New Delhi: Dozens of Mumbai stars, just short of the Bollywood A-list, have been caught on camera offering to post political propaganda in exchange for payments in cash, ahead of the 2019 national elections.
The subjects of the undercover string are star actors – Sunny Leone, Jackie Shroff, Sonu Sood, Amisha Patel, Rakhi Sawant, Mahima Chaudhry, Shreyas Talpade, Puneet Issar, Tisca Chopra, Rohit Roy, Minissha Lamba, Vivek Oberoi – the playback singers Abhijeet Bhattacharya, Kailash Kher, Mika Singh and Baba Sehgal; the comedians Raju Srivastava, Sunil Pal and Rajpal Yadav; and the choreographer Ganesh Acharya.
Last year, CobraPost conducted
a similar exposé of large media houses, which agreed to propagate pro-Hindutva programming for a price. Many of the subjects of the new sting, titled ‘Operation Karaoke’, are media powerhouses in their own right. Their online followings run into millions – Sunny Leone alone has a Twitter following just short of four million.
The fees they demanded for political promotions, Cobrapost said, ranged Rs 2 lakh to Rs 50 lakh per message. “Some even quoted a fee of Rs 20 crore for an eight-month contract,” said Cobrapost chief Aniruddh Bahal.
Many artists asked to be paid in cash. Bahal said the new sting, coming six years after the portal investigated black money in Bollywood, proved nothing has changed in the entertainment industry.
Four notable exceptions – actors Vidya Balan, Arshad Warsi, Raza Murad and Saumya Tandon – refused to take the bait or post content to mislead fans about their genuine beliefs.
New side gig for the B-list
Cobrapost said its reporters approached 36 celebrities posing as employees of a public relations firm, representing three major parties – the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the Congress and the Aam Aadmi Party. In most cases, they approached the star artists through their official agents or managers.
The reporters asked if the celebrities would be willing to promote a political party discreetly on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. “Almost all of the above celebs concurred to do it for a fee,” said Bahal. “Some of them even tweeted, without having been paid, to show their eagerness to our reporters.”
They also offered to personally tweak the content to make it look more like their own genuine opinion.
The celebrities offered to “defend the government even on controversial issues,” Cobrapost said, and to “sign a dummy contract for endorsement of products to disguise the real nature of the proxy political campaigning”.
The portal said not only did these celebrities offered to keep the entire exercise a secret, they also offered “promote the political party in their press briefings during the promotion of a film or an event”.
Many stars wanted only cash
Some stars, like actor and model Minissha Lamba, TV personality Aman Verma and actor Shakti Kapoor, allegedly asked to be paid the entire amount in cash – a way of avoiding any tax liability on their fee.
Lamba was allegedly disappointed when she learned that at least 20% of her fee would be in white. “Lekin aapne mujhe bola tha ki saara cash hoga (But you had told me payment will be made entirely in cash),” she said.