LEGAL actions intensified on Tuesday against two prominent Malayalam actors, Sidhique and Mukesh, as the Kerala High Court denied Sidhique’s bail plea in a 2016 rape case involving a young actress, while Mukesh was arrested by SIT for allegedly sexually assaulting another female actor a decade ago in Kochi. While Mukesh, a ruling CPI(M) MLA, was released on bail after his formal arrest, having already secured bail from a court in Kochi, Sidhique is reportedly on the run, prompting the police to launch a manhunt. Before his arrest was formally recorded, Mukesh was interrogated by the SIT for more than three hours at the Coastal Police Headquarters here. The rape complaints against both actors, along with those against a few other artists, were filed after the State Culture Ministry released selected portions of the Justice K Hema Committee report.

 

The committee was established by the Kerala Government after the 2017 actress assault case. Its report highlighted instances of harassment and exploitation of women in the Malayalam cinema industry. Rejecting the anticipatory bail plea of Sidhique, the High Court said that in view of the seriousness of the accusations he was facing, his custodial interrogation was inevitable for proper investigation of the crime. Justice C S Dias said that since Sidhique’s defence was “a total denial of the incident”, his potency test was yet to be conducted and there being a “reasonable apprehension” that he may intimidate witnesses and tamper with evidence, “it was not a fit case to exercise the discretionary powers of the court” to grant him the relief.

 

The High Court, however, made it clear that observations made by it in the order shall not be construed as an expression of the merits of the case. Sidhique, who was booked for offences under sections 376 (rape) and 506 (criminal intimidation), had claimed in his plea that the complainant female actor, had subjected him to a “prolonged campaign of harassment and false accusations since 2019”. In his anticipatory bail plea, he further claimed that she had repeatedly, for the past five years, made unsubstantiated and false claims of sexual misbehaviour and ‘verbal sexual offers’ by him in a theatre in 2016.