Poonam Dhillon and Padmini Kolhapure, whose conduct as president and senior vice president of the Cine and TV Artistes’ Association had become the bone of contention leading to mass resignation of its executive committee members, faced miserable defeat at the elections of the Association, held today (September 12) in Bombay. Not a single member of their team made it to the executive committee. The team of Deepak Parasher and Upasna Singh romped home victorious, winning 14 of the 15 seats. It was this team which was allegedly against the working of Dhillon and Kolhapure, whom they described as being “autocratic” and whose working they called “devoid of transparency”. One seat went to the Vijeta team led by Jitendra Sabu.
It may be mentioned here that Upasna Singh was the first to blow the lid off the brewing tension among the executive committee members of the CINTAA. She had made a video last month in which she revealed that eight elected members of the executive committee of CINTAA and three co-opted members had resigned to protest against the alleged high-handedness of Dhillon and Kolhapure. Soon thereafter, the Federation of Western India Cine Employees (FWICE), which is the parent Association of the CINTAA, announced fresh elections of the executive committee of CINTAA in view of the mass resignation. Poonam Dhillon went to court against FWICE’s decision, saying that it had no authority to call for elections. She lost the court battle. She appealed in the Bombay high court against the lower court’s decision, a day before the elections i.e. on September 11. To her bad luck, even the high court did not grant her relief, because of which the elections were held today (September 12). While not granting a stay on the elections, the high court did order that the new executive committee would not take any decisions till the final hearing in the appeal. The date for the next hearing is October 26.
The elections got over at 5 p.m., after which the counting process began. The results were declared soon thereafter.
The following members were declared elected: Upasna Singh (polled the highest number of votes – 360), Sahila Chaddha (357), Vikas Verma (349), Deepak Parasher (348), Kunickaa Sadanand (312), Varsha Usgaonkar (306), Naghma (290), Nimai Bali (266), Arjun (Feroz Khan) (250), Armaan Tahil (237), Shehzad Khan (234), Manish Kumar Chaturvedi (219), Sapan Kumar Bhattacharya (197), Ramkumar Singh (184) and Ramakant Borude (176). Of the above, only Ramkumar Singh was from the Vijeta team. All the others belonged to Deepak Parasher and Upasna Singh’s team. Neeta Khanjan from the winning team lost the elections. As mentioned above, all the contestants from the team of Poonam Dhillon and Padmini Kolhapure lost the elections.
A total of 571 votes were cast, which was more than the votes cast last year. Of the 571 voters, 12 voters did not elect a single candidate. In other words, the number of valid votes was 559.
The office-bearers will be elected after a week.
FWICE president B.N. Tiwari, ecstatic at the election results, told Information, “Poonam Dhillon and Padmini Kolhapure are getting a bad name because of their conduct. They should work for the betterment of the less fortunate actors rather than running after the chair. May better sense prevail.”