NEW DELHI: While it is not unusual for Indian movie stars to support political parties or express communal or secular perspectives, a sting operation revealed on Tuesday a whole lot of them are willing to take political sides for a whopping fee.

According to CobraPost, a well regarded portal with several sting operations to its credit, 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 sting 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; playback singers Abhijeet Bhattacharya, Kailash Kher, Mika Singh and Baba Sehgal; comedians Raju Srivastava, Sunil Pal, Rajpal Yadav and choreographer Ganesh Acharya.

The fees they demanded for political promotions, CobraPost said, ranged from INR 2 million ($28,000) to INR 5 million ($70,000) per message. “Some even quoted a fee of [INR] Rs 20 crore [$2.8 million] for an eight-month contract,” thewire.in news portal quoted CobraPost chief Aniruddh Bahal as saying. 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.

Published in Dawn, February 20th, 2019