The whole Sonu Nigam-Azaan issue

Shave off his head, said a cleric, enraged by Sonu Nigam's tweet on loud sermons. So the Bollywood playback singer did just that -- at a press conference on Wednesday he had himself tonsured by a celebrity hairstylist.

He had called the press to talk about his tweets on Monday which led to an online furore and a fatwa being issued against him by the Kolkata-based cleric, Syed Sha Atef Ali Al Quaderi.

His intention, he pointed out, was not to hurt anybody's sentiments. "If I have done anything wrong, please forgive me. My intention was just to talk on a social topic and not a religious topic," he added.

The singer said it was wrong to focus on one particular tweet where he described the broadcasting of sermons on loudspeakers as 'gundagardi' (hooliganism).

"People took one tweet of mine where I mentioned 'gundagardi' and ignored other tweets where I also talked about temples and gurudwaras," he said.

Nigam said if anyone thought him -- a person who considered the singer, Mohammed Rafi, as his father, and whose guru was Ustad Gulam Mustafa Khan -- as anti-Muslim, then "it is not my problem, but theirs."

People these days, he said, were either left-wingers or right-wingers, so a "secular" person like him was in a minority.

"I am a secular person, a neutral person. You will rarely find people who are neutral. So, I am the minority here."

Two man were stabbed in Gopalpura, Madhya Pradesh, after one of them took to Facebook in support of Sonu Nigam's comments on the use of loudspeakers for Azaan, the Muslim call for prayer.

Shivam Rai, who posted a comment on Facebook regarding the issue, was allegedly threatened on the phone by two men and told to come to the Freeganj area. Rai and his friend Ayush Shreewas were attacked on arrival with knives. The two were later admitted to a district hospital; Shreewas was reportedly seriously injured.

A case of attempted murder under Section 307 of the IPC has been filed against the accused, Mohammad Nagori and Faizan Khan, the Madhavnagar police station in-charge MS Parmar, according to a report in the Hindustan Times.

Earlier this week, Sonu Nigam stirred controversy after going on a Twitter rant against the use of loudspeakers at Mosques, calling it 'forced religiousness' and 'gundagardi'.