POLITICS: In India, Life and Art Imitate Each Other

By Ranjit Devraj Reprint | | Print |

Ranjit Devraj

NEW DELHI, Aug 9 2002 (IPS) - India’s most wanted fugitive from justice at the moment holds the exalted rank of inspector general of prisons in northern Haryana state, which adjoins the national capital of Delhi.

Ravi Kant Sharma has been on the run ever since a police posse from Delhi arrived at his official home in Chandigarh city, joint capital of Punjab and Haryana state, last Saturday, only to find that their quarry, a member of the elite Indian Police Service had bolted possibly after being tipped off by sympathetic insiders.

Sharma is wanted for the sensational January 1999 murder of Shivani Bhatnagar, a well-known city journalist with whom he was said to be involved with.

But, according to members of the journalists’ fraternity, Shivani was two-timing him and more than friendly with a powerful minister in the cabinet of Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee.

Bhatnagar, a correspondent with the ‘Indian Express’ daily, was strangled with a length of flex and stabbed by two unknown men. The men were not only admitted into the house peaceably, but were apparently also served snacks, suggesting she knew them, according to the police report.

Curiously, the men ransacked the house after the murder but took nothing of any value.

On Thursday, the celebrity fugitive’s wife Madhu Sharma called a press conference at their home in Chandigarh to declare that her husband was being framed because of factional rivalries with Vajpayee’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

“The Delhi police wants to nab my husband and torture him into naming a particular section of the ruling party so that another section gains from it,” the impassioned house wife said, as she faced a battery of television cameras flanked by her two young daughters.

She declined to name the cabinet minister said to be involved in the case, but said: “Everybody knows who he is.”

The denials were quick from a government already beleaguered by other scams, including one which forced Vajpayee to step in on Monday and order the cancellation of allotments of nearly 3,000 outlets for petroleum products such as petrol, cooking gas and kerosene — because the majority of them favoured BJP politicians and their relatives.

All through the week, the petroleum scam and the Bhatnagar case vied with each other for top spot in India’s numerous independently owned television news channels, and with the regular soaps on television.

Said I D Swami, junior minister for home: “If she (Madhu Sharma) is saying something, she should provide proof of her allegations and present it in court. Holding a press conference like this does not help anyone.”

If the Bhatnagar case, with all its mystery, intrigue and highly placed personae, resembles television soap or one of the more lurid films produced by India’s film industry, there are signs that well-known members of India’s show business are inextricably linked with underworld characters.

Several of these ‘characters’ operate from exile. Late last month, police in the bustling western port of Mumbai, home of India’s film industry, released tapes and transcripts of tapped telephone conversations between matinee idol Sanjay Dutt and Chotta Shakeel, an underworld mobster who controls South Asia’s biggest crime syndicate from exile in Dubai and the Pakistani city of Karachi.

There were hints of political motives in the tapes’ release. Sanjay Dutt’s father, veteran actor Sunil Dutt who played romantic and patriotic roles through the 60s and 70s, has now decided to campaign for the opposition Congress party in western Gujarat state.

The state was recently ravaged by a pogrom against the minority Muslim community, which left 2,000 people dead and more than 100,000 homeless.

Dutt, who was married to the late Nargis, a popular Muslim actress and mother of Sanjay, has tried to follow in real life the ideals of communal harmony among religious communities and middle-class family values promoted by the films of his time.

The elder Dutt, the head of the Congress party’s ‘sadbhavana yatra’ (goodwill pilgrimage) that involves walking the length of the country to neutralise the yawning communal divide that is the main fallout of the Gujarat violence, said the tapes had “all but finished his political career”.

The openly pro-Hindu BJP, which rules Gujarat, has already warned that it would play the tapes of the conversations between Sanjay Dutt and Shakeel wherever Sunil Dutt addresses public meetings in the state.

The BJP is determined to hold snap polls in Gujarat, hoping to win on the support of majority Hindu votes.

That the underworld provides the millions of dollars in unaccounted money needed to produce a film and pay actors is well-known — but the tapes show Chotta Shakeel and other members of his gang actually discussing film scripts, plots and direction with Dutt.

Recently, when Bharat Shah, one of India’ best known film producers now out on bail in a murder case, complained of murder threats from underworld don Abu Salem, the mobster was brazen enough to give a telephone interview to a leading news channel. He said that he was only to recover the money he invested in one of Shah’s more expensive productions.

In fact, the excessive violence and plots showing gangland vendettas and wars with the police force that have become the staple of Mumbai productions have been acknowledged by Sushma Swaraj, minister for information and broadcasting, to be the result of the direct influence of its financiers in the underworld.

“The government granted industry status to the film sector so that film-makers can get legitimate funding, but in spite of that they seem to be approaching the underworld,” Swaraj said, reacting to the controversy of the tapes.

She warned of serious steps under the law against Sanjay Dutt if proved guilty.

The younger Dutt, who plays macho, ‘Rambo’ roles on screen, has already spent time in jail on charges of illegally possessing an AK-47 assault rifle, which police said was provided him by his underworld friends who fled India after being involved in the 1993 terrorist bombing of the Bombay Stock Exchange.

Chhagan Bhujbal, deputy chief minister of western Maharashtra state, of which Mumbai is the capital, said the underworld gradually took control of the film industry because producers needed them not only for financing but to keep undisciplined, tantrum-throwing actors and actresses in line.

“Producers are now paying the price for accepting quick money from the ‘bhais’ (brothers) and using them to threaten actors if they don’t turn up in time for shooting sessions,” Bhujbal said.