Separate Laws For Celebs Please

Billy Hayes is an American writer and actor. But there is more to him than that. Hayes was arrested in 1970 at Istanbul airport for smuggling 2kgs of Hashish. This was a time when many countries in the world didn’t even have ‘Anti-Drug’ laws. Hayes was sentenced to four years in prison for cooperating with the authorities in nabbing the original supplier. But the law doesn’t work honestly in some places. Before he knew what was happening Hayes was told he was sentenced to life, which is 30 years in prison. He was tortured frequently in prison. Hayes finally escaped from the prison in 1975 to Greece and returned home to his family in the US a few months later. This extraordinary story is captured in the movie Midnight Express. His story and the movie got Turkey bad publicity throughout the world for their poor justice and prison systems.

Closer home, Sanjay Dutt was a known drug addict. He must have surely been in possession of drugs to be consuming drugs. Yet, to my knowledge, there hasn’t ever been a single case ever filed against him for drugs. His father packed him off to the US for rehabilitation programme which seemed to have worked and set Sanjay back on the road to his career and family. There are other drug offenders who have been let off too. So when the Supreme Court upheld the conviction of Sanjay Dutt in the shadow of the 1993 Mumbai blasts case for illegal possession of arms it wasn’t surprising that most of his clan sympathised with him. Let me correct that. They went beyond sympathy, most of them were declaring him “innocent”. From Jaya Prada to Mahesh Bhatt to many others, they were all narrating how Dutt has suffered for 20 years. This included his own lawyers and others like Majid Memon who claimed he had just made a “foolish mistake” and the SC should have been lenient.

Bollywood members describe SD as a “clean boy, kind soul, a good Samaritan”. Nice! And that he had acquired an illegal weapon just for self-defence. This is where the lies start. Acquiring assault weapons, hand grenades, a large amount of cartridges, helping store the arms, then destroying some of the weapons aren’t exactly deeds of a kind soul. Are they? And what were Sanjay’s own reasons for all of this? In his own words: “Because I have Muslim blood in my veins.I could not bear what was happening in the city”. That does seem like he was acting in preparation of self-defence, wasn’t he? And once again the foolish logic by the Bollywood mafia is that a lot of money is riding on his movies, these movies generate a lot of employment, hundreds of lives at stake and so on. All emotionally appealing but sheer nonsense! The undeniable fact is SD not only stored a cache of weapons enough for a small battle but was frequently hobnobbing with terrorists and the underworld. There have been taped conversations of his with the criminals available in public domain.

What should really worry us is that Sanjay Dutt may just be the tip of an iceberg in Bollywood. It is no secret that the underworld finances Bollywood heavily. Sometime back when CNN-IBN carried out a sting operation exposing black money in Bollywood people actually laughed. They laughed because it didn’t need a sting operation to know underworld money and black-money is the lifeline of Bollywood. Nobody needed a sting to be convinced. Here’s a small report about events in 2003 on Preity Zinta from ZeeNews that should stun any normal person:

Hmm! Thirteen other celebrities including Salman Khan and Shahrukh Khan retracted their statements in the case. Sanjay Dutt is not a child who was playing with a toy. He was playing with a lot more than just a gun. He is just unfortunate to have been caught. The sympathy from Bollywood is so overwhelming because everyone who sympathised with SD was sometime or the other probably connected with criminals or their funds in some way. Maybe they too have misdeeds that haven’t come out in the open. One has to be a nutcase to believe Mahesh Bhatt’s son Rahul Bhatt met David Headley at some informal meeting. If the ways of terrorists are any guide, they are smart enough to pick their “Bakras” very carefully. David Headley too would have picked Rahul Bhatt with some thoughtfulness.

The media morons are upset too. Naturally! One of their “sales-boys” may be packed off for a few years. When he returns he may not be saleable anymore. Wise-up crooks! There’s another one in line who may end up with a similar fate. Salman Khan, who is now being called a great-hearted, kind, friendly, children-caring man may head the same way. I believe Salman Khan is all of that except when he shoots black bucks or runs over people on the footpath after a few drinks. If Salman is smart he would learn a lesson and speed up hearing of his cases and not dodge summons. Sanjay Dutt is returning to prison at 53. He would have been smarter in finishing a major part of his sentence while he was younger instead of frequently seeking bails and hoping he will escape. He might have even been granted parole. Salman Khan has been dodging the law with bail, disappearing when summons are served and evading the prosecution of his case. It may be painful for him too if he is finally unable to escape when he is 55. That would be most certain to end his career.

It’s not just Bollywood but quite a good section of the MSM that may be thriving on mafia money. Oh by the way, nobody is seeking any action or investigation against those media celebs and activists who splurged on anti-India campaigner Ghulam Nabi Fai. In January I wrote why “Media Loves Criminals, Makes Crime Attractive”. The media encourages convicted criminals like Sanjay Dutt and Salman Khan and gets a whole generation to believe the law is a frivolous thing that can be broken and escape is possible. The stunts of actors who get away could even be inspiration for major crimes like armed robbery and even rape and murder. What Bollywood and our MSM are telling us simply is that they need a separate law for themselves. They want that their crimes should be overlooked because of the huge money implications of their business or stardom. Sanjay Dutt is only unfortunate that thousands of people like him in Bollywood, Media and Politics have gotten away and he paid a price.

Billy Hayes suffered enormously in an alien land with poor justice systems. What started as a four year sentence turned into 30. His escape from that prison is justified and admirable. Sanjay Dutt, on the other hand, is lucky. The SC knocked off a year from his original sentence of 6 years. Maybe the govt will now consider a separate law for celebrities to avoid “victimhood” and “criminals turned kind-souls”.