he’d been seeing it all from a very young age. The pair were, however, “baffled” by the amount of ethnically charged hate they received after the wedding.

The actor slammed the negative portrayal of the Pashtun ethnicity, calling it “wrong”.

“‘Pathans are regressive’ and this and that, and whatever else. Why do you call them that? I don’t understand that… I’ve never called Punjabis or Sindhis or Balochis like that, I’ve never looked at myself like that.”

Khushhal also questioned people’s double standards: “On the one hand, you all say, ‘To each their own. Everyone makes their own choices and decisions. Let them live; let them do this and that.’ But when we do that, you have a problem with it, why?”

The actor’s statements come months after a podcast from Choudary in August, where he claimed to have spoken to Ramsha about her departure from social media and the industry around the time her sister was getting married.

A number of comments on Ramsha’s sister’s wedding posts were simply the former actor’s fans questioning where she was, why she wasn’t in the wedding photos, and speculating over her marital dynamics. At one point, photos leaked from the wedding showing a masked couple were circulated, with fans speculating it may have been the pair.

Explaining her absence from pictures of her sister’s wedding, Choudary had said it was because Ramsha didn’t want to be on camera anymore, fearing it would have an impact on her mental health.