IFTA 2026, India’s only people’s choice film and television awards — voting open

Akshaye Khanna took 49.7% of 2,845 votes. Voters over 35 backed Mardaani 3’s Mallika Prasad.

Nearly half the vote

Seven nominees were on the ballot for Most Popular Performance in a Negative Role (Bollywood) at IFTA 2026.

Akshaye Khanna (Dhurandhar) won with 1,413 of 2,845 verified votes, 49.7%. The runner-up, Mallika Prasad (Mardaani 3), got 19.4%. The winner’s share was 2.6 times the runner-up’s.

Akshaye Khanna, winner of Most Popular Performance in a Negative Role (Bollywood) at IFTA 2026

Who decided it

Every IFTA vote is OTP-verified, one per WhatsApp number per category, and every voter’s age and gender is recorded at sign-up. So this is not a survey sample. It is the full count of who voted.

Women cast 2,031 of the 2,845 votes (71%). Akshaye Khanna won 54.2% of women’s votes and 38.3% of men’s.
Voters under 25 cast 65% of all votes. The biggest single group was voters aged 18–24 (1,336 votes).
Women aged 12–17 were Akshaye Khanna’s strongest group: 64.1% of their 446 votes went to Akshaye Khanna.
63% of Akshaye Khanna’s votes came from women under 25 (893 of 1,413).

Age split this result. Akshaye Khanna took about six in ten votes from voters under 25. From 35 up, Mallika Prasad (Mardaani 3) led: 43.8% of voters aged 35–44, 78.8% of those aged 45–59 and 85.3% of the 60-plus group.

Same winner, different second choices

Mallika Prasad was nearly as popular as the winner with men: 36.8% of men’s votes, against Akshaye Khanna’s 38.3%. Among women, she got 12.3%.

Riteish Deshmukh: 12.9% of women’s votes, 5.1% of men’s, 2.5 times as popular with women.

Across IFTA 2026

Akshaye Khanna also won Most Popular Actor in a Supporting Role for the same film, with 52.6%. He and Aneet Padda are the only nominees to win two individual IFTA 2026 categories.

In the voters’ own words

Voters could add a reason with their vote. A few of them:

“Mallika Prasad is a phenomenal actress and it shows in the movie. It really ellivated the movie to a whole other level.”
“Khofnak villan hai”
“She was so natural and effortless”

This is not a ratings chart or a critics’ list. It measures which audience turned up to vote, and how hard.

See the full results

IFTA 2026 voting has closed and the results are in. No jury, no award fixing: every winner was decided by India’s votes. See the full Most Popular Performance in a Negative Role (Bollywood) result, or all results: Bollywood · OTT · Television

All vote figures from the IFTA 2026 Most Popular Performance in a Negative Role (Bollywood) results on PolBol (2,845 verified votes, results final). Group figures are as published there; combined totals are added up from the published counts. Nominee images: IFTA 2026.