According to the police, Kundra had set up a company called Armsprime Media Pvt Ltd which, through London-based Kenrin Pvt Ltd, bought the HotShots app to upload questionable content online. The police claim that numerous web applications were being used to circulate the videos across the web and that the deal was worth $1.2 million for 121 videos.

Mumbai’s JPC (crime) Milind Bharambe claimed that the two companies had a mobile app called HotShots Digital Entertainment. In a press briefing, Bharambe said, “The free to download app was yanked off by both Apple and Google Playstore for the type of its content. Mumbai Police have recovered inc-riminating evidence like HotShots films, video clips, WhatsApp chats etc….” Several struggling actors and actresses would also be questioned, he said.

The investigation into the matter started in February 2021. The nine persons arr-ested earlier, aged between 24 and 40, include TV actress Gehna Vashisht, Yasmin R. Khan, Monu Joshi, Pratibha Nalavade, M. Atif Ahmed, Dipankar P. Khasnavis, Bhanusurya Thakur, Tanvir Hashmi, and Umesh Kamath.

The case has once again opened a deb-ate that has intermittently swirled around Bollywood and India’s film ind-ustries: if ‘erotica’ can be charged with ‘vulgarity’ and tagged as pornography—material that’s made for the exclusive purpose of ‘sexual arousal’. In India, watching porn privately is not punishable, but creating and publishing it is.

In the era of OTTs where Netflix, Disney Hotstar and others show Hollywood movies with disclaimers as to the type of material on offer, mobile apps with racy entertainment content have become popular, especially during the pandemic.

Google Playstore is loaded with erotic apps like Ullu, Fliz Movies, Gupchup, Hot Masti Magic, Kooku, Hindi Blue Film Video and Pataka Apps, to name a few. If one tries to get their details, only an email address is available under the head of ‘publisher’. Some publishers are based abroad, like those of Kooku, and Vipul Software Solution, publisher of Hindi Blue Film Video, who are based in the UK and Saudi Arabia respectively.

An industry insider says, “Viewership of particular material depends on class. Hollywood flicks and other international language films with erotic/sexual content generally have an affluent audience, while apps like Ullu and Kooku are mostly accessed by the lower rungs of society. These apps are downloaded mainly in Tier II and Tier III cities; the actors, too, come from there.” He added that the lockdown forced many artistes in Mumbai and across India into unemployment, so that at one point, desperate for work, they were ready to act in these erotic films at rates as low as Rs 10,000 a day. The films also have low budgets of just Rs 5-8 lakh.

Pornhub Insights, the data wing of the world’s largest porn website, states that 130 million people visit Pornhub every day from all parts of the world, from a variety of cultural and socio-economic backgrounds. Eighty per cent of users access it via phone, while 15 per cent via desktop and four per cent through tablet. In March 2020, Pornhub had offered free, premium content for users across several countries as they went into lockdown. On April 2, 2021, it stated in a report that traffic from India had increased threefold.

India’s policy on banning porn websites has been inconsistent. In 2013, a petitioner, Kamlesh Vaswani, had filed a PIL asking a court to block such websites. Two years later, the Ministry of Electronics and IT directed the telecom department to ban 827 websites. But the ban was short-lived and eventually removed. Again, in 2018, the Centre brought back the ban after the Uttarakhand High Court req-uested it to block the websites after an unsavoury incident in a school, where four boys raped a junior girl.

According to experts, there are adequate legal provisions to deal with online pornography and piracy. Sections 66E, 67, 67A and 67B of the Information Technology Act, 2000 provide for the punishment and fine for violation of privacy, and publishing or transmitting obscene, sexually explicit material and child pornography in electronic form.

In addition to this, other laws such as the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act, 2012, Indecent Representation of Women Act, 1986, as well as the Indian Penal Code have provisions to deal with pornography. The Copyright Act, 1957, provides for punishment for piracy and copyright violations, among others. It’s because of the dithering, vague official policy on the matter that definite action has not been taken. All it requires is a final setting of limits and boundaries between the currently porous categories of ‘bold’ and ‘erotic’ material and ‘pornography’.

(This appeared in the print edition as "Adult Content Inside")