The Cine and Television Artistes’ Association (CINTAA) elections yesterday (May 1) threw up a big surprise when a new group, backed by Preeti Sapru’s Actors Care and Mukesh Rishi, defeated many of the existing committee members. Even sitting president Amit Behl was defeated.
Ten members of Sapru-Rishi group were declared elected to the 15-member executive committee. From the Artistes Unity group, led by outgoing president Amit Behl, only two (sitting) members — Yashpal Sharma and Jaaved Jaferi — won the elections. Three winners — Vikas Verma, Sahila Chadha and Chandraprakash Thakur — contested as independents.
Mukesh Rishi bagged the highest number of votes (539). He was followed by Hemant Pandey who bagged 517 votes. The other 13 winners were: Padmini Kolhapure (486 votes), Vikas Verma (485), Poonam Dhillon (477), Deepak Parashar (460), Kanwarjit Paintal (458), Upasna Singh (454), Puneet Issar (447), Rakesh Bedi (430), Anita Raaj (421), Yashpal Sharma (421), Sahila Chadha (415), Chandraprakash Thakur (411) and Jaaved Jaferi (396).
The 20 vanquished were: Hetal Parmar (388), Virendra Singh (376), Tej Sapru (352), Ghanshyam Srivastva (348), Jaya Bhattacharya (336), Adi Irani (335), Amit Behl (321), Rajit Kapur (294), Ila Arun (289), Govind Kumar Pathak (285), Sanjay Bhatia (278), Abhay Bhargava (269), Tina Ghai (269), Neelu Kohli (252), Deepak Qazir (243), Abhijit Lahiri (232), Seema Pahwa (226), Jitendra Kumar Singh (213), Sheeba Akashdeep (211) and Apara Mehta (199).