The stage was set for yesteryear Khal Nayak’s return to prison, as Bollywood actor Sanjay Dutt changed his mind on Wednesday and offered to surrender before the designated TADA court in south Mumbai on Thursday to serve the remaining 42 months’ jail term in the 1993 Mumbai blasts case.
A day after he urged the TADA court that he be allow surrender before Pune’s Yerwada jail authorities in view of the alleged threat to his life from fundamentalist groups, 53-year-old withdrew his plea to that effect and said that he would surrender before the designated court in Mumbai on Thursday.
In a submission made before the TADA court, Sanjay’s lawyer Subhash Jadhav said that the actor, in a change of mind, now wanted to surrender before the designated court in Mumbai instead of the Pune’s Yerwada prison administration, and that he desired to withdraw his application before the TADA court. The court allowed the actor to withdraw his plea.
Sanjay — whose conviction under the Arms Act in the 1993 blasts was upheld and his sentence was reduced from the earlier six years (awarded by the TADA court in 2006) to five years by the Supreme Court on March 21, 2013 --will now have to serve a remaining jail term of three and a half years.
The actor had spent nearly 18 months behind the bars in three stretches in the past. Apart from the perceived threat to his life from some fundamentalist groups, the other reason that Sanjay had cited for his desire to surrender before the Pune Jail authorities was that he wanted to avoid excessive media glare at the time of surrender and shift to the jail.
The actor had specifically told the TADA court that he did not want a repeat of the experience he had last time when he was “chased” by media paparazzi during his journey under police escort from Mumbai’s Arrthur Road prison to Pune-based Yerwada jail after he was convicted by the trial court in the 1993 blasts case. Given that Mumbai’s Arthur Road prison is meant for under-trials, Sanjay Dutt will in all likelihood be lodged at Pune’s Yerwada prison, where he had been lodged earlier.
As has been the practice in Mumbai, convict prisoners on their surrender will be first taken to the Arthur Road prison, from where they will be shifted amidst security to other jails across Maharashtra. Sources said that the authorities would follow the same practice in Sanjay’s case as well.
During his earlier stay at Yerwada jail, actor had initially been lodged one of anda (egg-shaped) cells before and was later shifted to a separate cell in barrack no 3 of Pune prison, which incidentally is second biggest jail after Tihar Central prison in Delhi.