A former Indian narcotics officer who led a drugs investigation that saw Bollywood star Shah Rukh Khan’s son Aryan briefly jailed, has filed a defamation suit against Khan and his production company over a Netflix series he claims falsely portrays him as corrupt.
Aryan Khan made his Bollywood debut last week as writer and director of The Ba****ds of Bollywood, a seven-part Netflix series described as a “playful roast and toast to Bollywood”.
Khan shares writing credits with Bilal Siddiqi and Manav Chauhan, and the series is produced by his mother Gauri Khan, under the production house Red Chillies Entertainment she co-owns with her husband.
The Ba****ds of Bollywood became one of the most anticipated streaming launches of the year after its trailer featured a parade of brief star turns. The show itself has been praised on social media for its inside jokes and playful nods to Bollywood’s history and iconic moments.
However, some eagle-eyed viewers noticed a resemblance between Sameer Wankhede, a hard-charging anti-drugs police officer featured in the first episode.
In the scene, the controversial character shows up to a party celebrating a film premiere, announcing that he is there to catch people from the industry “who are doing drugs”. He quickly discovers a guest openly smoking marijuana but pointedly ignores them upon learning they have no ties to Bollywood. Moments later, however, he arrests a different partygoer, meant to be a young actor, who had not been seen using drugs himself but was simply nearby when they were found.
This scene has been widely interpreted as a thinly veiled retelling of Aryan Khan’s arrest in October 2021, a case that saw him spend 26 days in jail despite no drugs being recovered from his possession.
On Thursday, Wankhede lodged a suit in Delhi High Court, seeking to block the show from streaming and to secure damages for what he described as a “false, malicious, and defamatory” portrayal in The Ba***ds of Bollywood, according to NDTV.
He further claimed that the series “disseminates a misleading and negative portrayal of anti-drug enforcement agencies, thereby eroding public confidence in law enforcement institutions”.
The series, his suit claims, has been “deliberately conceptualised and executed with the intent to malign Sameer Wankhede’s reputation in a colourable and prejudicial manner”.
In his petition, Wankhede has also objected to another moment in the series in which the same character makes an obscene gesture, raising a middle finger, immediately after reciting the phrase “Satyamev Jayate”, a Sanskrit phrase from India’s national emblem that translates to “truth alone prevails”.
In a statement to the media, he argued that the act represents a serious violation of India’s penal code, which carries potential criminal penalties.
Wankhede is seeking damages of Rs 20m (£167,819), which he has pledged to donate to the Tata Memorial Cancer Hospital to fund treatment for cancer patients.
The Independent has written to representatives for Red Chillies Entertainment and Netflix for comment.
In 2021, Aryan was arrested in a case that sent shockwaves across the country’s multi-billion-dollar entertainment industry. The son of one India’s biggest superstars, he and several others were charged with “involvement in consumption, sale and purchase” of illicit substances at a party on a luxury cruise ship in Mumbai city.
Officials from India’s federal drug agency Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB), in a raid led by Wankhede, arrested Aryan and seven others after posing as customers and raiding the yacht.
Narcotics officials claimed Aryan was linked to an international drugs cartel and sought to investigate this further. The NCB had also dug up his old chats and taken his phone as part of the investigation.
In May 2022, all charges against Aryan were dropped with the NCB citing a “lack of sufficient evidence” as the investigation yielded no proof of wrongdoing and claims of fabricated evidence and misconduct cropped up.
Wankhede himself subsequently faced a series of inquiries, including an allegation that he had solicited a large bribe from Khan to release Aryan.
Many, especially from the country’s right-wing, at the time demanded a boycott of Khan and his films and sought strict punishment for celebrity children indulging in wrongdoing. Others showed support for the actor online as #MySRKStory began trending on Twitter.
Observers who follow the inner workings of Bollywood believed that India’s right-wing Hindu nationalist government was flexing its muscles to control the multi-billion dollar industry that runs on brand power. And the senior Khan, an articulate, Muslim actor, is a global brand.
The Ba****ds of Bollywood is available for streaming on Netflix.
