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Bollywood actor Sanjay Dutt served a five-year prison sentence after being found guilty of violating the Arms Act. Although he was granted bail multiple times during his sentence, he was ultimately released in 2016. This difficult chapter of his life was also depicted in the biopic Sanju, starring Ranbir Kapoor and directed by Sanjay’s longtime friend and renowned filmmaker Rajkumar Hirani. However, the actor himself has largely remained silent on the subject, rarely chronicling it.
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In a recent episode of The Himanshu Mehta Show, Sanjay spoke candidly about his time behind bars. He revisited the events of 1993, following the Babri Masjid demolition. Reflecting on the circumstances that led to his imprisonment, he said: “My father was being threatened, my sisters were being threatened. They said I had a gun, but they couldn’t prove it. So I don’t know what it was that actually put me inside there. All I can say is that it shouldn’t have taken them 25 years to realise that I was not in the TADA Act or in the bomb blast case. I don’t know why it took them 25 years to realise that, and then convict me in the Arms Act case without having a gun, without finding a gun.”
Sanjay Dutt also shared how he used this challenging phase of his life as an opportunity to learn and grow. The actor said, “But I take it as a part of my life, and I take it as a learning. I learned a lot. I learned the laws of the land. I learned to be a prosecutor, I learned to be a defence lawyer. I learned many things. I read a lot of books on law. I faced my jail time with dignity. When I was there, I read a lot of books. I prayed a lot, I chanted, I meditated. I read the Shiv Puran, the Ganesh Puran, the Bhagavad Gita, the Ramayana, the Mahabharata. I had that time in jail to read about my religion, about all the great gods.”
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He also emphasized that he never lost hope during those years. “I had to come out after five years, but all my request was to the great, honourable judges, and even the public prosecutors in the court, was to please expedite the case and finish it, whatever it was. Because in the I have seen so many people just languishing there in jail.”
On The Great Indian Kapil Sharma Show too, Sanjay Dutt shared insights into how he stayed productive while in prison. He shared, “I earned wages there. Whether I made chairs or paper bags, I got paid. Then I even started a radio station, called Radio YCP. It used to play only inside the jail. I got paid for that as well. I did the radio program. We had topics to talk about, and we also did some comedy. Three or four other prisoners would write the script for the program.”
He also highlighted his creative initiatives inside the prison: “I even started a theatre group, and I was the director and murder convicts were my actors.”
