Comment

How Congress compromised senior Dutt in those dark times

The middle class Pharisees, in the media and out, are having a whale of a time looking at the Sanjay Dutt case. They do not want to treat him as one of the more than 100 accused in the 1993 Mumbai blasts case.

At the same time, they do not want to be seen as supporting him, or sympathising with him because they would not like to be seen as being on the same side as the crowd. The men and women, the girls and boys on the street were not bothered about silly nuances but spoke from the heart when they said that the sentence of six years of RI meted out to the actor was harsh. If the people had known the Machiavellian context of the Sanjay case, then they would have spoken of his innocence as well.

But it is the hour of the smug tribunes. Their loud, clear and hollow voices are all that we hear. And they give us the impression that Sanjay has got away with a milder sentence because he is a famous film actor. And they do nurse the nagging doubt that perhaps Sanjay should have been tried under TADA, the now defunct anti-terror law rather than the Arms Act. They cannot resist the temptation of endless legalistic quibbling. They profess sympathy for the many poor among the accused who have been sentenced to harsher punishment.

What the blinkered newshounds refused to sniff out was the poisonous politics that still hangs around Sanjay, bearing a certain resemblance to the case of Albert Dreyfus, the Jewish military colonel in the French army who was wrongly accused and convicted of being a traitor. Emile Zola, the famous novelist, stood up and arraigned a complacent French nation for being complicit in an act of venality. But there is no Zola to throw light on the penumbra of conspiracy that provides the dark political background of the Sanjay case.

It goes back to the December, 1992 and January, 1993 communal riots in Mumbai. Sunil Dutt, father of Sanjay, plunged headlong into providing help for the riot victims, and they happened to be Muslims. The Hindutva mob would have none of it. The threat calls to the Dutt home, as to that of Dilip Kumar and Saira Bano were not imagined. They were real.

Remember that the riots were also used as a ploy in the intra-party power tussle of the then ruling Congress Party in the state. Sharad Pawar’s group was keen to prove the then suave and pipe-smoking Sudhakarrao Naik as an ineffective chief minister. It was part of the toppling game. But Sunil Dutt would not be drawn into petty games. He was in politics for idealistic reasons, a laughable motive for the small-minded, worldly-wise realists.

When Pawar was sent back to Mumbai as chief minister by the wily PV Narasimha Rao, his group ticked off Sunil Dutt. And when the opportunity came, Sanjay was charged as a terrorist who conspired against the state under TADA. The Pawar group had to corner Sunil Dutt, and they did it through the case against Sanjay. The Mumbai police who framed the charges against Sanjay should not pretend that there was no political pressure.

Narasimha Rao supported Pawar, and the whole of the Congress Party fell treacherously silent. It forced a proud Congressman like Sunil Dutt to go to Shiv Sena chief Bal Thackeray, who pronounced that Sunil and Nargis Dutt were patriots. Such was the shamelessness and cowardice of the secular Congress that they would not speak a word in favour of Sunil Dutt and his son. It is not surprising that 14 years later, the Congress plays the same cowardly game, afraid of offending Pawar’s Nationalist Congress Party (NCP), which is a crucial coalition partner in Mumbai as well as in Delhi.

Sunil Dutt remained a steadfast Congressman until his death. He faced the slings and arrows of fortune like a noble man. And he never hesitated to speak his mind. When Shiv Sena’s Sanjay Nirupam was inducted into the party, he spoke out against it like an honest man. Sonia Gandhi brushed aside his objections for political reasons.

Sanjay Dutt’s saga is intertwined with that of Sunil Dutt’s straightforward politics, a connection that remains invisible to the blinkered and hardnosed political observers in the media. The people who believe that Sanjay is paying the price for getting on the wrong side of the law are not really being judicious. They are just blind to the criminal side of political games.