The > Salman Khan trial isn’t just about an actor who may or may not have done the things he’s been accused of, the things > he’s now been acquitted of . (Whoever was driving that car has, by now, become as mysterious an entity as whoever fired the bullet that killed John F. Kennedy.) It’s about other things too, such as our all-consuming fascination for celebrity trials, and how we otherwise barely bother to read and react to the news item about the beggar down the road who was mowed down by a car driven by someone who isn’t in the movies we go to see, or in the test matches we watch on TV.
Baradwaj Rangan The Salman Khan trial is about how these trials go on and on. A child who was born the year when the driver of the Toyota Land Cruiser caused the accident — then again, maybe the Land Cruiser drove itself — is today a teenager. That’s a lot of time, a lot of newsprint, a lot of airwaves devoted to whether or not a very rich man is going to end up in jail. And in that kind of time, things change. Salman Khan is no longer the womaniser of Saajan , the prankster of Andaz Apna Apna , the lover of Pyaar Kiya To Darna Kya . He’s the innocent of > Bajrangi Bhaijaan who, while trying to help a lost little girl return to her home in Pakistan, meets army patrollers at the border and asks them permission to enter the country — this man, we are constantly being told, would never do anything against the law. Heck, he’s so innocent, even sweet old Sooraj Barjatya, upholder of Indian values that Indians didn’t even know they were supposed to value, likes to work with him.
“ The Salman Khan trial is about Bollywood’s clannishness: how it closes ranks around its own ”
The Salman Khan trial is about movie audiences who know, in some corner of their minds, that the tickets they’re buying are for a film whose hero may have done something very villainous — and yet they buy those tickets, over Rs. 100 crore-worth of tickets >( in the case of Dabangg ) , over Rs. 200 crore-worth of tickets (in the case of Kick ), over Rs. 300 crore-worth of tickets (in the case of Bajrangi Bhaijaan ). So the Salman Khan trial is about how we cease to care about things a civilised society expects us to care about, how we only care about entertainment, whether we’re getting our money’s worth. The Salman Khan trial is about > Bhai’s fans , those fever-crazed people who camped outside his house waiting for a glimpse of their hero as he returned from court. By fans, I refer also to an adoring national media, for whom this was the biggest story of the day, maybe even the year, given their instant and committed response, something that wasn’t evident during the polls in Tripura or the floods in some State down south.
What the Salman Khan trial isn’t about is what it was really supposed to be about: justice, truth — all those things that say there’s no difference between the man who’s forced to sleep on a pavement and the man who lives in a house fifty stories above that pavement. From the > 2002 charge of “culpable homicide not amounting to murder”, to the 2007 chemical analysis report suggesting that the actor was drunk at the time of the accident, to the 2015 verdict that he could not convicted on the basis of evidence produced in the 2002 case — what a roller coaster it’s been, the story of how Salman Khan got out of it. But did Salman Khan really do it? That may be the one thing we haven’t been told by the Salman Khan trial.
baradwaj.r@thehindu.co.in
