Operation Karaoke Bollywood Stars Exposed Ready to Promote for Cash
Explained Operation Karaoke Bollywood Stars Exposed Ready to Promote for Cash Black Money
Tuesday, February 19, 1919
In an investigation, Cobrapost exposes three dozen Bollywood celebrities who are ready to promote a political party by posting favorable messages on their social media accounts to help create a buzz in the run-up to 2019 elections, all for money.
Representing a fictitious PR agency and taking on aliases, Cobrapost reporters approached these celebrities with a simple question: Would you 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.
The party in question was, in most of the cases, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) and the Congress Party in some cases
Celebrities said Yes to the proposals asking for a fee which ranged from Rs. 2 lakh to Rs. 50 lakh per message. Some even quoted a fee of Rs. 20 crore for an eight-month contract, and almost none of them said no to black money when we told them a bulk of their fee would be paid in cash.
Oberoi alone has about 3 million followers, for instance, Bhattacharya has more than 2 million followers, Amisha Patel has about 6 million and Mika Singh has 10 million
Sunny Leonne has more than 20 million
Just with one button press the message reaches to millions of fans of this stars.
Among these celebs are directors, actors, singers, stand-up comedians and dancers:
Following are the names who agreed to create a buzz.
1-Abhijeet Bhattacharya,
2-Kailash Kher,
3-Mika Singh
4-Baba Sehgal;
5-Jackie Shroff,
6-Shakti Kapoor,
7-Vivek Oberoi,
8-Sonu Sood,
9-Amisha Patel,
10-Mahima Chaudhry,
11-Shreyas Talpade,
12-Puneet Issar,
13-Surendra Pal, P
14-Pankaj Dheer and his son Nikitin Dheer,
15-Tisca Chopra,
16-Deepshikha Nagpal,
17-Akhilendra Mishra,
18-Rohit Roy,
19-Rahul Bhat,
20-Salim Zaidi,
21-Rakhi Sawant,
22-Aman Verma,
23-Hiten Tejwani and spouse Gauri Pradhan,
24-Evelyn Sharma,
25-Minissha Lamba,
26-Koena Mitra,
27-Poonam Pandey,
28-Sunny Leonne;
29-Raju Srivastava,
30-Sunil Pal,
31-Rajpal Yadav,
32-Upasana Singh,
33-Krushna Abhishek
34-Vijay Ishwarlal Pawar
35-choreographer Ganesh Acharya a
36-dancer Sambhavana Seth.
Below are the names of stars who said big NO -
1-Vidya Balan,
2-Arshad Warsi,
3-Raza Murad
4-Saumya Tandon
Cobrapost interactions with these celebs can be summed up as follows:
1-Celebs agreed to promote the party in question to create a favourable environment before 2019 general elections. Some of them even tweeted without having been paid any money to show their eagerness to our reporters.
2-Most of them were willing to accept the bulk of their fee in cash, which in other words means black money.
3-Celebs would tweak the content on various issues to be provided to them before posting the same on their social media profiles to make it look as their own.
4-They would defend the government even on controversial issues such as rapes and fatal accidents such as a bridge collapse here and there.
5-They were willing to sign a dummy contract for endorsement of products to disguise the real nature of the proxy political campaigning.
6-They agreed to send us their PAN and banking details, and many actually did so.
7-They swore to keep the entire exercise a secret, and the agenda hidden.
8-Some actors even proposed that they would proxy promote the political party in their press briefings during the promotion of a film or an event.
9-Some even proposed to post videos on social media and make them go viral with the help of their followers.
The investigation was made to expose the celebs willing to endorse a political agenda in return for monetary gains.
Minissha Lamba wanted her fee to be paid entirely in cash.
Aman Verma also wanted only cash.
Shakti Kapoor, who went to town praising demonetization, an avowed aim of which was to curtail black money, had the gumption to blurt, “Number one mein pedalo mat (Don’t pay in number one).” Pankaj Dheer, anther BJP acolyte, had this to say on cash, “I am very comfortable because in quench I am burdened till here.”
Bollywood, Mahima Chaudhary, for instance, demanded Rs. 1 crore for a single message. “BJP toh kuchh bhi de sakti hai. They can give one crore a month (The BJP can give you anything. They can give 1 crore a month),” she said.
Sonu Sood, on the other hand, quoted a price of Rs. 20 crore to undertake the assignment. Not satisfied with the fee we would put on his table, Sood demanded Rs. 2.50 crore a month, saying, Let me tell you directly … Since if I am talking to you … you see I think I shall work seriously. There can be five or seven [posts/tweets]. My messages will be very, very strong and nice. If I say I will do only four not five on a given day … I will repeat something written by somebody else, for example, and I will add my answer to it. Is that okay? I will do all that … but I feel that the price 1.5 crore you have quoted, it should be at least 2.5).”
Kailash Kher, who has given his voice to the title song of Swach Bharat Abhiyan, to our surprise cosied up to our team and accepted our proposition, even showing his willingness to accept black money.
Stand-up comedian Sunil Pal while agreeing to lampoon Rahul Gandhi gave us a live demo of how he would go about doing it. He said,
“What is this? Rahul Gandhi says our party did this and that in the past 60 years. ‘He says his grandmother worked to develop the country, his father worked to double it up and he says let him be the prime minister he would bring everything down … and Sonia is the mother of a cynic ’… I would make such videos, post on YouTube and share the same with you.”
In his eagerness to undertake the assignment, Pal even made some tweets, with one taking a dig at Rahul Gandhi.
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Tags – Operation Karaoke Cobrapost Names List Bollywood Stars Black Money BJP Congress
