PR OFILE SAN JAY DUT T

THE
SINS OF
THE
SON
SOCIETY & LIFESTYLE

SOCIETY & LIFESTYLE

Is it enough to have a heart of gold
if your feet are made of clay?
NISHITA JHA on a falling star who never
quite gave up even as he gave in

• The Judgment Day Sanjay Dutt
being led into a Bombay court to
face trial
I
N A different Bombay, in September 1959, a
man was pardoned for murder. the man, Lt
Commander KM Nanavati, admitted to
shooting his wife Sylvia’s lover, a “rich, swing-
ing Sindhi bachelor”, three times through
the chest with a revolver he had procured
hours before the crime. there could be many
reasons why the governor of Maharashtra
pardoned Nanavati — that he was a well-con-
nected, highly decorated officer; that he had acted in the
heat of the moment; that he had committed a crime men
could understand and women could forgive. there was
no question that Nanavati broke the law, but an urban
elite abetted by a compliant, scandal-hungry media in-
sisted that he deserved mercy.
Unlike Nanavati, Sanjay Dutt, 53, is no upstanding
naval officer. Nor can it be argued that his crime — the
illegal possession of arms in a taDa notified area — was
provoked in one blind, hot moment of rage. But, like
Nanavati, Sanjay Dutt seems a character out of Shake-
speare or the Greeks. he was born a blessed child, one
to whom the gods had seemingly given everything. tragic

48 TEHELKA 6 APR IL 20 13 photo: REUTERS 6 APRIL 2013 T EHELKA 49

 1993 BL ASTS CASE
• Moments make memories A young Sanjay with
Sunil and Nargis Dutt; a still from Rocky
heroes though are afflicted by a fatal
flaw, that pinprick of character deficit
that brings down the whole balloon. In
the end, the lovable Dutt couldn’t escape
himself.
this is why the chairman of the press
Council, Retd Justice Markandey Katju,
felt moved to invoke Nanavati as an ar-
gument for why Dutt should be par-
doned. In a recent newspaper editorial,
senior advocate Shanti Bhushan agreed
that given the facts — that Dutt’s father
was helping Muslims in a riot-affected
area, that Dutt himself had received
threatening phone calls — it was evident
that there was “clear danger of a mob
attack on Sanjay Dutt and his family”;
and since “an attack by such a mob could
not have been deterred except by the
threat of an automatic weapon”, Dutt
should be pardoned for procuring and
SOCIETY & LIFESTYLE
keeping just such an automatic weapon,
unlicensed or not, by his bed.
T
HE CROWD of supporters outside Sanjay
Dutt’s residence at pali hill is growing. the
a-listers hiding behind dark glasses, emerging
from cars with tinted windows, agree with
Katju. Mps Jaya prada and Jaya Bachchan are
calling for clemency. Mamata Banerjee believes that
Dutt, who has already served 18 months of his five-year-
sentence, has “suffered enough”. Somewhat inexplicably,
Digvijaya Singh has described Dutt as “a great man”.
according to his apa, Zaheeda, star of the ’70s, “Sanju
is no Khalnayak, he is the kind-hearted, bumbling fool
from Munnabhai. he is innocent and has a heart of gold.”
this is a familiar version of Dutt, the infantilised ‘Sanju
baba’ forever evoking maternal responses from the
women in his life. Even as one section of Bombay, still
singed from the riots, sees no reason why Dutt’s fate
should be any different from others convicted for their
roles in the blasts, to another, he is a pitiable figure. Like
Walter Benjamin’s angel of history, Dutt has lived life
with his face turned towards the past. What we perceive
to be a chain of events, he sees as “one single catastrophe
which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls
it in front of his feet”.
But there is no denying his agency in causing that
catastrophe.
Dutt first met underworld don Dawood Ibrahim in
1991, when shooting for Yalgaar in Dubai. anees Ibrahim,
Dawood’s brother, a former ticket scalper, soon became
a frequent visitor to Dutt’s sets. Dutt, then 31, was tall,
lanky, droopy-eyed and fast turning into Bombay’s new
golden boy. his debut film, Rocky, about a Rambo-like
50 TEHELKA 6 APR IL 20 13
youth who sets about avenging his father’s death, had
done particularly well. For Dawood, Dutt held more star
appeal than his co-stars Feroze Khan and Kabir Bedi. at
a time before Bollywood finance had been sanitised by
banks, before the government had decreed it an industry,
the underworld was a source of ready capital for film-
makers. the dons, living in their gilded cages in Dubai
and Malaysia, enjoyed fraternising with the stars, and
flying them out for Bollywood roadshows. Most of all,
they liked turning their own black money white.
on 16 January 1993, Ibrahim drove a car filled with
explosives and assault rifles from Gujarat to Bombay.
this car made its way to Dutt’s tin-roofed garage, where
accompanied by Dutt’s friends Samir hingora and hanif
Kandawala, a man named abu Salem handed the actor
three aK-56s, ammunition and 20 grenades, altering the
trajectory of his life for ever.
this life, by the accounts of many of those closest to
Dutt, was already a troubled one. his parents, actors of
almost celestial fame, had met while shooting for the
iconic Mother India. Nargis had fallen in love with Sunil
when he rescued her from a fire that
had broken out on set. In Darlingji:
The True Love Story of Nargis and Dutt has lived life with his
Sunil Dutt, a collection of letters ex- face turned to the past.
changed between the two, accompa-
nied by entries from Nargis’ diary, she
What we perceive to be a
chain of events, he sees as
confesses that her disappointing ro-
mance with Raj Kapoor had left her one single catastrophe
contemplating suicide until she met
Sunil. Finally, she had found someone
who made her “feel normal”. Nargis, famous for her ethe-
real beauty as much as her temper and razor-edged
tongue, says she confessed everything about her past
“shamelessly” to him because she was certain that he
would never abandon her.
her instinct was right — Sunil never abandoned her,
even as she drew her last breath at the Sloan-Kettering
hospital’s cancer ward in New York several years later.
he did, however, like Kapoor, demand that she not work
with other male actors. If Nargis resented this, she buried
those feelings once Sanjay, the eldest of their three chil-
dren, was born, spending all her time pampering her
son. Indeed, so much did Nargis spoil him that by the
time he turned 10, Zaheeda, Nargis’ niece, says Sunil be-
gan to worry “that his son was turning into a sissy”. “We
would see him in the garden, having placed Sanju on a
tall branch, telling him to leap off it — ‘Mamu kya kar
rahe ho? Bachcha gir jayega,’ we would scream to no avail.”
Meanwhile, Sanju baba, who had taken to smoking
the ends of cigarettes his father’s friends threw around,
had also begun to show signs of the generosity everyone
attributes to him even now. Being driven past a group of
poor boys, Dutt would start wailing, until the driver
stopped and bought the boys the same beverage he was
drinking. In an interview before his death, Sunil recalled
how Sanjay once threw a tantrum at a wedding, insisting
that his mother give away his jacket to a young beggar
photo: IND IAN EX PRESS ARCH IVES
SAN JAY DUT T
shivering outside the shamiana. Finally, the senior Dutt
decided, as irate parents often do, that his soft-hearted
son should be sent away to a boarding school where he
could be toughened into a man.
one of the reasons his supporters cite while asking
for pardon for Sanjay Dutt is that while the law should
not privilege a celebrity, neither should it punish one for
being one. In april 1993, a report found that several MLas
and politicians were also guilty of possessing arms sup-
plied by Dawood Ibrahim. one of these was the Shiv
Sena MLa Madhukar Sarpotdar. Sharad pawar, chief min-
ister then as he is now, revealed that suspects interrogated
for the Bombay blasts had coughed up several names but
that “charges hadn’t been pressed against everyone in-
volved”. the book When Bombay Burned reveals that
two months before the blasts shook the city, as riots broke
out in Nirmal Nagar on the night of 11 January, Sarpotdar
was detained by the army and found to have two re-
volvers and several other weapons in his car. although
Sarpotdar’s gun was licensed, his son’s was not; besides,
they were both breaking the law by carrying weapons
in a ‘notified area’ during a riot. a man
named anil parab also accompanied
Sarpotdar that night. parab turned out
SOCIETY & LIFESTYLE
to be Dawood’s main hitman. Yet, Sar-
potdar, who had committed the same
crime as Dutt, was never tried in a
court of law.
I
N AN email to this reporter, Suke-
tu Mehta, the author of Maxi-
mum City and the last journalist
to have written about Dutt’s
childhood, excused himself from
providing details about his interview with Dutt. Mehta,
who currently resides in New York, suggested that a mu-
tual friend had been angered by his depiction of Dutt in
the book and it would be uncharitable to exacerbate the
situation further, especially at a sensitive moment. this
polite stonewalling echoes the reactions of Dutt’s im-
mediate circle. Unsurprisingly, his sisters, his closest
colleagues and friends have refused to speak to the press,
some on the advice of Dutt’s lawyer Satish Manshinde,
and others at their own discretion. a report published
in tEhELKa in March 2007 (How the Star Managed to
Escape TaDa), had captured Manshinde on a hidden cam-
era, admitting that he didn’t “have an answer” should
the Supreme Court ask him why his client did not deserve
to be convicted under taDa .
Guarded conversations with Dutt’s dormitory mates
and friends from Sanawar reveal that in boarding school
at least his celebrity background was a liability. “It was
like 10 of us would do something and he would be the
one who got punished until he’d dislocated a shoulder,”
a friend said on the condition of anonymity. “School-
teachers everywhere can be sadistic, but they really had
it in for Sanju, as if they had to make a point of proving
that they did not care who his parents were.” In Mehta’s
6 APRIL 2013 T EHELKA 51
 •• The Highs and the Lows
(From Le) Dutt with wife
Manyata; At a workers’
meeting while campaigning
for the Samajwadi Party;
Leaving a special court in
Mumbai; With Arshad Warsi in
Lage Raho Munnabhai, a film
that earned him critical as well
as popular acclaim

book, a particularly grisly passage describes how Dutt had failed.” leased to the world in 1981 and a new star was born, Nar- suited to dealing with a mob”.
was made to crawl up a gravel slope until his hands and Zaheeda offered to take Sanjay for a drive and a treat. gis died of pancreatic cancer. Despite the immense difference in the magnitude of
SOCIETY & LIFESTYLE

SOCIETY & LIFESTYLE

knees bled. the next day, his bandages were torn off and Sitting in an ice-cream parlour, she asked him if he was
he was made to repeat the exercise. on drugs. Dutt denied it, but Zaheeda warned him, “Your
While Dutt is hardly unique in suffering corporal mother knows. You think she cannot see it, but she knows
punishment, a form of torture school children across the what’s eating you up inside.” one day, Dutt woke up from
country still undergo daily, one can imagine how far a heroin binge and began looking for something to eat.
removed this world must have felt from the one inhabited Seeing him, a servant started to cry — “Baba, you have
by parents, cousins, aunts and helpers, in which he was slept for two days straight. Everyone in the house has
universally adored and indulged. When he finished gone mad with worry.” Dutt took one look at his distorted
school, he described feeling a resentment he had not face in the mirror and went into his father’s study. “Dad,
previously known. In 2007, speaking to family friend I’m dying. You have to save me,” he said.
Simi Garewal on her talk show, he said, “When parents Sanjay was taken to Breach Candy hospital’s detox
send a kid away to a boarding school, he has to learn to centre in Mumbai and then sent to a rehabilitation centre
be independent. When I came home to find that they in texas. Not wishing to cheat the producers who had
wanted to tell me what to do, it already invested money in his son’s
irritated me.” Back at home; Dutt was debut, Sunil Dutt informed them that
soon hanging out with friends who Out in nature, living by his son was an addict and that he
took recreational drugs. What began himself, Dutt said he found would soon clean up his act to return
as “a little bit of weed”, he told Mehta, to work. once out of rehab, Dutt dis-
turned into nine years of hell. Dutt a peace he had never covered that he didn’t want to return.
known while staying in
In 1993, Dutt was 33. he was too old, too buffeted by
grief and experience to still be called ‘baba’.
the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992, followed
by the riots of 1993 had forced India to confront the ques-
tion of its religious identity once again, and in horrifyingly
brutal fashion. Did being hindu mean causing harm to
Muslims? or did it mean extending support to those who
needed help? Dutt’s father, as popular a social worker
and Mp as he was an actor, had decided in favour of the
latter. hindu-Muslim marriages were not too unusual,
particularly within the hindi film industry. at the time
of the riots, Sunil Dutt, by then a widower for a dozen
years, could be found helping violence-affected families
in the Muslim neighbourhood of Behrampur. he had the
constant support of his youngest daughter, priya. all
three children were aware that their father was growing
older, frailer. priya spent more and more time taking care
of him while he took care of others.
their crimes, an uncannily similar instinct had spurred
the two men at either end of this supply chain of weapons
into action. Dawood Ibrahim too was goaded by the os-
tensible desire to protect his sisters. hussain Zaidi, the
crime reporter and author of Black Friday, described a
package Dawood had received full of red and green ban-
gles. the tinkling glass came with a note —“jo bhai apne
behno ki hifaazat na kar sake, use yeh tofha mubarak”.
on 16 January 1993, hanif Kandawala and Sameer
hingora, proprietors of Magnum Video and Dutt’s
friends, arrived at his house with a man named abu Salem
and told Dutt they would bring him new weapons. the
next day, the three men returned with another compan-
ion. From their car, which they had parked in Dutt’s tin
shed, they produced three aK-56 rifles, magazines and
about 250 rounds, and some hand grenades. accounts
of this meeting differ among the men who were present.
hingora alleges that when they reached Dutt’s house,
the actor was on the phone with Dawood’s brother, anees.

tried “every drug in the book”
but soon developed an addiction to
cocaine and heroin.
Nargis chose Zaheeda — a natural
confidante for Dutt because she was younger than his
mother but old enough to play a maternal role — to
confront her son about his drug habit. he was still naïve
enough to believe his family was unaware of his addiction
because his parents had never seen drugs. But Nargis
and Zaheeda had witnessed a distant uncle lose his son
to addiction. “apa would frequently say to our uncle,”
Zaheeda says, “‘had this been my son, I would have
scratched his eyes out.’ When she started seeing the same
signs in Sanju, he would sleep erratically, stay locked
in his bathroom all the time, she felt as though she
he had struck a friendship with a cat-
Bombay tle-rancher named Bill and invested
in a longhorn cattle ranch of his own.
out in nature, living by himself, Dutt
said he found a peace he had never known in Bombay.
he began to construct a new life for himself: a down pay-
ment on a small flat in New York and a dream to run a
steak house to rival the best in the city. two months later,
it was Sunil Dutt who went to his son with a plea.
“I didn’t want to return home, I didn’t want to do
films,” Sanjay confided in an interview soon after his
return, “but my father said, ‘Do it for me, do it for my
name,’ and I couldn’t refuse. I promised myself I’d make
some money and return to my dream.” Sanjay finished
work on his debut film. three days after Rocky was re-
I
T WASN’T just Sunil Dutt’s health that was waning.
he seemed to have lost the respect of his fellow
politicians. In a particularly humiliating instance,
Sharad pawar made Dutt wait for him in a lobby
for over three hours. thugs, displeased with his
pro-Muslim work, had begun to threaten the Dutt family.
Following an attack on his person that January, Sunil
Dutt asked for extra security detail to be posted outside
his house. But Sanjay thought his father might not be
able to do enough to protect the family. threatening
phone calls had been made; his sisters, he was warned,
were targets for kidnap and rape. It was enough to make
him want to buy another gun — a fourth, unlicensed au-
tomatic weapon to add to his three licensed firearms —
one that, as Shanti Bhushan believes, would be “better
he further claims that Dutt enquired about the arms
concealed in the car, showing knowledge of the plot to
smuggle weapons into Bombay. Dutt’s lawyers have de-
nied both these counts. however, tEhELKa’s earlier in-
vestigation unearthed that Dutt had in fact admitted to
calling anees, a confession that the CBI inexplicably de-
creed irrelevant, erasing the MtNL call records from Dutt’s
landline to a number in Dubai.
From the safe harbour of the present, however, it’s
easy to forget just how plagued Bombay was in the 1990s
by gang violence, kidnapping and extortion. Film jour-
nalist Rauf ahmed describes the atmosphere that had
gripped the city as a “fear psychosis”. “You’d wake up
and hear that Gulshan Kumar, whom one met at all the
parties, had suddenly been shot dead outside his office.

52 TEHELKA 6 APR IL 20 13 photoS: REU TERS, AP 6 APRIL 2013 T EHELKA 53

 1993 BL ASTS CASE
Manisha Koirala’s brother was killed. hrithik Roshan’s
father was shot at. It was all to show the royalty of Bom-
bay who really was the boss.” that said, it couldn’t be
denied that the film industry and the underworld were
dancing a particularly intricate pas de deux.
F
ILMMAKERS MINED the lives of gangsters for
material. For them, Sanjay’s stories from jail
— he served 18 months — of how the under-
world recruits shooters from the children’s
barracks were gold. as late as 2000, seven years
after Dutt had first been implicated in the Mumbai bomb-
ings, shortly after he had served time and had been let
out on bail, he was back in touch with gangsters. the
transcripts for a drunken exchange involving, among
others, Dutt, Mahesh Manjrekar and Chhota Shakeel
are available online. Dutt has little to say to the gangster
beyond such banalities as Govinda being a “chutiya”.
Shakeel probes listlessly, “aur kya chal raha hai?” Sanjay
responds, “Bas chal raha hai bhai.” Neither wants to hang
up, both star struck in their own ways.
In a section in Maximum City, Mehta describes how
Sanjay, close to abu Salem, had managed to get a friend,
director Vidhu Vinod Chopra, off the extortion hook
with a single phone call. In his call to Salem, Dutt had
allegedly said of Chopra, “this is the one man who stood
SOCIETY & LIFESTYLE
by me when I was in jail. You can’t touch him.” In a text
message to tEhELKa, Chopra, who is currently in London,
said he was “not qualified” to comment on the man who
saved him from abu Salem. Mehta’s description of Dutt
as “brontosaurus-sized” and overly fond of “guns and
muscles” and the masculine image of the Marlboro Man
appears to fit in snugly with the impression from that
drunken phone call of a troubled, immature movie star
playing with dangerous toys for kicks.
amateur psychoanalysts would keep turning to Nargis’
death, in the days after what should’ve been the high
point of her son’s triumphant return home, drug-free
and on the verge of bona fide movie stardom. When Dutt
has been down, life has rarely refrained from kicking.
In 1987, nearly six years after his mother’s death, he mar-
ried Richa Sharma. “It was nice to come home to some-
one,” he told Garewal. two months after the birth of
their daughter, trishala, Sharma was diagnosed with a
brain tumor. She died in 1996 and their daughter moved
to the US to live with her grandparents. Dutt had already
been found guilty by then of illegal possession of arms.
three years previously, he had been shooting in Mau-
ritius when he heard he was going to be indicted under
taDa and the arms act. he had asked a friend, Yusuf
Nulwalla, to remove his aK-56 from his house, and Yusuf
together with another friend, the steel manufacturer,
Kersi adajania, saw to it that the gun was melted and
thrown into the sea at Nariman point. the police recov-
ered the spring and some cartridges from the rocks. In
the end, it was Sunil Dutt who had the moral courage to
turn his son over to the police. he tipped them off about
Dutt’s return from Mauritius and on 19 april, he was
met at the airport by 200 commandoes.
When he saw his father again, Sanjay was in police
54 TE HE LKA 6 APR IL 2013
custody. Sunil Dutt must have felt his back pressed to a
wall when he gave Sanjay up to the police, but he still
hoped his son was innocent. had he done what the police
said he had done, he asked. his son’s answer must have
bewildered his already aching heart. “I have Muslim
blood in my veins,” Sanjay said, “I couldn’t bear what
was happening in the city.” It was a dramatic and, frankly,
strange declaration. Dutt belonged to a thoroughly mixed
family and his religious identity was equally mixed.
after his conviction, he was often seen with his fore-
head daubed with a giant red tilak, his Muslim identity
now in abatement. Was this tactical, an attempt to dista-
nce himself in the public eye from a dark event? or was
it a tribute to the support of the thackerays and the Shiv
Sena? (Support that has now been reversed.) It might
just as easily have been neither. having grown up around
Zaheeda’s love for Sai Baba, Dutt spent four hours each
day of the 18 months he spent in jail praying to God.
Which god he prayed to and what kind of deliverance
he asked for is unclear. In later interviews, Dutt spoke
of time spent befriending the sparrows, ants and rats
that would appear in his 8x8 cell. he was also angry, self-
recriminating. In a fit of rage, he banged his head against
the bars of his cell until he had to be removed from soli-
tary confinement for fear that he would kill himself.
Dutt has described his lowest moment as the day he
photo: A P
SAN JAY DUT T
In 2008, he married his present wife Manyata Dutt (then,
Dilnawaz Sheikh) at a private ceremony in Goa. So private
that he failed to inform his sisters that he was getting
married. Rauf ahmed, who was working on Dutt’s biog-
raphy with Random house, a highly sought-after project,
gave up on the book when Dutt informed him that Many-
ata would now be handling all his creative dealings. off
the record, his friends speculate about her chequered
past: to gossip about her political ambitions, how she
convinced him to join the Samajwadi party instead of
the Congress; how she was allegedly a bar dancer. per-
haps, as Nargis felt with Sunil Dutt, Manyata feels she
too has found the man who makes her feel normal, to
whom she can speak “shamelessly” about her past. Dutt
appeared to have found a new lease of life. he was once
again a box office success and happy to let his new wife
control the finances as the CEo of Sanjay Dutt productions.
at 50, he became a father again, of twins.
N
OW DUTT stays up nights to complete un-
finished projects before he goes to prison.
trade estimates say he has about 250 crore
worth of projects currently riding on his
shoulders. he is driven by the thought of a
lasting legacy, a film he will be remembered for, one that
might dwarf his enormous mistake. his most spectacular
SOCIETY & LIFESTYLE
The Shadow Lines Dutt success, earned in recent years, came with the Munnabhai
surrounded by journalists films. In hirani’s candy-glazed world, Dutt was Munna,
at the launch of the the lovable ‘bhai’, unacquainted with the cruel ways of
album Asha and Friends the world, solving problems with a generous dose of love,
laughter and jhappis. the irony is incandescent.
amid the emotional clamour for Dutt (or is it Munna?)
to be pardoned, his old friends, the Bhatts stay loyal but
also clear-eyed. pooja, who acted opposite Dutt and
was in jail and his father informed him that there was whose brother found himself bizarrely linked to David
nothing more he could do to help him. Unknown to San- headley, is phlegmatic. “We were shooting for Tadipaar
jay, Sunil had prostrated himself before Balasaheb thack- in Mysore one day when dad came up to us and said,
eray, a man whose divisive politics he had always ‘Baby, Sanju is in big trouble.’ We laughed. It was funny
despised, to ask for his help in getting Sanjay out of prison. because Sanju had always looked out for me and the idea
Each time Sanjay has crawled out of a hell of his own of him being in ‘big trouble’ was ridiculous. But it’s been
making — drugs, or prison; he has 20 years, and we’re still talking about
worked harder than before as if to his troubles.”
prove each time to his father that he His sisters, Dutt was Mahesh, who is self-confessedly
could take pride in his son. “he came and inordinately fond of Dutt, has
back from his junkie phase with Saa-
warned, were targets for struggled to find ways to help his
jan and Sadak,” says Rauf ahmed, “he kidnap and rape. It was friend cushion the blow of the
came back after the initial trial with enough to make him want Supreme Court’s verdict. Should I fuel
Khalnayak, then there was Daud, to buy another gun him with hope of pardons, he won-
Dushman, Mission Kashmir. Except dered, or should I help him reach deep
for Sanju, only amitabh Bachchan has into himself with great calm and seek
faded so far from the limelight and atonement. Face the flaw and redeem
been able to come back with a bang again and again.” the man. See this as time to recover his best self.
after Mission Kashmir was screened at Rashtrapati Bha- Maybe Dutt can be sustained by that knowledge too,
van, Mehta quoted Dutt, shortly after the president shook the understanding that if this time he does not chase the
his hand. “I will sleep tonight like I have never slept be- easy road —the urgent interventions; the uneasy pacts —
fore, India loves me,” he had nearly wept. at the end of these three years he will, for the first time
In the 20 years since Dutt first left prison on bail till in an unimaginably long time perhaps, enjoy an unin-
today when he is about to return, he has been to jail terrupted view of his future.
thrice, been married twice, had two children, shown up
for innumerable court proceedings and lost his father. nishita@tehelka.com
6 APRIL 2013 T EHELKA 55