The failure of her torrid love affair with a high profile Haryana politician hasn’t exactly sent Anuradha Bali alias Fiza into oblivion. Instead, it has turned her into a celebrity of sorts
All publicity is good publicity’, or so goes a popular saying. Anuradha Bali alias Fiza is the living epitome of this truism in the age of the electronic media. Her torrid love affair and marriage to a high profile Haryana politician, Chander Mohan Bishnoi, the former deputy chief minister of Haryana, and the abrupt end of their relationship amidst media frenzy late last year haven’t exactly left this former Assistant Attorney General of Punjab and Haryana cowering in a corner.
If anything, the stormy relationship drama has spurred this 37-year-old woman to find a new vocation that promises to keep her in the public eye. The controversy has, in fact, added to her personal charm. Thanks to the constant media attention, Bali has now found a job as an agony aunt and counsellor for women and men who have failed or been betrayed in love, deserted by their spouses, tormented by their bosses or denied justice by law. There are others, too, who seek her help to cut through the bureaucratic red tape to get a simple job done at a government office or the victims of goons whom police have denied help.
There is a constant stream of people knocking on her door at her plush three-storey house in Sector 48C, close to the Chandigarh-Mohali border. She lends them a sympathetic ear and a shoulder to cry on, and assures them her moral support. The visitors to her home include models, women from the backward Mewat region and even wives of paramilitary personnel. Being a celebrity of sorts, Fiza often gets invited as a guest of honour for the launch of events, inaugurals and prize distribution ceremonies.
“Somehow I am able to help people get justice. People who have been cornered in their life look up to me for help,” she declares with a tinge of pride. Right now, she is also dealing with Krishna, wife of a Central Reserve Police Officer, who complains of police inaction in her father's brutal death by his neighbours.
Fiza has apparently got into the groove for her new role as the counsellor-activist with the ease of a professional expert. She calls up the person against whom she has received a complaint, and urges him to mend his ways. She also threatens: if he doesn’t give in to her demands, there are other ways she can get things done. “I’ve used this method (dropping hints about her cosy relationships with the media) with a lot of people – even highly-placed bureaucrats and politicians. In most cases it works. They (the big bullies) chicken out,” she admits brazenly with a full-throated laugh.
Fiza’s dream of making it big on the silver screen, like her marriage, has proved to be a non-starter. Last year, she was ejected from the reality TV show Iss Jungle Se Mujhe Bachao much sooner than expected. She is out of Kamaal Khan’s Deshdrohi II. She is disillusioned with reality shows now. Fiza claims to have refused to be part of Big Boss 3. “Pacific offered me Rs 25 crore for my real story but I was not in the right frame of mind to accept it,” she claims, albeit with a tinge of regret.
The rumour mills are rife that she married Chander Mohan for his property. But Fiza has utter contempt for the rumours. “I was offered Rs 5 lakh in alimony but I rejected it. I am not fighting for money. This is a fight for a woman’s dignity.”
Bali shot to fame overnight in December last year when her love affair with Chander Mohan was documented in Bollywood style drama by the country’s electronic media and closely followed by newspapers and the Internet. The Haryana politician’s extramarital fling with her had all the ingredients of a sensational drama, clearly a TRP-chasing TV producer’s dream. Chander Mohan was not only the deputy chief minister but also son of one of Haryana’s three famous Lals – Bhajan Lal, a heavyweight politician in his own right.
Mohan, wanting to escape the charge of bigamy, converted to Islam and took on the name, Chand Mohammad to marry Bali, who became Fiza. Bhajan Lal, as expected, disowned his son and the embarrassed Haryana government dismissed him from the post of deputy chief minister. And then came a series of flip-flops with Chand divorcing Fiza, returning to her, and then divorcing her to go back to his wife, Seema and re-converting to Hinduism. This on-again-off-again drama took on another hue when she accused her detractors of abducting her husband, and then tried to commit suicide when Chand went missing. When asked if she has forgiven Chand Mohammad, she counters, “How can I? No woman can forget such an incident. He married me for sex. It was all a drama. The powerful make fun of the law. It was a blunder on my part to trust him. Had I died after consuming the overdose of sleeping pills, my case would have been like that of Ruchika’s,” she says.
No wonder Fiza feels morally vindicated by the marginalisation of the Bhajan Lal family in Haryana politics in the recent assembly polls. “God has given me justice. Politically, Chander Mohan is dead. Jasma Devi (Bhajan Lal’s wife) finished third in the assembly polls,” she says. With the newly elected MLAs of Haryana Janhit Congress led by another Bhajan Lal son, Kuldeep Bishnoi, defecting en masse to the Congress, the family seems to have suffered from the curse of the woman scorned.
Unlike Europe, however, where sex scandals and bigamy can attract a suspension from office, and even arrest, in India it has just raised a little bit of dust and made for a great story for the media.
