Featuring Yami Gautam Dhar and Emraan Hashmi in the lead roles, 'Haq' is said to be inspired by the life and legal struggle of Shah Bano Begum, whose landmark case in 1985 led the Supreme Court to grant divorced Muslim women the right to maintenance.
Bhopal: Indore bench of Madhya Pradesh high court on Thursday junked a plea by late Shah Bano Begum’s daughter seeking to stay the release of Bollywood movie ‘Haq’, purportedly inspired by her mother’s epic struggle to secure maintenance for divorced Muslim women, observing that “Privacy or reputation earned by a person during his or her lifetime extinguishes with his or her death”.
The petition to block the release of Emraan Hashmi, Yami Gautam starrer film was filed by Indore-based Siddiqua Begum Khan, daughter of Shah Bano, who shot into fame in the 1980s for courageously fighting a prolonged legal battle to get maintenance after her divorce by her lawyer husband.
The legal battle began in an Indore court in 1978, finally landed in the Supreme Court, which constituted a five-member Constitutional bench to hear the case.
The bench, in a landmark judgement in 1985, ruled that Muslim women are also entitled for maintenance under law.
The petitioner argued that the film, slated for all-India release on November seven, commercially exploits the privacy and personality of her late mother without taking consent from her legal heirs.
She contended that she inherited her mother’s ‘reputational rights’ after her death.
The single bench court of Justice Pranay Verma, while rejecting the petition, noted that ‘Privacy or reputation earned by a person during his or her lifetime extinguishes with his or her death. It cannot be inherited like movable or immovable property’.
The court held that the film is only inspired by the Supreme Court verdict in the Shah Bano case but is otherwise fictional.
“Since the disclaimer itself states that the same is dramatization and is fictional and adaptation of a book and is inspired by a judgment of the Apex Court, it cannot be said that the contents of the film are fabricated.
Since the film is an inspiration and a fiction, some amount of leeway is certainly permissible and merely because the same is done, it cannot be said that there has been any sensationalization or false portrayal”, the bench held.
The court further observed that “once a matter becomes a matter of public record, the right of privacy no longer subsists and it becomes a legitimate subject for comment by the Press and Media amongst others.”
