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Journalism of Courage
When Hero No 1 rubs shoulders with Villain No 1, you are left with more than a Bollywood plot. Govinda, smarting under the evidence of his having once cavorted with the likes of Dawood Ibrahim, may protest that he has been framed, that there were 24 others on that particular show, that blah, blah, blah…Cut! The fact is Govinda is an MP, and cannot absolve himself of his responsibility to explain himself. Does Sonia Gandhi’s new code talk about Congress party members with dubious pasts having to come clean? We wonder.
Of course, Govinda’s present discomfiture is linked to an ugly nexus between the Mumbai mafia and its dream factory. It is actually an all-consuming love story. What began as a modest relationship — an extortion bid here, an attempt to persuade a debtor to cough up dues there — evolved into a passionate clinch. Bollywood, always hungry for money to ride on, found that their friendly neighbourhood dons possessed the deepest pockets. This meant that sometimes casting suggestions from ‘bhai’ had to be scrupulously followed; that sometimes top ranking film stars were obliged to wiggle their hips for a dance show at a Dubai party. But so what? There were rewards, too, like chances to watch first-rate cricket at Sharjah, seated in Dawood’s box.
The Bombay blasts should have spoilt the party because the involvement of the D-Company was quickly established. Yet dons like Dawood, Chhota Shakeel and Chhota Rajan—operating from safe havens in Dubai, Pakistan, Thailand, and even Europe—continued to call the shots in Bollywood right through the ’90s. The post-9/11 world made life trickier. Dawood was designated a global terrorist by the US Treasury Department. The fact that not one of Dawood’s former buddies from Bollywood turned up at his daughter’s wedding this July testified to their need to remain discreet. But the question that should worry us is this: How deep was the relationship between Bollywood and the mafia in the past; how deep is it today?
