'Hichki' director calls Nishant Kaushik's plagiarism allegations 'baseless'

Image Courtesy: Movie Stills

New Delhi: Director Siddharth P Malhotra on Wednesday vehemently denied the claims made by Nishant Kaushik for taking ideas from his script and not giving him the due credit for his upcoming flick Hichki.

Terming the claims as "baseless", Malhotra said that he had bagged the official rights of the novel Front of the Class on which the movie is based and claimed that the team has credited all the writers who have contributed to the film.

"I had acquired the rights to make Front of the Class as a Hindi motion picture in 2013. Nishant Kaushik's claims are baseless. He was contacted through Exceed Entertainment and I haven`t even met him once. We were looking for writers who could come up with a take on the Front of the Class. We had approached several writers including Nishant."

"This was, 2015. Several prominent writers like Amole Gupte, Abbas Tyrewala have worked on the story of Hichki and we have obtained NOC`s from them and I thank each one of them for being the creative contributors of Hichki. We have credited all the writers who have worked in our film. So, it is ridiculous that we will not give credit to anyone in particular who has worked hard and contributed for Hichki," he added.

Nishant Kaushik, who is also the author of My Father Is A Hero, claimed on Twitter that the director had approached him to write a story based on a one-liner that he had in my mind.

Despite having a day job, the author worked on developing the story and the characters and submitted to the the director. But for months, he didn`t get any reply from Malhotra about whether his script is approved and he assumed the project has been shelved.  However, after watching the Hichki trailer, he found many similarities with the plot and what he had written for Malhotra and decided to rant against the director on the social networking site.

The makers of the film released its trailer via a live video on YRF`s official Facebook handle, in the presence of Rani herself.

The movie is slated to release on February 23 next year.