---

Nawazuddin Siddiqui x Big Cash Poker Ad Courts Trouble

In the past few years, several Bollywood celebrities have jumped on the poker and online real-money gaming bandwagon and have promoted them via ads. Nawazuddin Siddiqui is one of those elite few, but his ad for Big Cash Poker has drawn the ire of a Hindu Organization, the Hindu Janjagriti Samiti, according to reports online.

One of their ads shows Nawazuddin Siddiqui as a police officer who faces the audience and tells them that he knows how to handle criminals who tell him all kinds of sob stories. He knows this because he plays the same game with thousands of others every day. He then says that poker players can do the same at the BigCash App.

View Nawazuddin Siddique x Big Cash App Ad

The Hindu Janjagriti Manch maintains that the ad tarnishes the image of the Mumbai Police and has written a letter alleging the same to the Mumbai Commissioner of Police and the DGP, Maharashtra.

Abhishek Murukate, Maharashtra state coordinator of Surajya Abhiyan, wrote the letter requesting the Mumbai Police commissioner to book Siddiqui and Ankur Singh, the owner of Big Cash Poker’s online gaming application, under the Maharashtra Civil Services (Discipline and Appeal) Rules 1979 and the Maharashtra Police Act 1951. It is unclear whether the Manch has filed a complaint against Nawaz and the app in question or just wrote a letter.

---

ALSO READ: Bombay HC Asks State To Clarify The Legality Of Online Poker Games

---

Bollywood has long had its main characters as police officers, both as antagonists and protagonists and even as allies of other characters. There are countless movies that portray the police officer as the villain, including the iconic Karnan (2021), about a villager who wins a sword and then fights for the rights of the villagers, which also means he has to go at loggerheads with the District Police Superintendent Kannabiran.

Even in the instant iconic Kantara (2022), Forest Officer Murali was a grey character, and that actually added to the story arc. Corrupt police officers and immoral cops are so common in fiction that they are sometimes even comic characters. For example, keep in mind that everything that happened in Andhadhun (2018) happened because a woman had an affair with a much-married police inspector, Manohar Jawanda, played by Manav Vij.

To date, not a single police case has been filed against any one of these—and it would be surprising to see a police case filed against, say, Amitabh Bachchan and Tinnu Anand for Shahenshah (1990), in which Bachchan plays the role of a police officer who is a vigilante by night, one of the most famous fictional police officers in Bollywood before Salman Khan took that mantle with his Dabanng (2010) franchise.

Celebrities promoting products has been a problem for some time now. Shah Rukh Khan, Akshay Kumar, and Ajay Devgn have been castigated for promoting Vimal Elaichi. The common idea is that celebrities are playing characters in advertisements and are not endorsing those products at a personal level. 

Poker and real-money gaming apps have experienced courtroom battles, with several of them maintaining that games like poker and rummy are games of skill and have no gambling component. It remains to be seen whether this case will go to trial and what judgment the courts will give this time around. At the outset, we stand with Nawaz and the Big Cash, and we hope the litigation meets his natural end.

Gutshot Magazine provides you with all the latest updates about the poker world, from issues pertaining to the legality of the game to winners of the major poker series. To know more and keep a tab on these, Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Telegram

 

---

---

More News

---

Comments