The Madras High Court on Thursday decided to hear on September 28 petitions filed by Kalanithi Maran of Sun Pictures and film director S. Shankar to quash private criminal complaints lodged by writer Aarur Tamil Nadan who had accused them of having stolen his story for the making of Rajinikanth starrer Tamil flick Enthiran in 2010.
Justice M. Nirmal Kumar agreed to hear the quash petitions after three weeks since the counsel for Mr. Maran sought time. However, senior counsel P. Wilson, representing Mr. Shankar, vehemently objected to the private complaints and contended that the writer could not blow hot and cold by filing a civil suit as well as criminal complaint.
When the prayer in the civil suit, preferred in 2010, was to declare that the writer was the copyright holder of the story of Enthiran and when the suit was yet to be decreed, how could he simultaneously file a criminal complaint for infringement of copyright as well as the charge of cheating under the Indian Penal Code, the senior counsel wondered.
However, the writer’s counsel K. Elangovan claimed that there was no bar in prosecuting both civil as criminal proceedings. He also urged the court to vacate the stay imposed by it on the criminal proceedings pending before the XIII Metropolitan Magistrate Court at Egmore here on the basis of a private complaint lodged by his client in 2011.
In the quash petition, filed through his counsel on record D. Sai Kumaran, Mr. Shankar said, he was busy making big budget movies such as Kamal Haasan starrer Indian and Aishwarya Rai starrer Jeans in 1996 when the writer claimed to have published his story ‘Jugiba’ on humanoid robots in Tamil monthly magazine ‘Inia Udayam’ and a book titled ‘Thik Thik Deepika.’
“Then, the petitioner had no time to read books more specifically Inia Udayam and Thik Thik Deepika,” he said and claimed that he got to read the writer’s work only after the filing of the cases. Asserting that the story of Endhiran was his original work, the director stated that there was absolutely no connection between his script and that of the writer’s.
