Telugu Choreographer Jani Master was arrested from Goa by a special operations team of the Cyberabad Police after he was charged under the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POSCO) Act following a complaint of sexual assault by a 21-year-old woman.
The complainant, who worked as a junior choreographer, accused him of sexually abusing her during a shoot in Mumbai and multiple times in his vanity van even when she was still a minor. He was being brought to Hyderabad on transit remand.
Meanwhile, BJP MLA T Raja Singh accused him of being a “love jihadi” and urged the police to probe if there are more victims.
The victim initially lodged a zero FIR against Shaikh Jani Basha, popularly known as Jani Master at the Raidurgam police station following which the case was transferred to Narsingi. In the beginning, the police invoked sections for rape and criminal intimidation but added provisions of POSCO after it became clear from her complain that the sexual abuse had begun while she was a minor.
According to the victim, she first met the accused in 2017 during a television contest and got the offer to join him as an assistant choreographer in 2019. She was first sexually abused in a hotel room during a shoot in Mumbai when her mother could not accompany her and then multiple times at sets in his vanity van.
Of late, he was pressuring her to marry him after conversion, the FIR mentioned. A national award winner, Jani Master works in Tamil and Telugu films and has also worked in some Kannada and Hindi movies.
Meanwhile, Goshamahal BJP MLA T Raja Singh urged the Director General of Police Jitender and Cyberabad Police Commissioner Avinash Mohanty to take stern action against the choreographer and treat him the way they treat a thief, robber and murderer.
Singh released a video clip in which he called Jani Master a “love jihadi” and urged the police to inquire whether there are more victims who he could have offered to convert. He called for the banishment of the choreographer from the film industry. “People in Telangana and Andhra Pradesh are looking at the police to see what action they would take against Jani Master,” he said.
Although Jana Sena, which had asked him to stay away from party activities after the rape charges surfaced agaisnt him, party chief Pawan Kalyan’s brother K Nagababu posted a cryptic tweet. Without naming Jani Master, the party’s secretary general wrote in an X post, “No person can be considered guilty of a crime until he or she is found guilty of that crime by a court of law – Sir William Garrow.” Nagababu’s post was followed up by another quote by Robert Evans which said, “There are always three sides to a story, yours, theirs, and the truth.”