Director Anubhav Sinha on Monday tweeted an open letter directed at trolls who he claimed had attacked the trailer of his upcoming film Mulk, about a Muslim family that is forced to prove its loyalty to India after one of their members is found involved in a terror plot. In his post, Sinha said he pitied those who had criticised the movie, which examines institutionalised Islamophobia in the country and is said to be based on true events.

“You don’t have a name or face,” Sinha wrote in an open letter addressed to trolls. “Your family can’t tell anyone what you do. Your parents aren’t proud of you, your sister isn’t, your brother isn’t and worst, you don’t have a future.”

He added that the people whom trolls are attacking are “doing well for themselves”. “They come here whenever they can find time and go back to their lives and careers and you move on to the other target your master doesn’t like. You do this day in and day out. This, my friend, has never been a career in any part of the world,” he wrote.

Sinha also clarified that Mulk has not been funded by Dawood Ibrahim, Congress, or the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, as some users on Twitter have alleged. He also said that since he knew that the trolls would be “instructed to respond” to his open letter by their “masters”, he would take the opportunity to “plug” his film.

“Mulk is a very nice film,” he wrote. “It is not doing what you think it is doing. It is not about your masters. Hindus or Muslims. It is about you and it is about me and mostly it is about us. Please do write back the real nasty ones, but do go watch the film. You will still like it, because I know, a bit of you is still alive inside you.”

Produced by Banaras MediaWorks and Soham Rockstar Entertainment, Mulk stars Tapsee Pannu, Rishi Kapoor, Prateik Babbar, Ashutosh Rana and Rajat Kapoor. It will be released on August 3, the same day as Akarsh Khurana’s Karwaan and Atul Manjrekar’s Fanney Khan.

Sinha’s tweet sharing the Mulk trailer on July 9 had received several comments claiming that the film criticised Hindus or obfuscated the “history of terrorism”.

During the trailer launch, Pannu said that it is disturbing for her to see members of a single religion being targeted. “If somebody has to stand up to address the issue, then I would love to take the responsibility,” she said. “Doing this movie was a way of venting out how disturbed I felt because of how Muslims are treated.”