Businessman and Hindi film actor Kamaal Rashid Khan has moved the Bombay High Court seeking to quash a First Information Report (FIR) lodged against him at the Bandra police station in a 2017 case for allegedly making offensive remarks against actor Dhanush on X (formerly Twitter).

The petitioner, a resident of Mumbai currently residing in Dubai, in his petition filed through advocate Sana Raees Khan, said the Bandra police station had maliciously implicated him under Section 509 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC), which criminalises words, gestures or acts intended to insult a woman’s modesty. He said all the allegations against him were false and bogus and that the alleged Tweet had no connection with a woman.

The FIR alleged that Mr. Khan had made derogatory statements against Mr. Dhanush and his co-star. The alleged comment read: “I can’t understand how can any girl allow this bhanggi dhanushkraja to even touch her Yukki! He is really dirty,“ and had obscene images of Mr. Dhanush and his co-star, leading to the charges of insulting a woman’s modest. However, Mr. Khan submitted that the alleged Tweets are false and non-existent, with no evidence to substantiate their existence.

“Even if the allegations are taken at face value for the sake of presumption, the term ‘yukki‘ as used in the alleged post, holds no recognised meaning in any language, dialect, or context. In the absence of a clear and universally understood meaning, the term cannot be classified as obscene or as insulting to the modesty of a woman under the Section 509 of the IPC,” he contended.

Advocate Khan said that the petition was filed in January this year, would be mentioned on February 25, and was expected to be heard next week. She had urged the court to hear the matter soon. “The petitioner is an innocent man falsely and maliciously implicated in the present case with no fault on his part,” Mr. Khan’s petition read, urging the Court to dispose of all the legal proceedings against him. He also claimed that he had been unaware of the FIR for three years and only learned about it in 2020.

“The FIR was registered in 2017, however, I was only intimated about the said FIR in 2020, thus, the subject FIR was registered three years prior to the petitioner being informed, which violates principles of natural justice and fairness,” the petitioner said.

He also raised concerns that it had been over seven years and, to date, the chargesheet in the case had not been filed as the investigating agency had no material or evidence against him and this gave fair grounds to quash and set aside the impugned FIR, he contended in the petition.