India-Forums.TV

[taylor11]

When Nihita Biswas Sobhraj made entertainment history Monday night by becoming the first contestant from Nepal to take part in Indian TV channel Color's reality show 'Bigg Boss 5', back home in Kathmandu her family's moment of pride turned into shock and consternation at the first barrage of questions raining down on the 23-year-old.
'I was shocked,' said Nihita's mother Shakuntala Thapa, a senior lawyer practising at Nepal's Supreme Court, reacting to the question posed by one of the participants, news anchor Mandeep Belvi.
'Did you have sex with Sobhraj?' Belvi had asked Nihita after learning the young Nepali woman was the wife of Charles Gurmukh Sobhraj, branded the 'Bikini Killer' by the tabloids in the 1970s when he was accused of a series of tourist killings in several Asian countries -- a charge that he has denied all through his career in crime.
When a blushing Nihita sought to parry the question, the next query was why did she marry him then.
'We have a conservative society in Nepal,' Thapa told IANS.
'People don't ask such questions, especially to people they have known only for 15 minutes. Nihita is young and led a sheltered life. We encouraged her to join the show thinking she would make friends with people from different cultures and broaden her horizon.'
'We didn't expect such sensationalism or ignorance.'
Thapa wondered how a news anchor could be ignorant about prison norms.
'Sobhraj is in prison whereas Nihita is not,' Thapa said. 'How could the question of having sex with a prisoner arise?'
Though Nepal's apex court recently ruled prisoners should be allowed their conjugal rights, it has not been implemented by the prison authorities and is likely to remain an impossibility given how the prisons are crowded and lacking funds and other resources.
Nihita says she fell in love with Sobhraj, who is 44 years older, at first sight when she visited him in Kathmandu's Central Prison after she heard he was looking for a Nepali interpreter for his visiting French lawyer.