Bollywood stars exposed for promoting politicians for money: report

Indian investigative website Cobrapost has alleged that several Bollywood celebrities took money to promote political narratives of particular parties on social media.

In most cases, the party was the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Cobrapost claimed.

The website stated that it conducted an investigation, “Operation Karaoke”, posing as employees of a fictitious public relations agency and using aliases. The sting operation revealed that playback singers Abhijeet Bhattacharya, Kailash Kher, Mika Singh and Baba Sehgal, actors Jackie Shroff, Shakti Kapoor, Vivek Oberoi, Sonu Sood, Amisha Patel, Mahima Chaudhry, Shreyas Talpade, Puneet Issar, Surendra Pal, Pankaj Dheer and his son Nikitin Dheer were willing to post favourable messages on social media for political parties in exchange for money.

Other actors who were on this list included Tisca Chopra, Deepshikha Nagpal, Akhilendra Mishra, Rohit Roy, Rahul Bhat, Salim Zaidi, Rakhi Sawant, Aman Verma, Hiten Tejwani and spouse Gauri Pradhan, Evelyn Sharma, Minissha Lamba, Koena Mitra, Poonam Pandey, Sunny Leone, comedians Raju Srivastava, Sunil Pal, Rajpal Yadav, Upasana Singh, Krushna Abhishek and Vijay Ishwarlal Pawar, and choreographer Ganesh Acharya and dancer Sambhavana Seth.

Some of the stars also agreed to post such messages without payment, the report added.

However, some celebrities, including Vidya Balan, Arshad Warsi, Raza Murad and Saumya Tandon, refused to promote any political party, Cobrapost said.