In the film, Mukherjee plays the role of Naina Mathur who suffers from Tourette syndrome that forces an individual to make involuntary repetitive movements or sounds.
Author Nishant Kaushik took to Twitter and expressed his grief over not receiving credit for working towards developing the story.
"Landing in India this morning, I watched the trailer of 'Hichki' which served as a rude reminder of how easy it is to treat writers like trash. I will rant in this short thread after I have collected my composure."
"I was excited, and thankful for being considered to take a stab at the opportunity. I mentioned I had a day job. I was told time is not a constraint. Siddharth gave me a one-liner brief. I began working. Over a month, I developed characters, motives, plotlines, and a story synopsis.
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"Despite being in Australia, I opened all channels of communication to keep him abreast with updates. After submitting the material over email, I waited. Dropped emails and texts. No response."
"...I conceded with whichever of the two was true. More than two and half years later, I watch the 'Hichki' trailer and notice a rather similar storyline, a protagonist with the same speech disorder I had described, and other nuances that I may not own all by myself, but are undoubtedly similar to the ones I portrayed.
"Does this mean 'Hichki' is my story? No. Does it mean I worked on it and was owed the courtesy of a response or acknowledgement of the effort I invested? Hell yes."
"...The fact that you abruptly cut off from the writer who put in months of hard work to deliver a story to you without a word of feedback, gratitude, or even a "regret to inform" message rankles me.
"My written material, which has been nonchalantly consumed (and possibly forgotten), and all my communication with Siddharth Malhotra is saved on record. Happy to present evidence. But the question is what am I to expect of it?"
"Plagiarism or not, the way our industry treats writers is appalling," Apurva Asrani said on Twitter.
While Khalid Mohammed, tweeted, "Welcome to the ways of Bollywood, friend."
The four main writers reportedly credited for "Hichki" are Anckur Chaudhry, Sidharth P Malhotra, Ambar Hadap, and Ganesh Pandit.
"'Hichki' team, good luck to you. I am sure you will earn millions. I hope all the money you make is good enough to numb you, because if I were you, my conscience would be pricking me sharp. Rant ends," Nishant concluded.
"I had acquired the rights to make 'Front of the Class' as a Hindi motion picture in 2013. Nishant Kaushiks claims are baseless. He was contacted through Exceed Entertainment and I haven't even met him once.
"We were looking for writers who could come up with a take on the 'Front of the Class'. We had approached several writers including Nishant. He was given a brief for the film and the story and slant he came up with, was not what we were looking for. So, we did not proceed with him and Exceed was informed about my decision immediately," Malhotra said.
"We have obtained NOC's from them (Gupte and Tyrewala) and I thank each one of them for being the creative contributors of 'Hichki'.
"We have credited all the writers who have worked in our film. So, it is ridiculous that we will not give credit to anyone in particular who has worked hard and contributed for 'Hichki'," he added.
The film is being produced by Yash Raj Films will be released on February 23, next year.
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