The recent news stories about Shah Rukh Khan and the Pujari brothers seem like déjà vu. Except this time it is different. There is none of the old paranoia when the mafia first laid siege to Bollywood couple of decades ago. Filmmakers are no longer quivering in fear and planning their exit like Rajiv Rai ( Gupt and Mohra ) who left India in the ’90s for 20 long years.

Unlike today, the mafia invasion of Bollywood in the ’90s was total and terrifying. The dons were the dark lords of the industry — controlling the stars, producers and directors through extortions and threats. The man responsible for this mayhem was Abu Salem — vain, heartless and money hungry, he almost went berserk and would have had the dubious distinction of breaking the back of Bollywood, if his run had not been cut short.

Abu Salem began his career as a lowly lieutenant of Dawood’s brother Anis Ibrahim. Before Anis, Bollywood had its dalliances with the mafia, albeit in a peripheral manner. Black money was being ploughed in to make films but that came in from all sources. The mafia’s Bollywood connection in that period started and ended with the starlets and actresses. Their common meeting ground was Dubai, where it was prestigious to be seen watching cricket in the VIP enclosure at Sharjah with Dawood Ibrahim. Salem himself at the time was primarily a gold smuggler, who had a merely starry-eyed interest in Bollywood. His closest brush with movie stars came when he delivered firearms to Sanjay Dutt, his hero, for Anis in January 1993. It was an encounter that was to change both their lives.

In 1993, Mumbai was rocked by serial bomb blasts that devastated the city and the nation. Rakesh Maria, who was a deputy police commissioner and at the helm of the investigation, was turning on the heat and nobody was spared. When famous filmstar and the son of a MP, Sanjay Dutt was sent to prison for possessing firearms, Abu Salem, who had supplied those weapons, knew he would be next in line.

And so Salem escaped to Dubai, like all the other mafia dons, where he began to eventually work more closely with Anis Ibrahim. Anis owned King’s Video, a massive pirated film business. In that era, the only way expatriate Indians could watch Hindi movies was via videos. The mafia had realised the huge potential for Bollywood films in the Middle East, where there was a large number of Indians, and made a killing on pirated cassettes. Salem began working with Anis on the video business but was soon given the job of handling Bollywood and the builders of Mumbai. The ambitious young don was desperate to make his innings with the Dawood family, and so plunged into his new job with a zeal and fervour that only left destruction and despair in its wake.

Back home, the country was going through its own churning. The economy was opened up by PV Narasimha Rao and his finance wizard Manmohan Singh. In Mumbai, the financial nerve centre of the country, there was a lot happening both in Bollywood and the real estate sector. Rich Indians were now laundering their black money after the government gave many voluntary disclosure sops. So, this was an opportune moment for black money to find its way into Bollywood. Plans, too, were being laid for what would eventually change the geography of Mumbai. The land in south-central Mumbai was dominated by mills, and while the ’80s was dominated by mill strikes, the ’90s were a time when mill owners were secretly parlaying with the state government to free up the mill land for commercial use. Fortunes were about to be made.

Liberalisation had its side effects in other areas like the storylines of Bollywood films. The angry young man of the ’70s and ’80s and the romantic hero suddenly seemed like extinct species as the younger audience got more aspirational. The audience — many of them born in the ’70s after the wars with China and Pakistan and the angst of Partition — identified with the younger heroes. In 1990, Mahesh Bhatt’s Aashiqui was a superhit followed by Baaghi, Dil and Ghayal .

The old guard of Bollywood began to slowly decline and in their wake rose a brilliant young generation. There were the Khans — Salman Khan and Shah Rukh Khan and Aamir Khan, topped with the machismo of Sanjay Dutt and Sunny Deol and a sprinkling of Ajay Devgn. Amitabh Bachchan’s Hum was only remembered for the voluptuous Kimi Katkar and the song Jumma chumma de de . Though the Kapoor clan tried to revive their stock with Henna , they too had to eventually bow out.

Among the newcomers, one man stood out for his audacious charm and his appeal. Shah Rukh Khan simply swallowed the screen and everybody else with it. The audience could not take their eyes off him. He took Bollywood by storm. He was so compelling that the veteran lover boy Rishi Kapoor appeared lost and spent in Deewana (1992).

When Abu Salem left the shores of Mumbai, Bollywood’s reinvention was near complete, and profits had soared almost six times from the late ’80s. The mafia naturally began to show an interest in what was happening in the industry. Earlier, filmmakers earned solely through distribution in the domestic sector and music rights. But Shah Rukh Khan’s Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge in 1995 opened up a very lucrative market overseas. Then there were the satellite rights as PV Narasimha Rao did us another favour by saving us from the limited options on the drab State-run Doordarshan channel and opened up all of television.

One man from Bollywood who seemed to be on a winning spree at the time was filmmaker Subhash Ghai and he was the first target of the mafia. Ghai, known as the showman, made larger-than-life films. He told simple stories but etched the characters in your mind for eternity. Like Dilip Kumar and Raj Kumar in Saudagar or Sanjay Dutt in Khalnayak . Remember the way Sanjay Dutt tilted his head and shook his shoulder-length hair vigorously in Khalnayak , a classic act that won him numerous fans. He was the first anti-hero of contemporary Bollywood long before Shah Rukh Khan immortalised the trend in Darr . Ghai’s Khalnayak was a runaway hit. The protagonist’s reel life image collided with real life when Sanjay Dutt got arrested making the film even more compelling. The cash registers began ringing and Ghai emerged as one of the biggest movie moguls of the ’90s.

Salem’s job was to make calls to the big bosses of Bollywood and demand international distribution rights, access to piracy or just money. Most people gave into his demands. Ghai refused. Salem — who had started the trend of recruiting boys from his hometown Azamgarh for hitmen for measly sums of ₹5,000 — dispatched five boys to kill Ghai. The boys were intercepted by the Mumbai police and the plan foiled. Salem maintained that he didn’t actually mean to eliminate Ghai but was only intent on sending out a message.

The next target was director Rajiv Rai, who had three hits to his credit, Tridev, Mohra and Gupt . In 1997, Rajiv Rai was in his Tardeo office with his bodyguard, provided by the Mumbai police when five youths opened fire upon him. But Rai’s bodyguard managed to put up a fight and arrested one of them, while others fled from the scene. Rai was so perturbed by the murder attempt that he packed his bags and left the shores of India forever.

Gulshan Kumar, owner of T-series and a music magnate, was not so lucky. His killing was very brutal and it shook the film industry. The trick worked. Nobody knows how much money the big movie moghuls coughed up after the killing of Kumar. But it is said that Abu Salem made a neat profit of ₹400 crore, besides purchasing many prime properties in Dubai, which he rented out. For Bollywood, Abu Salem coined a new name for himself. Captain. He also used the name Arsalan in his dealings with Bollywood, a name he had used to make a forged passport for Dubai.

Using his pseudonym Arsalan, he wooed Monica Bedi, who was a struggling starlet at the time. Eventually, they fell into a relationship and married. By this time, Salem and the other dons’ hold over Bollywood was complete. They were not just making money from the industry but also shaping it. Struggling actors and actresses had inveigled their way into Bollywood using mafia contacts. The mafia had begun to even have a say in the casting of many films. Later, of course, they got bolder and started making films. Chhota Rajan’s brother Deepak Nikalje got the Sanjay Dutt hit Vaastav made and Bharat Shah got into trouble for money laundering for the mafia in Chori Chori Chupke Chupke (2001).

Abu Salem and the controversies on film financing and the mafia only helped Bollywood. While in the ’90s film producers were not transparent about the funding and earnings, Bollywood was forced to go legit. Today nobody is shy of claiming that their film made ₹200 crore in earnings. Viacom, UTV, Balaji and other big production houses work on corporate lines and all financing is above board generally. Movies, of course, don’t run for one year any longer and are supposed to yield returns in the first two days of the opening itself. Meanwhile, Abu Salem is just a name, erased from Bollywood’s collective memory.

But the veterans are still wary of Salem’s presence in Mumbai jails. You never know if he will get acquitted or serve out his time, only to return and make lives miserable again.

( S Hussain Zaidi is a journalist and author, most recently of My Name is Abu Salem)

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