MUMBAI, March 18: Bollywood stalwarts flexed their muscle on Friday, denying there is a ?casting couch? in the Indian entertainment industry as claimed by a private television network following a series of sting operations. Top Bollywood stars and directors descended on the well-known Mehboob studio here to vent their anger against India TV for broadcasting programmes that purport to have caught popular actors demanding sex from a reporter who posed as an aspiring actress.

Top stars Salman Khan, Sanjay Dutt, actor-turned-parliamentarian Govinda, producer-director Ravi Chopra, David Dhawan, Sunil Darshan and Pahlaj Nihalani joined hands to protest the sting operations, calling them an invasion of privacy.

In the past week, Indian TV has broadcast footage of actors Shakti Kapoor and Aman Verma demanding sex and making passes at a female journalist whom they met separately. The journalist, known only as Ruchi, had met them saying she wanted to be an actress.

?These are well planned traps by the channel to malign us and in the bargain increase its viewer ratings,? said Salman Khan. ?There is no casting couch in Bollywood. How is it that this reporter Ruchi goes only to actors for roles and not producers when it is well known that it is the producers and directors who offer roles and not the actors??

After Shakti Kapoor?s expose, the television station interviewed a number of aspiring actresses with at least two of them pointing fingers at known film-makers, saying they too had made similar demands of them.?AFP