For Shatrughan Sinha, the day of reckoning may be fast approaching. But the actor-turned-Bharatiya Janata Party member of Parliament from Bihar seems unfazed.
As the Bihar election results trickle in, the buzz over his possible ouster from the party has reached a crescendo, especially in BJP circles in Bihar.
Sinha is aware of the sword of Damocles hanging over him. After all, he has drawn the ire of the BJP high command for attacking the party and its poll strategies repeatedly in Bihar, and publicly praising the BJP's bête noir, Bihar chief minister and Janata Dal (United) leader Nitish Kumar.
He says he too has heard whispers of his ouster from the party but indicates that he is ready to take it all in his stride.
"If they expel me from the party, salute to them. Their wish will be my command. But I won't let it go so easily," says the 68-year-old who is known as Bihari Babu in and outside Bihar.
After all, he argues that he has been with the party since the mid-1980s when it had only two MPs in Parliament.
"I have been with the BJP through its bad and good days. I can't be thrown out just like that," says the man who completed two terms in Rajya Sabha and is now into his second term as a Lok Sabha MP from Patna Sahib, one of the two constituencies in Bihar's Patna district.
On the wall of the living room in his official Talkatora Road residence in New Delhi hangs a framed certificate from the Limca Book of Records. It certifies Sinha as the "first actor from mainstream Hindi cinema to become a Cabinet minister" in 2002.
The certificate occupies pride of place not just in his house but in his heart. He refers to it a couple of times in the course of our conversation.
"I was India's health minister and the health ministry is a real social sector," he says, about the stint in the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government, where he also held the shipping portfolio. "And that says something about me," Sinha says, a tinge of pride in his voice.
Attired in a pair of dark trousers and a red checked shirt, top three buttons open to reveal a hairy chest, Sinha offers me a glass of sattu, a favourite drink of Biharis, himself sipping the nutritious drink from a tall glass, while popping walnuts into his mouth. The man who does yoga every morning clearly takes care of his health.
"My age is flexible and adjustable. I feel fitter, better and stronger now than when I was 39," says Sinha, known for his one-liners and wry sense of humour, a gift that helps him pull crowds to rallies.
Sinha - the youngest of four sons (Ram, Lakshman, Bharat and Shatrughna or Shatrughan) of the late Bhubaneswar Prasad Sinha, an educationist trained in the US - grew up in his Patna house surrounded by books.
He studied at Patna Science College before joining the Film and Television Institute of India in Pune as he wanted to be an actor.
It was the late Bharatiya Jana Sangh leader and RSS ideologue, Nanaji Deshmukh, who inspired him to join politics. He recalls how Deshmukh would visit his Mumbai house - even "when I was having drinks and was embarrassed by his presence".
The hero of such 1970s and 1980s hits as Kalicharan, Zakhm, Khudgarz, Khoon Bhari Maang and Antarjali Jatra was the first in his family to enter the world of cinema, and then politics.
"No one in the Sinha family had ever become a municipal councillor, let alone an MP. So certainly politics is not in my DNA," he says, taking a dig at Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who had made derogatory remarks about Nitish Kumar's DNA in the Bihar poll campaigns.
Sinha belongs to the old guard of the BJP. And like some of the veterans - such as Lal Krishna Advani, Murli Manohar Joshi and Yashwant Sinha - he has been sidelined by the new dispensation.
Shotgun - a nickname he earned for saying what he thinks - was bitterly disappointed when he was left out of the Modi ministry despite winning by a whopping 2,00,000 votes from Patna Sahib in 2014.
"I got 55 per cent of the votes polled. It is some kind of a record in election history in Bihar," he says.
Relations between him and his party soured further - almost reaching the point of no return - during the just-concluded Bihar elections.
<,>W<,>hile Bihar BJP leaders accuse him of not campaigning, Sinha insists that he was never asked to campaign for the party in the state he represents in Parliament.
He says he attended the Prime Minister's rally at the veterinary college in Patna a month or so ago and after that was never invited to campaign for the party.
At least on two occasions in October, he says he was all dressed up for campaigns at the request of some BJP candidates but had nowhere to go "since the party did not make any arrangements".
And Sinha puts the blame squarely on "a handful of so-called powerful" BJP leaders from Bihar. But what troubles him is that the central leadership did not come to his aid.
"This is my biggest regret. The high command could have given me some protection but they chose not to and instead believed these Bihar BJP leaders who had even tried to block me from contesting the 2014 elections," he says, preferring not to name them.
As for his praise of Nitish Kumar, Sinha says he stands by it. "He is known in today's Bihar as Vikas Purush and an able administrator."
Does that mean he may join Kumar's party? No, not even if the BJP expels him, he replies.
"What am I going to do there at my age? The BJP is my first and last political party."
But he will stand as an independent from Patna Sahib in the event of his expulsion from the BJP, he reveals. "I am sure friends like Nitish and Lalu will support me if I stand as an independent," he says, but adds that he believes the BJP is too "large hearted" to take action against him.
But Sinha's equation with Kumar should be of concern to the BJP. The government college of health and physical education in Patna has now been renamed after the actor-MP's father. Nitish Kumar, Sinha adds, has also accepted his proposal to set up a film city in Rajgir if he returns to power.
"I see a touch of Jyoti Basu in Nitish Kumar, a mature politician always restrained in his speech and composure," says Sinha, who met the late Bengal chief minister a number of times.
"We were very fond of each other and I had the rare privilege of calling him Jyoti da," he recalls.
<,>W<,>ith Lalu Yadav, Sinha has had a roller-coaster of a relationship. They had a "misunderstanding" which has now been "cleared up".
When Sinha's mother, Shyama Devi, died in 2002, he remembers that the Rashtriya Janata Dal boss went to his house and insisted on according her a state funeral, backed by his wife, the then chief minister, Rabri Devi.
I asked him about Lalu Prasad's alliance with Nitish, and the popular fear about a breakdown in law and order, characteristic of the Lalu regime, which the BJP had been focusing on during its poll campaigns.
Instead of harping on the return of jungle raj as a Bihar poll plank, the BJP should have focussed on the " mangal raj" it intended to bring about, he says.
"If you call the Lalu regime a jungle raj, what do we have in Delhi now where the central government is located, a Rape Raj?"
Sinha believes that the Lalu-Nitish alliance is "a political masterstroke" in the Bihar elections even though "it may not suit us, the BJP".
In a tone dripping with sarcasm, Sinha says "our dynamic, dashing, action hero Prime Minister" should have visited "the nooks and corners of Bihar as Prime Minister, not as a BJP campaigner".
All this - especially his praise for Nitish and Lalu Prasad - may not go down well with the BJP leadership. But Sinha couldn't care less. If anything, he seems to be courting punishment.
"They have all the right to expel me if they think I am guilty and the guilty must be punished," he says.
But first, he adds, the party should explain his faults, and why action should be taken against him. And before that it should clamp down on Bihar leaders who "deliberately" kept him out of party campaigns at "this crucial juncture".
It is not yet clear whether the party high command will take action in a post-poll scenario against "Bihar's own Bihari Babu", as he puts it. What's clear though is that Shatrughan Sinha is not giving up the battle.
Today - the day of the results - will be crucial, he says.
"I hope, wish and pray that this is not a Black Sunday for us," the BJP MP stresses.
The actor who once made the word Khamosh ("Be quiet" in Hindi) a household term is not going to be quiet, no matter what.
