On Thursday, March 16, the Indore district court issued an arrest warrant for film producer-actor Kamal Rashid Khan aka KRK for failing to appear in a defamation case filed against him by actor Manoj Bajpayee.
After Khan allegedly referred to Bajpayee as a drug addict in a few tweets in 2021, the actor filed a defamation suit against KRK. According to Bajpayee’s lawyer advocate Paresh Joshi, the Judicial Magistrate First Class on Thursday issued an arrest warrant against Khan and deferred the case’s next hearing to May 10.
KRK’s lawyer argued that the case against him should have been dropped since he had filed a petition with the Supreme Court.
The Madhya Pradesh High Court denied Khan’s request to have the defamation action against him dropped on December 13, 2022. In the High Court, Khan’s attorneys argued that one of the Twitter accounts, “KRK box office,” from which the tweet in question was posted in 2021 had been “sold” to a person named Saleem Ahmed in October 2020. According to his lawyers, he had never tweeted anything purposely derogatory against Bajpayee.
Notably, in August 2021, actor Manoj Bajpayee filed a criminal complaint against KRK under IPC section 500 in the court of judicial magistrate first class (punishment for defamation).
What prompted Bajpayee to initiate legal action against KRK was a tweet posted by the ‘Deshdrohi’ actor and film critic on July 26, 2021. In his tweet, KRK called Manoj Bajpayee ‘Charsi’, ‘Ganjedi’ (a marijuana addict). This was remarked by Kamal R Khan during his purported review of the Manoj Bajpayee starrer web series “The Family Man” on Twitter.
“I am not a Lukkha and Faaltu in life, So I don’t watch web series. Better you ask Sunil Pal. But why do you like to watch a Charsi, Ganjedi Manoj? You can’t be selective. If you hate Charsi Ganjedi in Bollywood, So you should hate everyone,” KRK wrote in his now-deleted tweet.