'Done with deliberate intentions to mislead public': Shabana Azmi, Javed Akhtar accuse PM biopic makers

Veteran lyricist Javed Akhtar recently expressed his shock after finding him credited as the lyricist in the poster of the movie, PM Narendra Modi.
Javed Akhtar and Shabana Azmi
Javed Akhtar and Shabana Azmi

Veteran lyricist Javed Akhtar recently expressed his shock after finding him credited as the lyricist in the poster of the movie, PM Narendra Modi. Soon the movie's producer, Sandip Ssingh came up with an explanation that Akhtar was credit because one of his old songs was used in the movie. 

"Javed sahab is a senior writer in our country. We have grown up listening to his songs. We have used one of his old songs Ishwar Allah from 1947: Earth and gave him credit. I did not get any call from him and so I also did not call him. He spoke about it on Twitter, so even I replied there. But he could have called us," Sandip reportedly said.

The producer also posted an explanation on Twitter, saying the film's makers had used songs penned by the lyricists from two older movies and therefore they credited the two lyricists for the songs. The songs used were 'Ishwar Allah' from the film '1947: Earth' (written by Javed Akhtar) and 'Suno Gaur Se Duniya Waalon' from 'Dus' (written by Sameer).

However, the explanation given by the producer was not taken very well by Javed. In a recent interaction with a daily, he reportedly said, "Firstly, I don't know who Sandip Ssingh is. Secondly, when you take an old song in your film you don't give credit to the original person on your promotional material because I have not written anything for the film PM Narendra Modi. You can't behave like I'm part of your unit, as your songwriter."

"If they wanted to give me respect, why haven't they given the same to Shankar Ehsaan Loy and AR Rahman, the music directors of the same song? They would have done it if their intentions were correct, which clearly isn't. Such an incident has never taken place in Indian film history. Nowadays, every second film has a recreated song but never has the original lyricist been mentioned on the posters of the film," he added.

Commenting on the incident, veteran actress Shabana Azmi (Javed Akhtar's wife) said, "It is quite clear this was done with deliberate intentions to mislead public into believing that Javed Akhtar has written the songs for PM Narendra Modi when the song 'Ishwar allah tere jahan mein' is from Deepa Mehta's film '1947 Earth'."

The trailer of the Modi biopic, directed by Omung Kumar was released on March 20. PM Narendra Modi is slated to release on April 5.

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