A don done-in: Dawood Ibrahim may be still alive, but struggles in shame and insecure anonymity

Dawood Ibrahim remains India's most wanted man and by all accounts lives/hides/fades away in the protection of the authorities ruling its most intimate enemy, Pakistan -- unless rumours of his being poisoned are true with the most fatal outcome.

Coming in the backdrop of reports of more than a dozen anti-India terrorists being killed recently in Pakistan, the rumours have an ominous ring to them. "Unknown gunmen" behind those killed is now a code word for folks said to be kind to the Indian establishment, or those to whom it is kind or said to be. All we need now is a Hindu-sounding equivalent of James Bond (Jaswinder Bandhu, perhaps) and we would be feeding half-a-dozen nationalist scripts in Bollywood or its of-late cousins, the OTT platforms.

As of now, Dawood's poisoning as well as his rumoured death have been denied, both by Indian intelligence sources talking to an eager news media and his aide Chhota Shakeel. A Pakistani YouTuber is said to be behind the poisoning story. It is a comment on the state of affairs in the subcontinent that a random video can trigger the most buzzing of headlines. We can safely say that in the foreseeable future, we can see no demand recession for Akshay Kumar, Bollywood's frequent hero-in-waiting for gallant roles to scripts set in strange locales and challenging circumstances.

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Beyond all this, lie philosophical questions: Is a defunct Dawood any better than a dead one? Who is he, now, really?

Dawood crossed the rich-and-famous threshold nearly four decades ago, and what has been at stake since 1993 is his image of being a powerful social figure. In 1986, he was a patronising patriot for India, trying to shake off his underworld image by courting India's giant fame machines: Cricket and Bollywood. He is said to have offered Toyota cars to India's cricketers at Sharjah in the dressing room ahead of a final game in an international tournament, no less. The holy space made controversial headlines recently during the cricket World Cup when Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited India's defeated cricket team at the Ahmedabad dressing room in the stadium named after the PM himself. Just imagine: Media should have made a much bigger fuss when Dawood entered the holy space in 1986. Though legends have it that Indian cricket star Kapil Dev asked him to buzz off from the dressing room, the fact that he continued to be popular enough to be proudly photographed with movie stars and influential politicos says so much of who he used to be.

All that vanished after 1993, after serial blasts in the city then called Bombay of which he was considered the mastermind. The blasts that killed over 250 people (dozens more than those killed in the 26/11 attacks in Mumbai in 2008) changed his stature from generous patron to most wanted terrorist. The blasts were said to be in retaliation for Hindu activists demolishing the disputed Babri Masjid structure in December 1992 but I have my theory that he was probably more upset by then-finance ministerManmohan Singh's decision to allow full conversion of the Indian rupee on the current account two weeks before the deadly blasts. That probably hit Dawood in the solar plexus of the illegal foreign exchange business called 'hawala' with Dubai as its centre.

Oh, well! We can write racy paperbacks like that. Dawood, besides inspiring writers and filmmakers in Bollywood (including a biopic on his sister Hasina Parkar in 2017), has had such a fall from being an urban Robin Hood to a despised global terrorist that even if he is free, he has no place to hide. There he is, said to be living in Karachi's plush Clifton area, watched by Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agents and fearing some arsenic might drop in his sip of liquor, of which he is known to be a loving seeker despite his avowed image as a champion of Muslims.

Pakistani cricket star Javed Miandad's son married Dawood's daughter Mahrukh in 2005 in probably the only high point in the underworld don's quest for prominence and respect after the 1993 blasts. That was 2005. After that, as India's stock went up in global economic and geopolitical stakes and Pakistan's dived south, both the don and his adopted home have fought ignominy and intelligence hunts alike.

The don's name was poisoned long before the rumours swirled about him being physically harmed.

A combination of shame, cowardice and insecure anonymity is hardly what the doctor ordered for someone once known for his wealth, bravado and flashy ways. As an old Bollywood song goes: "Yeh jeena bhi koi jeena hai Lallu?" (Is this life a real life, oh fool?).

(Disclaimer: The views of the writer do not represent the views of WION or ZMCL. Nor does WION or ZMCL endorse the views of the writer.)