Soft Dismissal

True, there were simple lapses in the investigation. The prosecution’s crucial evidence—the tape said to have contained the conversation between Shah and Chhota Shakeel—was not admitted by the court. Due to a typing error in the panchnama, the cassette mentioned in it and the one eventually presented were different. An additional three minutes in the evidence tape were not accounted for in the prosecution’s papers, and the cassette was not even sealed properly. Also, Chhota Shakeel’s voice wasn’t convincingly verified.

But the Mumbai police had no reasons to be ashamed in the sessions court on October 1. Both sides had won.

In a crowded courtroom, judge A.P. Bhangale was finally about to sentence Shah. A two-and-a-half-year-old drama was about to end. It was one of the most high-profile cases in the country but the judge was disproportionately inaudible. Everybody pressed the best ear forward. Shah’s extended family, the matronly old women and the slimmer younger lot, looked at each other as if to ask what the judge had said. Some paralegals turned to them and said, "Congratulations, he’s been sentenced to one year in prison." When they didn’t look happy enough, the suited boys explained, "He’s already served more than that time, he can go home."

The relief on the faces of the women was muted. They were more expressive the previous day when Bhangale had acquitted Shah under the Maharastra Control of Organised Crime Act (MCOCA). He was found guilty only of the minor offence of withholding information on the underworld links of Nazim Rizvi, the producer of Shah’s ill-starred Chori Chori Chupke Chupke. The film had brought the rumoured underworld finance in Hindi cinema under legal scrutiny. Shah was charged with associating with the organised syndicate for monetary gains. That was the case. On October 1, he went home free muttering, according to one newspaper, that he would make a film on how he was framed. He got a triumphant welcome in his office. But the truth is, he had only saved himself from graver punishment.

Shah spent 15 months of his otherwise luxurious life in jail. He paid crores of rupees in legal expenses to luminaries that included Ram Jethmalani and Kapil Sibal, and in other costs not exactly legal in nature. As one of his lawyers told the court, Shah had "already been punished". His bail petition was rejected eight times before the Supreme Court granted him reprieve. That someone with his clout could spend so many months in jail was an ominous message by the police to the industry: if they associated with the underworld, the same could happen to them.

During the Shah incarceration and trial, the industry quietly cleaned itself up. "That’s why this case is not a blow to MCOCA," says public prosecutor Rohini Salian. Also, despite the dents in the investigation, the extent of the exercise—called a witch-hunt by some—impressed even the defence. "They did their job well," says one of Shah’s lawyers, Vibhav Krishna, "but there is only so much they could do: right from the start the prosecution’s case didn’t have legs. I can’t say why the state went after him." The state is expected to persist as the prosecution may now move the high court.

While the police investigation did get six years’ rigorous imprisonment for Rizvi, Rohini Salian emerged from it all as a grand David fighting not just one monster but a whole well-paid legal battery. "In the film Shah will make on his trial, I’ll be the vamp"—she seems glad at the prospect. In the course of the case when Shah’s lawyers "got personal through insults and accusations targeted at me", there were also mysterious moves to transfer her. She survived till the very end but she may not do so in Shah’s film. Especially since he has threatened to write it himself.