Maanyata (right) leaves Arthur Road Jail with Sanjay’s sister Namrata on Wednesday. (Fotocorp)

Mumbai, Aug. 1: Maanyata is standing by her man — not her estranged husband.

Sanjay Dutt’s girlfriend went to see him in Arthur Road Jail today. In a pink salwar suit and white dupatta, Maanyata looked agitated as she stepped into the car after the visit.

The former item girl, whose relations with the Dutts — including Sanjay’s daughter Trishala — are sour, accompanied his sisters Namrata and Priya to the jail this afternoon.

Within days, she has lost both her estranged husband Mairaj Rehman and her current companion to the law — both are behind bars, miles from one another.

Rehman was arrested on July 28 for sending lewd text messages to Bollywood actresses and is in police custody at Bandra police station, where he will stay until Friday.

Sanjay’s legal team is expected to apply for bail in two or three days. “The court may take from a day to 2-3 weeks to give its verdict. So at this point it is not clear how long it will take Sanjay to get bail if at all,” his lawyer Satish Maneshinde said.

Support poured in for him today, as minister Kapil Sibal said: “We should stand by the family.” While Sibal said he was speaking in his personal capacity, his colleague Priya Ranjan Das Munshi spoke up as minister. “I will go to jail with a garland when Dutt will be released,” he said.

The actor yesterday began his six-year term in jail and slipped into prison uniform today.

More than a decade ago, when he was in prison last, Sanjay had found support in model Rhea Pillai whom he later married.

The photograph of a dishevelled and haggard Dutt, with Rhea holding on to his fingers from the barred windows of the police van, is still etched in popular memory.

The romance, which started when he was in jail, came in the wake of media speculation that Madhuri Dixit had walked out on Sanjay after he was arrested. Neither of them had ever confirmed they were seeing each other.

But Madhuri did wait for Sanjay for a year-and-a-half to come out of jail and finish shooting for Mahaanta, a film that was released in 1997. Now married to a doctor in the US with whom she has two sons, the actress described him as a man with a “heart of gold” in a recent television interview.

In 1998, an impulsive Sanjay proposed to Rhea on Valentine’s Day and the two headed straight to a Sai Baba mandir, woke up the priest and got married. They divorced a few years later. Rhea now has a daughter with tennis player Leander Paes, but remains friends with her former husband.

The marriage to Rhea was Sanjay’s second. He had married actress Richa Sharma in 1987, only to lose her to cancer just after the birth of their first child. He had to let go of daughter Trishala when he lost a custody battle to his in-laws, who took her abroad. But now 18, the New York student is close to her father.

Yesterday, Sanjay discarded the “lucky” blue shirt he had worn to court hearings so far for a white shirt and jeans because that’s what Richa liked to see him in.

If Rhea had been a pillar for Sanjay when he was in jail and Richa had nursed him back from a lung failure, Maanyata has walked into the actor’s life when he is at his peak with Munnabhai.

Believed to be still married to Mairaj, she first appeared with him in public at an awards function.

Yesterday, it was reported that Maanyata had been sent to South Africa by Sanjay to protect her from the media glare on his sentencing. The reports might have been put out by friends of the actor, said to be anxious to see she is not harassed.

Police officers at the Bandra police station who took charge of her estranged husband said Mairaj “is a sweet talker”.

“He can easily fool people into believing that he belongs to an aristocratic family and has a lot of money. He is a charmer. When he was brought here, he offered the DCP the role of a ‘comedian’ and said he wanted an additional commissioner to be the ‘lead actress’ in his next film,” says an officer who accompanied Mairaj to court.

Speculation was rife that Sanjay had married Maanyata when she was seen wearing a mangalsutra and sindoor, but the actor has denied this.

Yesterday, Trishala told a television channel her father would not remarry.