Sacred Games: Delhi HC to hear plea seeking stay on episode with references to Rajiv Gandhi on 12 July

Delhi High Court on Thursday will hear the plea against Nawazuddin Siddiqui and Netflix for allegedly making derogatory remarks against former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in Sacred Games , the newly released Indian original. The plea comes a day after Rajiv Sinha, a Congress member in West Bengal, filed a complaint against the makers of the show for allegedly insulting Gandhi and “misrepresenting facts during his regime [sic]”. [caption id=“attachment_4456181” align=“alignnone” width=“825”]  Radhika Apte, Saif Ali Khan, Nawaazuddin Siddiqui in Sacred Games/Image from Twitter.[/caption]

It seeks a stay on the streaming of the particular episode in which references to Gandhi’s rule are made and also demands deletion of said dialogues. Filmmaker-producer Anurag Kashyap has also been named in the complaint. He has co-directed the series with Vikramaditya Motwane. The plea was mentioned earlier in the day before a bench comprising Acting Chief Justice Gita Mittal and Justice C Hari Shankar, which allowed it to be listed on Wednesday. When the matter came up for hearing in the afternoon, the acting chief justice recused from hearing it without giving any reason. The plea will now be heard by a different bench on Thursday. Sinha, in his complaint had said that Nawazuddin as Ganesh Gaitonde “abused our late Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi calling him fattu, which translated as pu*** (in the subtitle)”. The makers are yet to respond to the plea as well as the complaint. With inputs from the Press Trust of India. (Also read: Netflix's Sacred Games gets these five things wrong, when compared to Vikram Chandra's book)