” Bahut puja kar li, ab upar ja ke karna (you have done enough puja, now do it up there).”
Three decades after that, the attack on actor Tiger Shroff yesterday from close range by two shooters, in crowded Juhu, has set off a similar cycle of urban paranoia. His crime? It comes months after unidentified gunmen fired five rounds at filmmaker Rohit Shetty’s multi-storey home, Shetty Tower, in Juhu. The difference is stark. Where once violence was part of the business conducted by gangs, it now appears to be a product of vanity, of brand-building, as director Ram Gopal Verma calls it. Grewal denied any friendship with Khan. Several non-entities became producers: Hanif Kadawala and Samir Lakdawala, video pirates till Dawood’s cash made them businessmen; Sudhakar Bokade, a former Air India cargo handler; Mukesh Duggal, a garments trader; and Dinesh Patel, a clothing store owner. Invitations to his parties and his cricket box in Sharjah gave many actors bragging rights. Mahesh Bhatt is a survivor of the ’90s. I picked up the phone and called the Prime Minister, Mr IK Gujral. He was unusual in that he kept a line on which you could reach him directly, and he answered it himself.
In November 2023, he claimed responsibility for shooting at actor-singer Gippy Grewal’s home due to his alleged association with Salman Khan. Almost thirty years ago, those were the words that greeted music baron Gulshan Kumar on the morning of August 12, 1997, along with a pistol aimed at his temple. He had just left after his customary morning Shiv mandir visit, only to have three shooters put 16 bullets into him. The killing set off a cycle of fear and suspicion in the Mumbai film industry, which had begun with an assault on producer-director Rajiv Rai in his Mumbai office on July 31 that year, not long after he turned down the demand of extortionists, and two calls to director Subhash Ghai reportedly demanding Rs 5 crore. Both attacks were claimed by gangs connected to Lawrence Bishnoi, currently in Sabarmati Central Jail in Ahmedabad, where he has been since 2023, when the Gujarat Anti-Terrorism Squad sought his transfer from Tihar Jail for drug smuggling. Bishnoi issued his first public death threat against Salman Khan in 2018 for allegedly killing blackbucks, considered sacred to the Bishnoi community, while shooting Hum Saath Saath Hain in 1998. Following Sidhu Moosewala’s death in 2022, Bishnoi warned Salman Khan again. In April 2024, Lawrence Bishnoi’s brother Anmol took responsibility for shots fired at Salman’s first-floor Galaxy Apartments flat at around 5 in the morning, calling it a ‘first and final warning’. Salman’s famous first-floor ‘darshan’ for fans has ceased, with the balcony and windows now covered with bulletproof glass since January 2025. The Mumbai film industry has a long association with the underworld, beginning with gold smuggler Haji Mastan, whose fascination with cinema was memorialised in fiction in Milan Luthria’s Once Upon a Time in Mumbai (2010), where Ajay Devgn played a version of the don. The rise of Dawood Ibrahim, who was totally glamour-struck, spawned a new closeness between the industry and the mafia, with an estimated 40% of Hindi films financed by the underworld at one point. With Mumbai becoming a city where gangs operated by Dawood’s former associates Chota Rajan (currently imprisoned in India serving multiple life sentences following his 2015 extradition from Bali), Chota Shakeel (currently said to be in Karachi and on India’s wanted list for his role in the 1993 blasts) and Abu Salem (currently lodged in Nashik Central Jail, where he is serving concurrent life sentences). The split between Dawood Ibrahim and Chota Rajan became the subject of the iconic movie, Company (2002), written by Anurag Kashyap and directed by Ram Gopal Varma.
He had refused to pay the second instalment of Rs 10 crore “protection money” to the underworld, which had set its eyes on his empire of 45 companies and studios across Mumbai and Delhi (estimated to be worth Rs 350 crore). “And there is no better way to do so than to attack a celebrity,” he adds. Bishnoi was seven years old then but vowed revenge, we are told. The 1993 blasts changed all that, with the ” bhai ” becoming persona non grata, and Sanjay Dutt’s inexplicable custody of an AK-47 delivered to him by Dawood’s men, signalling the temporary end of his career. He recalls August 12, 1997, as the day when the “ground beneath our feet shook”. Says he, “I was in Film City when the call came (about Gulshan Kumar being shot dead). I told him what had happened, and the news had not even reached him yet.”
