Some time ago, the police arrested Bharat Shah, a diamond merchant, who was allegedly acting as a façade for the Dubai-based mafia financing production of films and engaged in bullying actors and actresses to part with their earnings or face execution at their hands. Obviously, the police had made a list of stars who had been receiving threats to make a case against Bharat Shah. But all the stars chickened out and only Preity Zinta agreed to depose in court in the case against Shah.

That the Dubai-based mafia was rolling in wealth, thanks to widespread smuggling operations and funding by Pakistan’s intelligence agency, ISI, was also acting as financier for many films produced by Bollywood every year was a well-known fact. When Dawood Ibrahim, the dreaded underworld don, used to live in Dubai—he has shifted to Pakistan now—Bollywood actors and actresses were not only frequent guests at his lavish parties but also danced and performed skits at Dawood’s parties for his guests from Pakistan and other countries of the world where Hema Malini, Rekha, Amitabh Bachchan and leading lights of Bollywood today like Aishwaria Rai are better known than any other thing about India.

The lid was blown off this organised crime racket when Dawood’s lieutenants used the well-known screen hero, Sanjay Dutt, as a conduit for smuggling arms into India. Not only that, gangsters operating Dawood’s crime network began bullying Bollywood stars to part with a sizable portion of their earnings as "protection money"; Gulshan Kumar, who made a name only by producing cassettes, was murdered in broad daylight not because he had declined to shell out cash but only because one of his rivals in the trade allegedly wanted him to be eliminated so that he could have a free run of Bollywood without anyone daring to challenge him in artistic terms.

Film stars receiving threats on their mobiles either from Mumbai or abroad raised a hue and cry, which made the authorities sit up and do something for their safety. The investigation was by no means easy for nobody was willing to talk about the underworld dons who were terrorising them. At last, police investigations led to a Mumbai millionaire, Bharat Shah, who was acting as a conduit for the transfer of cash to Bollywood film producers who were looking up to the mafia to finance their movies; he was also acting as a conduit for the transfer of money the gangsters were demanding—and often getting—as protection money. Bharat Shah was allegedly involved in the production of Devdas, which was Bollywood’s hit last year.

When Bharat Shah was arrested recently, it was thought that the entire network of the gangsters involving production of films and threatening film stars would come to light. But surprisingly, none of the stars cited as prosecution witnesses in the Bharat Shah case agreed to depose against him in court. Salman Khan, Rakesh Roshan, M. Manjrekar, Shahrukh Khan and even Sanjay Dutt sought to excuse themselves. When Sanjay Dutt, the hero of many popular films, was confronted with tapes of his talks with hoodlums in Dubai, he said he was too drunk to remember what he had said.