Salman is out on bail as are his alleged accomplices Saif Ali Khan Tabu Nee- lam Sonali Bendre
Posted in General on 05. Aug, 2010
Salman is out on bail, as are his alleged accomplices, Saif Ali Khan, Tabu, Nee- lam, Sonali Bendre and the comedian Satish Shah – hot Bollywood properties all, and back into the hectic Bombay film round, sprinting from set to set of half a dozen movies in production simultaneously.What the Jodhpur escapade will do for Salman Khan’s career it is too early to judge. When I arrived the sun was poised above the horizon, and the trees were dense with the cries of returning birds. At the end of the avenue between the trees stands a simple whitewashed shrine; inside, a flame burnt before the portrait of Guru Jambaji. As the sun set, the priest, clad in orange, beat a tattoo on drum and gong in memory of the Bishnoi martyrs.Back in Bombay, life for the stars is getting back to normal. At the spot where Khan made his last killing, another male blackbuck chases the eight or 10 does in his harem back and forth, the does shooting almost vertically up into the air as if on pogo sticks.A few miles away is a grove of sacred kejri trees: 363 of them, for the 363 Bishnoi who died nearly 270 years ago protecting their community’s woodland. To see the Bishnoi lifestyle in its purest form you must travel far from the city and out into the fringes of the desert, to villages like Osian, Phalodi, Jamba and Mukaon, which the contamination of city life has yet to reach. But in fact this proximity to the city makes what one sees here all the more striking Rural Indian life goes on all around.
A line of Bishnoi women pass with big brass water pots on their heads, others crammed into a tractor trailer, a family of five squeezed on to a scooter. And over and over again we see deer, placidly cropping grass a few yards away. A group of chinkara dashes away at our approach, then stands there staring, wagging their broad, flat tails. A full-grown male blackbuck steams across the road, head and long, twisting horns lowered, almost under the bumper of an Ambassador. The perimeter fence of the British-built aerodrome borders the road. Other groups with no special concern for wild animals or the enviroment live in close quarters with the Bishnoi. What, I asked them, would they consider a suitable punishment for Salman Khan? The reply was instantaneous and vehement, and a bit surprising if one takes the Bishnois’ pacifism at face value.
“He should be hanged.” “His ears and nose should be cut off,” said another, “and he should be beaten black and blue.”Gudda-Bishnoiya is Edge City: the suburbs where middle-class Bishnoi like Mahesh Bishnoi the advocate build their pink stone villas are only a few miles away. The mammoth organisation’s Indian branch has been criticised lately for ineffectuality. But this was much worse: just as Salman Khan was being produced in court, accused of one of the worst wildlife crimes one can think of, the Fund’s glossy 1999 calendar was rolling off the presses – with 12 artful photographs of the hottest Bollywood stars, one for each month.Salman Khan’s month was February. Under the bright shamiana in the mellow October sunshine, the towering white turbans and divided whiskers and hawk-like brown profiles were assembled. There he was, moody, sensitive and stripped to the waist as usual. “Travel your way to good health,” twittered the copy at the foot of the page. “Use bicycle or better still, walk whenever you can.” WWF issued a furious denunciation of the poachers and arranged for February to be pulped and replaced.In the field that surrounds a tumbledown Bishnoi house in Gudda-Bishnoi, a couple of kilometres from the scene of the final night’s poaching, Bishnoi elders gathered recently to give a ceremonial send-off to a local girl who had just got married.
As a result of the case, poaching has been all over India’s front pages for weeks. The right of Bombay’s rich punks to butcher at will has, for the first time, been seriously questioned.An unexpected casualty of the affair has been the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF). Dushyant Singh, the guide who is alleged to have arranged the poaching trips, has yet to be arrested, and there are dark rumours that he is being protected by the powerful Rajputs who used to rule Jodhpur (Singh is a Rajput himself), and who still wield great power.But already something has changed. The vet responsible for the faked report disappeared, and is sought by the police. Finally, a full 10 days after the event, Khan and his friends were arrested and charged.The case is far from over yet, and the outcome is far from certain. Like all trials in India, it will drag on for many months, possibly years. A new post mortem was ordered, the deers’ carcasses exhumed, and a body of learned men declared that they actually died from gunshot wounds.
Bishnoi leaders made it clear that the political parties’ stand on Salman Khan would powerfully influence how they voted.It took seven days – days of fevered meeting, long phone calls, smoke- filled rooms, VIP “air-dashes” – before the political will to proceed was mustered. Furthermore, it is election time now in India: polls for state assemblies all over the Union were due in a few weeks. The Bishnoi community in Rajasthan is numerous – no-one knows how many, but an educated guess puts them at two per cent of the state’s population, about one million people They are tight-knit, too, capable of voting as a block. In the days after the killings, they held demonstrations in Jodhpur demanding justice. In the rare event of a poacher being caught in the act, he has numerous opportunities to get off the hook: by bribing the forest guards, who are paid starvation wages; bribing vets who perform post mortems; pulling political strings to have the case aborted. A hurried post mortem carried out on the two blackbuck at the site of the shooting declared, fatuously, that one died from “injuries suffered during leaping”, one from “overeating” The deer were buried at the spot The weapons used to kill them were spirited away to Bombay The case looked like ending before it had even started Bollywood rules.Two things made that impossible First, the Bishnoi would not let the matter rest. Even if a poacher is charged, the case can disappear into the bowels of India’s grossly underfunded legal system for years.