Salman and the agony of waiting

If Salman’s indeed guilty, then his best option would have been to take the punishment early enough

If Salman’s indeed guilty, then his best option would have been to take the punishment early enough

If there is a movie that Salman Khan should be watching in his present moment of suffering, then it is Flight. In it, Denzel Washington pulled off one of his great performances as an alcoholic trying to manipulate the system during an enquiry over a plane crash. He even succeeds, but in the end, the only redemption he finds is in owning up to his actions.

Two witnesses now say that they saw a drunk Salman get out of the driver’s side of his car after it had run over pavement dwellers in 2002, killing one and injuring four others. A third witness does not remember which door he emerged from, but says he did flee the scene. There are two ways in which most criminal cases get managed in court—by delaying hearings indefinitely and by turning witnesses hostile. In the Salman case, both tactics have run out of power after 12 years. There will still be time to work the appeals in the upper courts, but his conviction seems a strong possibility at the trial court level, at least after the deposition of these witnesses.

It is something that Salman must long have been anticipating, given his radical image makeover over the past few years. You suddenly saw a mature temperate superstar replacing an emotionally delinquent man. He increasingly began to highlight his charity Being Human, and he was wont to speak of how he had given up on vices. This was also a period when he became most successful career- wise. All the movies he touched turned to gold. This too was turned into good public relations with claims that all his money went into charity. And yet, if all this was the real deal, then what is one to make of the report that a day before the present witnesses deposed, one of them got a phone call threatening him to take Rs 5 lakh and go away? Whoever did it had just sabotaged years of reputation management.

Salman’s predicament is in some measure a thumbs-up for the Indian legal system. It is overburdened, corrupt and on the verge of collapse, but the very exercise of manipulating it is so agonising that it’s a punishment in itself. After having charges whittled down to ‘death by negligence’, it was unexpectedly again changed to the far more serious one of ‘culpable homicide’ last year.

The more it gets postponed, the older Salman becomes if and when he finally has to serve a prison term. And prison is always more endurable for a younger man. An artist, if he goes through such an experience early enough, might even make some use of it in his art. He can continue with an unburdened conscience and make more out of life. But these are usually not considerations because the only thing that matters is managing the immediate environment. It is possible to do that in India, but in the long run, there are so many forces at work— from crooked and honest policemen and politicians to activist lawyers to the media—that it is almost impossible for a high-profile case to be scuttled forever.

If Salman’s indeed guilty, then his best option would have been to take his punishment as early as possible. There was a long half-a-decade interregnum when all he had to do was plead guilty to the negligence charge and spend a minimum length of time in jail. Instead, it has gone out of his lawyers’ control, and, like Sanjay Dutt before him, the actor faces the agony of uncertainty.

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Madhavankutty Pillai

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