The Pioneer presents to you our interview with Nakshatra Bagwe, who is fighting against the tide of revenge pornography, despite all the obstacles in his path and is frequently referred to as a ‘superhero’ by the victims he has assisted.
Tejal Sinha
Undeniably, with the advent of technology, digital abuse has certainly been on the rise. And one such is revenge porn. It is a sort of digital abuse in which naked or sexually explicit images or films are released without the agreement of the individuals depicted. This type of nonconsensual pornography is directly related to sexual abuse. A current or former partner may release such photographs for “revenge” or threaten to distribute them as a form of blackmail.
With an aim to bring down such cases, we have Nakshatra Bagwe, hailing from a simple middle-class family, who dons multiple hats, including that of being an award-winning filmmaker, actor, LGBTQ+ activist, entrepreneur and most of all, an influencer. Coming from a family where a proper 9-to-5 job was considered an ideal one, he chose to go out of the box. In fact, it was his work that, in January 2024, he became the only Indian to win an International LGBTQ Association fellowship.
But you may wonder, how did his curb to bring down the cases of revenge pornography happen? So here he tells us during an exclusive chat: “Back then, I was simply browsing through an adult site and realised there was this one video of a girl, and I realised, she was very uncomfortable in the video. It was clear that she was forced to do all of it and that video was up on the site. And somehow, I reported the video and got it down.” However, in one such incident, what really kicked in was, “There was this app, which people used to go live and interact with each other. One day, a couple’s video of them kissing each other had just gone viral on the internet. There was this user who was uploading it on site. I realised that there were more than 79 videos as such, and they were all non-consensual. I sat down one night and reported all such videos and within a week all these videos were deleted.”
This was something he knew was not the end, and there were many such cases. And so, more than him being inspired to work around the cause, he feels it was the cause that has chosen him to work on. Last year, he recalls how he made a reel showcasing how he helped out a victim and showing the process of his work. The reel eventually went viral, reaching 16 million views and his followers increased by 2 lakh.
“My majority of followers were from the LGBTQ+ community,” shares the first gay brand ambassador of India. “However, post that video, I even had heterosexual people. The majority of people who follow are doing so for help. I realised there were 10-12k people who were seeking my help and there are so many people who are victims but don’t know how to help themselves.”
But it was also not easy for him. It was during this that he revealed slipping into depression because of the intensity of these cases and people crying for help in his DMs. He realised that these cases had to be solved swiftly. “I had to take a 14-day break before I could get within it and I wasn’t prepared for this Pandora box that opened in front of me. I didn’t get viral because of dancing, singing, or doing any stupid things on social media, but it was for a cause.”
But ironically, things turned out against him after people learned about his identity. Moving ahead, he shares, “Generally, I am not a hacker, which people believe me to be. What I am good at is the ‘art of reporting’ and I figured out how to effectively report. I finally created a tutorial for people to also know how they could help themselves or their loved ones in such cases. These tutorials had certainly turned out to be very helpful.”
All the cases that are knocked into his DMs include a very intense level of negativity. Each case, he says, comes with a different set of trauma and on the other hand, he tries to keep positive for the victims to have hope. “There have been cases I have come across where the victim commits suicide, especially girls. All the cases come with their own trauma. There have been times I had to sit down until 2 or 3 in the morning personally to comfort them. There have been sleepless nights and they do keep me in negativity, but I need to make sure I’m strong because these people come to me as a hope.”
Today, you go through his social media and he has now been called a ‘Superhero’. However, he has a different perspective. “I have come across comments where people have come up and said that ‘we love this gay guy because he is helping us’. And I feel that there are so many gay people out there who are not coming out but are working towards helping out people in need. I’m glad people like me for my work helping out innocent people. However, there is another section of people who end up unfollowing me because I post things like a pride flag or any romantic posts. I remember putting up a post on Valentine’s Day, and people went so against it just because I expressed my love for a man. Ironically, it was the same people who were praising me for my work.”
Being an award-winning filmmaker and an actor, he has worked in several films around the community and he shares that his agenda is to cast and sign people from the community. Currently, he is working on a film that has the entire cast and crew from the community. “The mainstream cinema may not give opportunity to all of us, so why don’t I? I’m not a big-shot person and there are many other filmmakers more popular than me, maybe doing much better work than I do. However, I have a separate fan base for my work where I am recognised. I was recently contacted by YouTube India to create more content related to the community.” On a concluding note, he believes that the film festivals are a private concept. However, he desires to create content that aims to raise positive awareness for people in his own community.
