But, as Thakur discovers, it is not the spiked shoes that kill Gabbar. Thakur's assault on Gabbar's chest had made him fall on a sharp iron spike embedded in the pillar behind him. (Till the 1980s or '90s the good guys were not alllowed to kill even murderous screen villains, on the ground that death sentences were something best left to the judiciary. Therefore, during the fight sequence in the climax the haresd villain, whom the audience wanted dead,would stumble off a cliff, get bitten by a snake or die of his own bullet, so that the hero could not be accused of taking the law into his own hands.) (Sholay (1975): Scene deleted by the censors.)