Shiv Sena leader Sanjay Raut is producing a biopic on trade unionist and Socialist leader George Fernandes, Mumbai Mirror reported. Raut, who is the executive editor of Shiv Sena’s newspaper Saamna, has also produced a biopic on the party’s founder, Bal Thackeray, starring Nawazuddin Siddiqui.
“I have written the script,” Raut told the newspaper. “As soon as we wrap up work of Balasaheb Thackeray’s biopic, I will start working on this one. In the meantime, I am trying to identify a team to work on the project.”
During his years as a trade union leader in the 1970s, George Fernandes was among Thackeray’s “most trenchant critics”, fighting tooth and nail with Shiv Sena cadres, and yet, Raut told Mumbai Mirror, the two leaders “shared a warm regard for each other’s views”. Fernandes, who joined the Janata Dal, later formed the Samata Party and was Defence Minister for two terms in the National Democratic Alliance government between 1998 and 2004, was on “cordial terms with Thackeray’s father social reformist Prabodhankar Thackeray”, Raut said, adding that apart from Thackeray, only Fernandes has influenced him.
The biopic, which is likely to be released in 2021, will document the period between the mid-1950s and the Emergency. Fernandes, who is 88, reportedly has Alzheimer’s, and is being cared for by his wife, Leila Kabir.
