Rakhi Sawant is in the sweetest possible spot as far as her career is concerned – she is in trouble.
A team from the Punjab police force landed up in Mumbai on Tuesday to arrest the headline-grabbing entertainer for her allegedly derogatory remarks about the sage Valmiki. Sawant’s publicists claim that she had surrendered to the police, who were acting on an FIR filed against her. The Punjab police have said that they could not trace the famously loose-tongued entertainer, who can always be counted upon to say the wrong thing at the right time.
Could it actually have been the web series Rakhi in Khaki that vexed the police? Produced by the company Gunpowder and posted on its YouTube channel, the short episodes feature Sawant as a police officer who holds forth on current affairs and whatever else catches her fancy from behind her desk. Aided by a dim-witted secretary and a colourful tongue, Sawant takes on charlatan holy men, lectures Nawaz Sharif and Hafiz Saeed on terrorism, and shares her views on Valentine’s Day. Example: “In the name of kaam (work), you are practising your Kama Sutra moves!”
The series has low viewership, which is hardly surprising, given the ghastly quality of the humour, the poor acting, and the desperate attempts to shock through double entendre and profanity. The meter went up only when Sawant shared her “Mann Ki Baat” on the infamous Modi dress. Sawant had worn the low-slung black dress decorated with images of Modi during a trip to America in 2016. One image of him waving his hand sits on one of her breasts. It caused a kerfuffle, which was the purpose.
On Rakhi in Khaki, the outrage artist clarified, “This is my message to Modi and only Modi – is this right? Am I a rapist? A terrorist?” Sawant reminded Modi that she had chosen him over Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama: “I represented Modi, and I am proud of this – there is nothing wrong in being in love with Modi.”
This is vintage Rakhi Sawant, and the series needed more such expressions of her cockeyed worldview to have been a hit.