Some celebrities go to jail in disgrace, and others merely because history chases them with burdens few others would bear. The sentencing of Bollywood star Sanjay Dutt to six years in jail seems to have pushed him into the latter, leaving him nowhere to look perhaps except to the Mahatma's own footsteps for inspiration. After all, what man cannot turn into a saint after troubles like this? And what nation can fail to see him as anything but one?
This is not merely because public sympathy is on his side, but so are truth, justice, and the whole moral universe of Indian cinema -- which is seldom wrong about anything. As a celebrity-child and a celebrity himself, Sanjay Dutt's life has been a public narrative for many years. What is uncanny though is that rather than being the story of a rich brat driving over pedestrians or shooting people at parties, it has turned into a mirror of the Indian film hero himself in all his noble forms.
In his early years, he was like the maudlin heroes of the black and white era, seeking escape through intoxication. Then, he became like the heroes of the 'angry young man' genre, taking the law and those cursed weapons, literally, into his own hands in a flash of vigilante-style machismo. Now, as he confronts another nightmare in real life, one wonders if his last screen avatar will emerge to guide him. Will Sanjay Dutt prove himself a real-life Munnabhai, a true devotee of Bapu?
That is what perhaps India is ultimately expecting of him, and that is why it is on his side. The people who do not want him punished so harshly are not just film-crazed fans. They are those who see justice in an Indian way, as a matter of truth and righteousness, rather than rules and procedures. They echo a sensibility that is at the heart of Mahatma Gandhi's injunctions against lawyers and modern legal institutions. Their moral universe knows that Sanjay has more