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Popular TV series director Akshayaditya Lama accuses Ashutosh Gowariker of plagiarism

15 Dec 2016

After Hrithik Roshan s film to be directed by Sanjay Gupta was caught in a controversy over plagiarism, now yet another film of his has faced a similar fate. Ashutosh Gowarikers ambitious project Mohenjo-Daro faces plagiarism troubles as TV serial director Akshayaditya Lama claims that he is the original writer of it. Akshayaditya Lama, who has directed some popular shows like Kumkum and Kkusum, has issued a legal notice to UTV-Disney, Ashutosh Gowariker and Hrithik Roshan seeking a stay on the film as he has alleged that Ashutosh has stolen his script. According to Lama, during the period 2002-2003, whilst he was working as an assistant director for Gadar: Ek Prem Katha , he had sent Ashutosh his script on a film that was based in the Mohenjo-Daro era through his friend and editor Ballu (Jaswinder) Saluja. However, in a span of a couple of days, Lama received the script back from Ashutosh and his team and Lama claimed that he had returned the script because Ashutosh was not interested in making a period drama immediately after Lagaan.Akshayaditya also stated that he had registered the same script under the Copyrights Act with Ministry of HRD (Human Resources Development) in 2007 with the title Samrajya which was later re-registered as Mohenjo-Daro by him in February 2010. He also added that two days later, Ashutosh Gowariker too registered the same name with a similar script. After several enquires, when Lama apparently was sure that Mohenjo-Daro has a rather similar plotline to his film, he decided to approach the filmmaker and even tried to contact him through mails but did not receive any response on the same. While Ashutosh Gowariker has not responded to these accusations publicly, the legal team of the director-producer deny these allegations and have maintained that the script was returned to Lama without Ashutosh even looking or reading it and also clarified that the claims made by Akshayaditya over not making a period drama are false too.