Bollywood's Dark Past Is Threatening To Return

12/26/2024 7:00:43 PM

(MENAFN- Live Mint) (Bloomberg Opinion) -- Disaster. Flop. Average. If you had to bet on a
Bollywood movie's fate in 2024, those would have been your three best options in a year set to end with a 30% to 40% drop in box-office collections.

The world's most prolific film industry
is desperately hoping for a better 2025. And so are the city's cops: When the
theaters
go empty, the body count starts to rise
on the streets of Mumbai. That's what the 1990s were like - and everyone's dreading a repeat of lawlessness in India's financial capital.

The fears are far from exaggerated. Baba Siddique, a local politician and real-estate developer who enjoyed
close friendships with celebrity actors, was gunned down in October as he was about to get into his car. A member of the gang that claimed responsibility
said
in a Facebook post that“Bollywood, politics, and property dealings” were behind the murder.

Organized crime and the show
business of
Bombay -
as the megalopolis was known until 1995 -
have been
joined at the hip for a long time. The Golden Age of Indian Cinema
that began around the country's 1947 independence from British rule had a 20-year run. Politics
took a cynical turn in the late 1960s, and popular culture began to reflect the loss of idealism. Bollywood scripts shed
the
social concerns of a young republic
and became the
escapist fantasy the world knows
today.

By the early 1970s, India was releasing
hundreds of Hindi-language films. Banks wouldn't finance them. That's where the likes of Haji Mastan came in. One of Mumbai's
most powerful
dons at the
time, Mastan was
a sucker for glamor. Dressed in all white, the stylish boss
became something of a private-equity player for the entertainment business when he began to finance
movies for his actress
lover.

The mob had eked out its
initial capital from the docks of Bombay, smuggling gold and electronics. As it reinvented itself
for a more open economy in the 1980s and 1990s, bootlegging and extortion gave way to
money-laundering, trafficking in drugs and
guns ... and more cinema. Dons were no longer satisfied with a profit share,
a 2003
report by the Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies noted. They wanted“partnership by becoming producers and getting overseas rights for film and music distribution.”

Leading this change was Dawood Ibrahim, a policeman's son who rose
to prominence as the city's most feared mobster in the post-Mastan era. Dawood began
operating from Dubai in the mid-1980s, but his syndicate, known as the D Company, is believed to have carried out the assassination of the founder of T Series, a music-production powerhouse,
in 1997.

That murder, as well as a subsequent
attempt on the life of a producer
- whose son
Hrithik Roshan was the reigning teen heartthrob -
shook the industry. Ibrahim's suspected involvement in the deadly 1993 terror attack on Mumbai, in which 257 people were killed in a series of bomb blasts across the city,
provided
urgency to the cleanup. Bollywood has an entire crime noir
dedicated to
so-called encounter specialists,
who would, instead of
apprehending underworld operatives and producing them in court, simply execute
them. One of my
personal favorites
is Ab Tak Chhappan, or
“56 So Far,” a reference to the kill count.

Just when it looked like the city had escaped from that cycle of violence, there are fresh signs of unease.
In February 2021, a
car packed with explosives was found parked outside the home of Mukesh Ambani, India's richest tycoon. An elite detective -
a former“encounter specialist” - is awaiting trial in that case. While denying the ex-cop's bail petition last year, a
court said his
aim was to spread terror in the mind of the Ambani family.

Siddique's murder has deepened the foreboding. Police have
invoked
a
harsh
1999 law
designed to crush organized crime. But cops don't know the underworld's
current level of engagement.
“We must have made 20 to 25 films and earned profits, too,” Chhota Shakeel, an Ibrahim
aide, had bragged in a 2001 interview, after authorities
busted a
high-profile case
of the
mafia's movie-financing operations.“Instead of extorting money from film personalities, we thought we would do business with them.”

Have the proceeds of crime seeped in again, slipping through the veneers of Bollywood's corporatization?
It's an important law-enforcement question. As the Indian investigative journalist Swati Chaturvedi wrote recently,“Nowhere else in the world does a film industry of this size face such organized threats.”

The repercussions go beyond showbiz.
Lawrence Bishnoi, the leader of the group
suspected of
murdering
Siddique, has been accused by the Canadian police of colluding with Indian government agents to kill and harass members of the country's
Sikh diaspora. A gangster
who's at the center of a
diplomatic spat - and at the same time
threatening to eliminate
Salman Khan, one of India's
biggest film stars -
adds a new dimension to the threat.

Arthouse Indian
cinema has always felt smothered by kitsch. That has only gotten worse in recent years with right-wing propaganda films competing with the usual song-and-dance and action routines.
But now Mumbai is losing control
even on its signature
over-the-top entertainers. Studios in the southern city of Hyderabad can
lay claim to two of the
biggest hits in a
dull year.(1) That is
just like 1984
when the Mumbai industry's dalliance with crime had begun to get serious. Meanwhile, the acclaimed drama
All We Imagine as Light, nominated for two Golden Globes and the winner of
this year's Cannes Grand Prix, is struggling
to find exhibitors at home.

A second-generation Mumbai producer recently sold half of his studio
to Adar Poonawalla, the billionaire vaccine maker who earned handsome profits
during
Covid-19. The pandemic marked
a crucial
intermission. It fueled
demand for original content people could stream
at home on Netflix, Amazon Prime and homegrown apps like Hotstar when cinemas were under lockdown. Now everything is open, and yet audiences
are so bored of the insipid fare on screens big and small, they're neither out
for a movie night, nor clicking through big-budget web dramas.

When everything starts bombing for Bollywood, things take a sinister turn in Mumbai.