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Director Aditya Dhar’s directorial Dhurandhar is filled with characters inspired by real life. While many similarities have been condemned, there are some which have been appreciated as well. One of the peculiar characters from the film is Ankit Sagar, playing the character of Javed Khanani, of the Khanani brothers. Recently the actor talked about his experience of playing Javed and whether he knew who he really was.
Karachi-based hawala titan Khanani was ISI’s money man, its shadow banker. If the terrorist organisation wanted to move money without raising any eyebrows, they went to him.
He ran Khanani & Kalia International with his brother which spearheaded economic sabotage in India. He looked like an accountant, spoke like one too but his work was hardly that — its ambit included managing the money for terror organisations such as Al Qaeda, Lashkar-e-Tayyiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed, as well as cleaning the cash for the dreaded D-Company. KKI was designated as a “significant transnational criminal organisation” by the US. He also spearheaded the fake currency notes flooding India, which were both sophisticated and nearly identical to Indian rupee. Some estimates say Rs 1,500–2,000 crore worth of Pakistan-origin fake notes were pumped into India in the early 2000s, and were used to fund Jihad.
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A month after India introduced demonetisation, Khanani was found dead, he had allegedly fallen from the fourth floor of an under-construction building. It was claimed that the step had created catastrophic liabilities for Pakistan’s Hawala king.
‘I looked almost identical to Javed Khanani’
When asked about what he knew of Javed before playing him, Ankit said, “I wasn’t told anything about the character, and I was just given some dialogues for the audition. I didn’t understand the background of the character, but the dialogues were very good. Later, when things worked out, Aditya Dhar told me about Javed Khanani and who he really was. Then I realised all of these characters, like Rehman Dakait and SP Aslam Choudhury, are all real.”
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He told TV9 Bharatvarsh that he slowly realised that he looked almost identical to Javed, and it made him wonder whether Dhar cast him for his acting skills or just the resemblance. “I got to know more about the Khanani brothers and the fact that they had over 350 offices in Pakistan alone. I had the curiosity of knowing about him, and when I googled him, I realised that he looked very similar to me. I jokingly kept telling Aditya, ‘Sir, yeh toh mera bhai lagta hai’ (He looks like my brother). I even asked him, ‘Have you just taken me for my face, or did you actually see my performance?’. However, he said no and that both my look test and my other audition went very well.
Even though Dhar and Ankit’s perception of Javed is of a flamboyant man, who is often the comical feature of the film, Javed was nothing like that in real life. The brothers ran KKI (Khanani and Kalia International), an organisation dealing with hawala and money laundering. Their reach was long, and they had offices in Toronto, East Africa, Dubai and many more important junctions. He was also responsible for a well-executed economic attack on India, in which terrorist organisations flooded the country with fake currency notes, which not only funded hawala networks but also paid for arms and ammunition. It also damaged the reputation of Indian currency.
Directed by Aditya Dhar, the cast of Dhurandhar includes, Ranveer Singh, Arjun Rampal, Sara Arjun, R Madhavan, Akshaye Khanna, and Sanjay Dutt.
