'Manage kar dena' culture won't work always: Salman verdict a wake up call for our elites

In the eyes of the law it should not matter if Mother Teresa was behind a hit-and-run or Dawood Ibrahim. It should not matter that one is a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize and the other is a wanted terrorist and don. In the eyes of the law the only narrow question is whether they are guilty of a hit-and-run. The character of the driver is moot.

No one is questioning Salman Khan’s philanthropy. No one is debating whether Being Human proves his generosity and humanitarian spirit. No one is arguing about whether he is a beloved star in Bollywood or not. And no one is contesting Parineeti Chopra when she rhapsodizes about the “beauty of a human being that Salman Khan is”.

Alia Bhatt probably came closest to understanding the difference between the crime Salman Khan is found guilty of and the man he is when she tweeted “It hurts when your own are punished, even if they are in the wrong. We love you and are standing by you.”

That is what friends and family are for – to stand by their own even if they are in the wrong. Nobody is expecting the film fraternity to do a Mother India act in real life and stab Salman Khan.

But that does not mean the blame should go the victims of the hit-and-run whose only crime was to be sleeping in the way of his car. That’s a transference of guilt even the most outlandish Bollywood script would not countenance. But that is exactly what the singer Abhijeet did when he tweeted ““kutta rd pe soyega, kutte ki maut marega, roads garib ke baap nahin hai I ws homles a yr nve slept on road”. As if the poor choose to sleep on the street for the marine breeze when they could easily crash on the couch of some kindly middle-class friend.

Bollywood produces film after film cheering the poor but honest boy who eventually wins against the filthy rich don, some of them probably written by Salman Khan’s own father. It is astonishing how quickly and callously, however, it tosses its own script out of the window when one of its own stars is in trouble.

If today a court had exonerated Salman Khan of all charges and bought the story of the guilty driver, many would have shaken their heads and said that’s how justice works in this country. The rich and the superstar can bend justice to their will and find someone to take the blame. They can cozy up to powerful politicians, they can ride out the process, delay it at will, get judges transferred and ensure an acquittal. But now that the law has actually proved it can be blind, Salman Khan’s supporters like Pulkit Samrat are tweeting “Today I wish he wasn’t a superstar. Prejudice.” In the universe Samrat lives in, the rich and powerful are apparently routinely punished because vindictive and jealous judges are prejudiced. In fact, if that was the case the Salman Khan verdict would not be such big news. It’s landed like a bombshell because we are used to the well-connected never having to face the music because they have the fat cat lawyers, the time and the money that the little guy just does not have.

Remember what happened with Manu Sharma who shot Jessica Lall in a bar in front of many witnesses? Remember the twists and turns of that case, the witnesses turning hostile, until that final ’not guilty’ verdict that spurred such national outrage the case had to be revisited.

But Jessica Lall was different. She came from a strata of a society which counted for something in our class-conscious society. Celebrities demanded justice for her. They adopted the case as one of their own. Pavement dwellers are another matter. They are not people. They are a problem – human detritus in the way of a car. As Farah Khan Ali tweeted:

“The govt should be responsible for housing ppl.If no 1was sleeping on d road in any other country Salman wuld not have driven over anybody.”

While Bollywood might care about Salman Khan, those hysterical Twitter-tears are really a result of self-pity as it realises that Sanjay Dutt was not just an aberrant nightmare. Bollywood is coming to grips with the fact that it is not above the law, that the same law that applies to a pavement dweller is also supposed to apply to stars, that the system cannot always be manipulated just because you have the means to do it.

In India, which at its heart remains doggedly feudal, laws and permits and licenses are always meant for the little people, the plebians. Wealth, power and prestige is measured by nonchalance about rules and regulations – whether its speed limits, building permits, customs rules or liquor laws. The rich, put simply, can roll up their windows and get away with murder. Impunity is just a perk that comes with wealth and status. Manage kar dena.

What the Bollywood elite cannot fathom is why a court would choose to be so harsh on poor Salman when even the victims of the hit-and-run are prepared to accept compensation and move on. “Compensation matters more than conviction, my health and work suffered,” says Abdullah Rauf Shaikh who lost a leg in that accident. “If Salman is punished, I will not be benefited in any way as neither my leg will heal nor my problems would go away.” Shaikh still watches Salman Khan films.

A poor man like Shaikh is entirely entitled to be more interested in compensation than punishment. But that does not change in any way what Khan is accused of doing and the punishment that comes with it. A murderer must face the legal system even if the victim’s family decides to forgive him. If today there is an honour killing it does not mean the state can shrug its shoulders and ignore it just because both sides agree that the victims deserved it.

But India’s elite think their power, connections and money can “manage” everything from bootleg liquour to access to the VVIP lounge to a court conviction. And Bollywod with its extra patina of glamour is even more convinced about its superpowers.

The court gave Salman Khan a wake up call. Hopefully the rest of India’s elites also got a bit of the same and understood that in the end there’s more to Being Human than a t-shirt. Being human should be that we are all equal in the eyes of the law.