Bollywood celebrities willing to post political updates for money? New investigation claims 

In a new documentary titled Operation Karaoke, investigative news website Cobrapost has alleged that several Bollywood celebrities — including actors Vivek Oberoi, Shakti Kapoor, and Jackie Shroff, and singers Abhijeet Bhattacharya and Kailash Kher — agreed to promote politically favourable updates on social media for a fee. The website claimed to have approached these celebrities pretending to be a PR agency and offering them sizable commissions in exchange of sharing political posts as personal opinion.

Personalities who allegedly assented to these proposals, as listed by Cobrapost, also include: “singers Mika Singh and Baba Sehgal; actors Sonu Sood, Amisha Patel, Mahima Chaudhry, Shreyas Talpade, Puneet Issar, Surendra Pal, Pankaj Dheer and his son Nikitin Dheer, 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 these celebrities, Cobrapost claims, also agreed to share political content free of cost. However, actors Vidya Balan, Arshad Warsi, Raza Murad and Saumya Tandon were exempted from the list for turning down the propositions made by the investigators. The said political parties mentioned in these conversations were the Bharatiya Janata Party, Indian National Congress and Aam Admi Party.