Rahul Dev Played Mast Gul’s Role in Unfinished Dus

A recently released Pakistani Taliban pic showing Mast Gul (left) with the Mufti Hassan Swati of TTP.
Pakistani militant leader Haroon Khan alias Mast Gul resurfaced recently with a suicide attack on a hotel in Peshawar on Tuesday that killed nine persons.

As a Hizbul Mujahideen commander, Gul held Indian security forces off during a two-month siege of the Chrar-e-Sharif Sufi shrine in March 1995 and escaped into Pakistan. He wasn’t seen for over a decade until he re-emerged recently as a Pakistani Taliban commander, ironically, fighting the state that once backed him. A photograph released by the Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan showed a henna-bearded Gul, 47, sitting cross-legged cradling an AK-47.

Gul was the inspiration for a Gabbar Singh-esque lead villain in an unfinished blockbuster in 1997. Actor Rahul Dev reacted with bewilderment and nostalgia to the news of the real Gul’s return. “It’s like the 1990s again man,” Rahul Dev said. “Mast Gul is out and Sanju is back in jail,” he said. In 1996, the Delhi-based model spent many months studying his pictures and videos to play Gul in Mukul Anand’s “Dus”.

The big-budget military thriller starring Sanjay Dutt, Salman Khan as army commandos infiltrating Pakistan, was shelved after Anand died suddenly of a heart attack in September 1997. The previous year, Anand had wrapped up a 40-day schedule in Salt Lake City and the rugged Rocky mountains of Utah. The remote US state stood-in for Jammu and Kashmir where Dev played the main villain, Mast Gul.

“Mukul Anand was fascinated by his name. He had lots of video footage of Mast Gul and a pin board studded with his photographs in his Worli office,” Dev recalls. Anand had made the acclaimed ‘Agneepath’ with Amitabh Bachchan in 1990, was trying to regain lost ground in Bollywood after the disastrous ‘Trimurti’ in 1995. Dus was his best shot. Unit members recall the film’s spectacular action sequences of being anything that the industry had produced, a reason why Anand shot in the US. He recreated India Gate and Rajpath in Utah for a sequence where the lead characters heli-rescue the Pakistani Prime Minister from an exploding limousine.

Dev, who now runs the fitness centre, Breathe in Delhi, has fond memories of the 1996 shoot in Utah. “Sanju had just got out of prison and was in peak physical fitness. We used to wake up at 5 am every morning and work out together and go for mile-long walks. Producer Nitin Manmohan briefly attempted to complete the half-finished film with other directors but gave up. “Dus was Mukul’s baby,” he said a few years ago. “No one else could realise its vision.” Manmohan released outtakes of the unifinished film in a music album in 1997 and made another big budget movie in 2005 using the same title. The reel Mast Gul gathers dust in film cans in Manmohan’s Neha Arts production house, the real one is free to wreak havoc in Pakistan’s north-western region.