INDIA: The enfant terrible of Bombay's film industry is in trouble again, but his case is only part of a wider problem in Bollywood, reports Rahul Bedi.
The trial of Bollywood movie sex symbol Salman Khan for mowing down five people with his Toyota Land Cruiser has brought into focus once again the Bombay film industry's frequent brushes with the law.
Bollywood's enfant terrible, voted one of the world's best-looking men by People magazine in the late 1990s, has been charged on 11 counts of rash and negligent driving which, if proven, could lead to a two-year jail sentence.
But trial proceedings, which began last week, were adjourned by nearly four weeks as the state government awaited the Supreme Court's decision on whether or not to charge Khan with culpable homicide for killing one and seriously injuring four poor labourers as they slept on the pavement in the port city's suburb a year ago. This charge carries a maximum 10-year jail term.
Police investigations revealed that not only did Khan not have a driving licence at the time of the accident, but also that his vehicle had fake registration papers.
Khan fled the scene after the incident, but was arrested a few hours later and released on bail. On the court's orders he also paid 1.9 million rupees (€35,600) to the deceased Nooru Behra's family and to the injured.
Khan has frequently made headlines for roughing up reporters and photographers, getting aggressive with his actress girlfriends, who include the former Miss World, now Bollywood heroine, Aishwarya Rai. He was also arrested four years ago for poaching the banned black buck in Rajasthan state in a case that has yet to come to trial. But Khan is not the only Bollywood celebrity to fall foul of the law.
Last month film producer Nazim Rizvi was imprisoned for six years for having links with Bombay's powerful mafia, while India's biggest movie financier, Bharat Shah, was sentenced to a year in jail for withholding information about organised crime.
Police claim that Shah and Rizvi had ties to Chhota Shakeel, a suspected mob boss who lives in Pakistan and the United Arab Emirates and who "controls" a large proportion of the city's underworld activities. But Shah, who is also one of India's top diamond traders, will not spend more time in jail, having already served out his sentence whilst his trial was in progress.
Shah's case rocked Bollywood, the world's largest movie industry, producing more than 800 films a year. Movie executives claim the city's dominant mafia controls the film industry, extorting money, giving loans at high interest, seeking distribution rights and forcing producers and actors to do their bidding.
Five years ago, after recession hit Bombay's booming property prices that rival Hong Kong and London, the city's four major gangs aimed their extortion activities at Bollywood. Police were unable to offer any protection partly because the victims were too scared to report the matter or, as Federal Intelligence Bureau sources said, they were closely linked to the various gangs.
One such Bollywood victim, who declined to be named, said well-known film personalities were going to great lengths to publicly portray themselves as poor by driving old cars, staying away from expensive restaurants and holding low-key parties, anxious not to attract the unwelcome attention of any city gang.
CID police sources estimate that Bombay's four major gangs, run like corporations with legal advisers, bankers, musclemen and highly trained mercenaries, annually do a variety of "business" with Bollywood worth more than 200 billion rupees (€3.8 billion).
They say that some of the larger gangs even hired trained mercenaries from Sri Lanka's Tamil Tiger guerillas, for around 200,000 rupees (€3,765) per "hit", known locally as a supari. They also gave them arms like assault rifles and machine guns to carry out dramatic gangland executions, many in public places and in broad daylight.
The collapse of Bombay's textile industry in the 1980s and the urban despair that it caused triggered the spectacular rise of Dawdood Ibrahim, the son of a local CID police constable who runs Bombay's largest criminal outfit from Dubai and the southern Pakistani port city of Karachi.
Last week the US administration acknowledged Ibrahim as a "major criminal of Indian origin" who was connected closely with Pakistani intelligence and the terror groups they reportedly sponsor in Afghanistan and northern India's disputed, war-torn Kashmir region. The federal government claims Ibrahim's organisation was responsible for Bombay's 1993 serial bombings in which nearly 300 people died and several important buildings, like the stock exchange, were blown up. His extradition from Pakistan has been demanded.
After falling out with the established figures in the city's prolific underworld that began smuggling gold, liquor and electronic goods from the Gulf sheikhdoms in the 1960s, Ibrahim set up on his own. In 1984, after a series of bloody gang wars in which scores died and lawlessness prevailed for months in Bombay, he moved to the Arab sheikhdoms but retained his control over the city.