Munnabhai chale jail: Four lessons from Sanjay Dutt’s conviction
“It’s a sad day for the industry”, director Kunal Kohli, told news channels after the Supreme Court upheld the sentence on Sanjay Dutt. Let’s not get carried away. If it’s a sad day for anyone, it’s for the Dutts.
Bollywood will be fine. The Munnabhai franchise, if it must go on, can wait.
The Supreme Court was unimpressed by Dutt’s record of reformation or all the charitable organisations he’s been involved with since his old wild days. They reduced his six year sentence to five years (of which he has already served 18 months) but it’s still a sentence. Sanjay Dutt has to go to jail.
Watching the old 1993 footage of the lean, long-haired, bad boy Sanjay Dutt and comparing it with the cropped-haired, puffy-faced Munnabhai going to jail now, one does feel a twinge of sympathy. Yesterday’s Khalnayak has settled into paunchy middle age like so many of us. He’s obviously not the same guy he was back in 1993. But when a case crawls along for two decades, that’s true of everyone involved. And the past has a habit of biting us in the butt.
If there are any lessons to be learned from the downfall of Sanjay Dutt it’s these:
Do the fully Ponty Sanjay Dutt was cleared of terrorism charges but finally convicted of possession of an AK-56, an illegal assault weapon that he apparently got from the Abu Salem of the Dawood Ibrahim gang, the mastermind of the 1993 bomb blasts. It’s a crime and he’s being punished for it. But for the aam aadmi, possession of illegal weapons hardly feels like the most shocking of crimes these days. In 1993 most of us had not even heard about Ponty Chadha. That Chadha farmhouse shootout played out wrote Lakshmi Chaudhry “like a scene from The Godfather – except this one is subsidised by hard-earned tax-payer money.” The weapons allegedly included an AK-47 which private guards are not allowed to carry. So the insinuation was that police officers were acting as personal security officers for the liquor baron. The AK-47 disappeared from the charge sheet. Now if Sanjay Dutt had only gone to the “good” guys for his guns, instead of the Mafia don, it might have been an entirely different story. The moral of the story – please bribe the police instead of treating underworld kingpins as a one-stop shop for all your contraband.
