12 Key Questions In Bollywood's Celebrity Trial Of The Century

Hollywood has never seen the likes of the trial of Salman Khan, the Bollywood movie star who is currently engaged in a legal appeal of his five-year prison sentence for ‘culpable homicide not amounting to murder.’ Imagine Tom Cruise or Brad Pitt being convicted and sentenced for committing a violent, unpremeditated crime, while their latest film is breaking all records at the box office, and you begin to get a sense of what’s currently at stake in India.
Khan was convicted in May, 2015 on charges of hit-and-run driving while under the influence of alcohol, for a 2002 incident in which five men were run over on a sidewalk by Khan’s Toyota Land Cruiser. One of those men died at the scene; the other four were injured.

Salman Khan’s banged-up Toyota Land Cruiser

Khan has appealed the conviction, claiming that he was neither driving the vehicle nor was he under the influence of alcohol.
The case has the Bollywood film industry transfixed. Not just because it is Salman Khan, India’s biggest movie star, who is the subject of the proceedings, but also because of the questions the case has raised, such as:

1. Was Khan behind the wheel or not?
2. If not, why did two other people who were inside the Land Cruiser at the time of the incident testify that Khan was driving?
3. Why was one of those two witnesses—a police constable named Ravindra Patil who had been acting as Khan’s bodyguard in the vehicle—unable or unwilling on five different occasions to appear in court to provide his testimony in the case?
4. Why was Patil incarcerated at Mumbai’s Arthur Road jail although he was never charged with any crime?
5. Was Ravindra Patil’s death at the age of 30 in 2007 due to natural causes, or was it, as Patil’s mother claims, due to beatings, torture and poisoning at the hands of state police, the alleged “henchmen of Salman Khan”?
6. If Patil’s mother’s accusations are true, why have there been no charges filed in her son’s death.
7. Why was the second eyewitness, pop singer Kamaal Khan, never deposed in the case? (In his statement to police after the incident, he was quoted saying, “Salman was driving and we started to head to his house. We were heading from St Andrew’s Road to Hill Road. While taking a right turn, Salman lost control of the car and it went on the steps of a building and crashed into a shutter. I heard shouts and people gathered around the car.”)
8. Was there a third passenger/witness in the vehicle at the time, and if so what happened to them?
9. If Khan was intoxicated, why was it only 13 hours later before his blood was sampled for testing?
10. Although unrelated to this case, many are asking why Khan didn’t serve his prison sentences for two prior criminal convictions?
11. Are certain people in India simply above the law because of their power, wealth and fame?
12. What will happen to Bollywood if Khan goes to jail? What will happen if he doesn’t?

The last time a decision was near regarding Khan’s legal fate, Bollywood came to a standstill. Expect a frenzied reaction when the Bombay High Court announces its decision regarding Khan’s appeal.