Hello Bajrangi Bhaijaan, bye bye hit-and-run

When Bollywood actor Sanjay Dutt was convicted of illegal arms possession during the 1992-93 Mumbai riots in 2007, judge Pramod Dattaram Kode - who sentenced him to jail - applauded Dutt for his contributions to Hindi cinema and cheered him up when the actor looked crestfallen over the verdict. While rejecting Dutt's plea then, Kode told him, "Act till the age of 100; I have only taken six years away…" and comforted Dutt saying he was "number one in films" and that the actor should not "lose faith".

At that time, Dutt's career got perhaps a second wind through the Munnabhai films, which sermonised on Gandhian thought through "Gandhigiri", a signature idea of those movies. Kode, after delivering his judgement, said Dutt must make movies that espouse rectitude.

Ironically, even as Kode sent Dutt to jail, he was gold-plating Dutt's position as a star. (It's a question worth asking: Is it becoming of a judge in a professional capacity to mouth accolades or diatribes over an accused in a case that he presides over?) The eulogising of Dutt's acting implied a privileging of his public stature. Even when held guilty, the superstar remained more a cinematic lodestar than a legal lightning rod.

The framing of the public discourse of the time meant that Dutt's arrest, trial and punishment were phrased in a language whereby sympathies lay with the culpable Dutt. The information dissemination of Dutt's conviction made the guilty Dutt seem the victim. If judge Kode admitted to being a Dutt fan, Bollywood rallied behind "Sanju Baba". In the years that followed, Dutt came in and went out of jail, acted in films and blipped on the public radar. Dutt had no direct hand with the blasts of 1992-93. But how do we now remember the victims of 1992-93? Do we recall them at all?

Two months ago, current Bollywood superstar Salman Khan received a hyper-amplified treatment of the one that Sanjay Dutt got in 2007 - the kind of encomia a religious orthodoxy reserves for its gods. Bollywood impresarios pledged conditional and unconditional support for Salman Khan. Like in Dutt's instance, the victims of the September 2002 hit-and-run case in Mumbai returned to the limelight in the background of the hearing and judgment of the case.

Both the Sanjay Dutt and Salman Khan episodes, beg the questions: Why does public sympathy lie with a superstar who is an alleged perpetrator and not with the victims of those crimes? How on earth are a majority of the public's understandings so biased in support of our superstars rather than nondescript victims? Indeed, how do we explain their continuation as mass heroes despite allegations of severe wrongdoing? Worse still, how do we account for the slipping out of the memories of the vanished and wounded?

For long spells of time, why does the public forget the struggling individuals and families who became victims of crimes by some of our stars whose careers continued apace? How is it that despite everything he may have supposedly committed and got court clearance for, Khan still gets accepted, loved, worshipped, and his haircuts, mimicked, his Bajrangi Bhaijaan lockets, bought?

None of these questions are new, but one suspects these factual and emotional complexities are swept away in the run-up to the imminent release of Bajrangi Bhaijaan. They also point to the nature of superstardom, celebrity hood, media behaviour and subaltern status of victims of crime in India. These questions apply to a Salman Khan or Sanjay Dutt as much as a Roman Polanski, who remains notable, if not popular, in his environs.

Each superstar establishes an intimate relationship with a billion people. And through a mediated popularity he makes a space in their hearts where he is accepted warts and all. A superstar is the Indian mass audience's bestie; the people who died on the street as a result of his - or his chauffeur's - mistakes, lesser than strangers. Khan is a household name. Can we say the same about those who died on the night of September 8, 2002? Do we even know their names? Salman Khan is flesh and blood; the victims are an abstraction. The Salman Khan episode informs us about the inveterate biases and prejudices in the larger public's sympathies.

A Salman Khan or Sanjay Dutt, have come out of the camera frame to become stars outside the cinema world. We see them as alleged perpetrators of crimes only when there is a court hearing. For the rest of the time large parts of the public are happy with them on screen. We have blotted out another side of them. The lead-up to the release of Bajrangi Bhaijaan exemplifies the sheer randomness in the way we perceive the superstar and those who may have allegedly suffered at his/her hands. We will accept Salman in Bajrangi Bhaijaan and with it perhaps, put the final nail in the coffin of the memory of the victims of September 8, 2002.