CHENNAI : Following the release of the teaser of A R Murugadoss’ upcoming film, Sarkar, the team was charged with plagiarism allegations. Writer and assistant director Varun Rajendran lodged a complaint with the South Indian Film Writer’s Association claiming that the film is similar to his script, Sengol, which was registered with the body in 2007.
On Friday, social media was abuzz with a copy of the association’s judgement stating that both the scripts of Sengol and Sarkar were indeed one and the same. We reached out to the President of the association, veteran writer-director K Bhagyaraj, to confirm this.
“I do not know how the copy came out in the open, but yes, it is indeed true. Plagiarism charges are a serious matter of concern for us and we did our due diligence on this. Here, the committees heard the essence of the story and we felt Sarkar was exactly the same as Sengol. While the latter was registered in 2007, the former was registered under the name Pachai in 2017,” said Bhagyaraj.
Asked what decision was taken following investigations, he said, “We asked Murugadoss if he can provide Varun a writing credit, but he didn’t accept it. He said his inspiration for the script was Sivaji Ganesan’s real life election campaigning back in the day. So we offered him an alternate solution. We asked him to add, ‘Inspired by original events and adapted to screen by AR Murugadoss’ to the start of the film and give an additional inspiration credit to Varun. But the director didn’t accept that either. In light of these developments, we wrote the leaked letter to Varun that we tried our best but couldn’t do anything more, and expressed our regrets on the same.”