By Venkatesh Raghavan
Mumbai: The recent Raj Kundra case, where the Mumbai Crime Branch sleuths claimed they acted on information about women being coerced into performing lewd sexual acts after getting lured by promises of plum film roles is now cited as the tip of the proverbial iceberg when it comes to sexual exploitation of women hailing from a vulnerable class of society. It may be mentioned that after spending two months in jail, Raj Kundra, husband of cine star Shilpa Shetty, is now out of Mumbai jail after a metropolitan magistrate’s court granted him bail in adult films case on September 20, 2021.
In a recent case that came to light over social media network, a woman who was yearning to be comforted reportedly fell for the trap. Her religious mentor cautioned her not to inform anything even to her close family members. Having learnt that she lived in a joint family, he asked her to perform her ‘vidhi’ (a Hindu ritual) inside the bathroom.
Consequently, she parted with her nude pictures, releasing them in the late night hours. She was led into believing that she was God’s chosen and no one should learn about it. Subsequently, what followed was an endless nightmare and the woman was at a loss to fathom whom to trust. Of late, many single and married women have formed social help groups to combat this menace.
According to regular informers who cater to the intelligence gathering network of the police force, there are scores of people who use the mushrooming usage of social media platforms to their advantage by preying on their unsuspecting victims. The modus operandi that came to light when in conversation was that of using the religious sentiments of the unsuspecting victim or woman to gain her trust and patronage.
The predators constantly watch the kind of posts that the users participate in. If there is a strong religious bent of mind that gets thrown up, they keep feeding the unsuspecting women with information about religious rituals, mantras and how to propitiate deities of their choice. Over a period of time, the woman starts trusting in the source of religious mentoring. Consequently, there comes a stage where she looks up to her ‘mentor’ for solutions to problems she faces in her personal life.
Subsequently, the conversation shifts to the various chakras in our body and how their getting activated can benefit the woman in her personal and professional life. For this purpose, the woman is first encouraged to post her photographs and later parts of her body, before she is made to part with full nude photographs of herself. Once past this stage, the blackmail begins to happen and the woman is helpless as she has dispatched her nude photographs on her own accord without any proof to convey the contrary.
Using this blackmail weapon as a peg, many women are forced into performing intimate sexual acts as desired by their predators for fear of being exposed to their family members or friends. Many who bite this bait are unable to escape owing to the social and peer pressures they have to put up with. Consequently, nude women performing sex with men get captured on camera for near dirt cheap rates and the porn matter finds wide distribution in the India’s domestic markets.
Whereas, in the current case that came to light with the police receiving complaints early February this year from women who alleged that they were coerced into performing sex under the pretext of giving them a break in the film industry, more women felt emboldened to lodge their complaints, the women who get trapped by the “religious mafia” dare not complaint for fear of being stigmatized.
The police informer also revealed that there are currently many women, not only in Mumbai, but also pan India who are forced to suffer in silence owing to their gullible trusting nature. “Formerly, there used to be a craze among the cine-goers for Malayalam movies that had a reputation for exhibiting explicit sexual acts. Now however, the tide has turned with porn movies being made and available in all regional languages including Bhojpuri,” he added.
– global bihari bureau
