Mafia Queens of Mumbai

by S. Hussain Zaidi

  There is no doubting that Bigg Boss changed Monica Bedi’s life to a certain extent. While she is still not able to find a footing in Bollywood, Indian television has opened its arms to her. Monica has since been seen in several television shows after this, including the dance show Jhalak Dhikbla Ja.

  In 2009 she launched a religious music album, Ek Omkara, where she chants verses from the Guru Granth Sahib. A Sikh by birth, Monica had taken to Islam and Christianity, before turning back to Sikhism. Her only defence for shifting religious loyalties was that she was very spiritually inclined. ‘I can’t sing but chanting from the sacred texts of my religious book has helped me get in touch with my spiritual side,’ she said.

  For a woman with dreams of making it big in the Hindi film industry, it is ironic that Monica’s own life reads like the screenplay of a Bollywood masala film. She has seen the good, the bad and the ugly, and yet her dreams still seem far from being realised.

  EPILOGUE

  ‘I

  am extremely sorry for the delay,’ she said, as she sat down opposite us, her publicist joining her on the couch. ‘This show is so competitive ... I have been practising with my choreographer all day, so I just got caught up. Sorry again,’ she added.

  Monica was dressed in a green T-shirt and blue jeans that showed off her slim figure. Her wavy hair, with golden-brown streaks on it, was let loose and she barely had any make-up on her face, except for gloss on her lips. A few people threw knowing glances at her but Monica seemed indifferent as she made herself comfortable on the small cane couch.

  The meeting had been fixed after a lot of unanswered calls and ignored messages. She had finally agreed to meet us over coffee at the JW Marriott Hotel in suburban Mumbai, following repeated requests to her publicist Shradha. Monica was late by over forty-five minutes, but was apologetic, very unlike a celebrity. The show she was referring to was the third season of Jhalak Dikhla Ja, which was going to hit Indian television in the second week of April 2009. Monica seemed very nervous about the dance show. ‘Cut-throat competition,’ she said succinctly.

  The sole purpose of the meeting was to convince her to talk to us for the book. ‘I am not so sure about this. The past few months have been so good and I have been so lucky that I don’t want to rake up my past anymore,’ she said.

  ‘But don’t you want to clear the air?’

  ‘I don’t feel the need to. People have started accepting me despite my past. You’ve seen it on Bigg Boss,’ she said, sipping her black coffee. We noticed that she was deliberately avoiding the topic of Salem in our conversation.

  Despite her reluctance, we explained the premise of our book to her. Monica listened carefully and, for a moment, she seemed intrigued. ‘Even if we do the project, how would I have to contribute?’ she asked.

  ‘Just a few sittings with us, where you can tell us your real story.’

  ‘Hmm ... you know, many people have offered to do a film on my life but I’ve refused.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I want to forget my past. It was traumatic,’ she said.

  ‘But your story is very interesting ...’

  ‘Yes, I know. Interesting for others, not for me, which is why I have got the copyright of my story,’ she said.

  ‘How can you have a copyright to your story, when it is out in the media and heavily recorded in police dossiers?’

  She didn’t reply for a few seconds. Then she said, ‘Uh ... I will have to speak to my parents before I get back to you on this. They take all my decisions for me,’

  We agreed, and then asked her about other issues including her comeback on reality television shows, her alleged relationship with Rahul Mahajan and her recent decision to launch a religious music album. Though uncomfortable, she answered all our questions cautiously. When she had sipped the last of her coffee, she got up to leave. We shook hands, even as she promised to get back to us in two days.

  The call never came, neither were any of our calls to her received.

  INTRODUCTION

  That the female of the species is deadlier than the male.

  —Rudyard Kipling

  T

  he implication of these lines from Kipling’s century-old poem still remains a subject of contention and debate. Nevertheless, in Mumbai’s mafia history, this rings true, as exemplified by the wives of dons, who emerged as powerful de facto bosses following unexpected developments in the city’s crime scene.

  In the mid 1990s, with the surge of terrorism, both the state and international police began closing in on the underworld, sounding the death knell for Mumbai’s mafiosi. Or so the police thought. In order to avoid direct confrontation with the law and to deflect the attention of the police, mafia bosses handed the reins of their respective ‘businesses’ over to the people they trusted the most.

  However, with cases of defection on the rise and the ganglords’ lack of faith in their own men, finding a custodian became a challenge. Time was short and options were decreasing by the minute. In this environment of distrust, many dons turned to their better halves. Until then, these significant others had looked on from the sidelines as their husbands carried out their bloody work. Their lives were restricted to carrying out households chores and chanting bhajans in makeshift temples in their homes. Suddenly, these very same wives found themselves in a situation that required them to expand their management skills, from their homes to an entire gang.

  Dealing with a pack of hoodlums, they soon realised, wasn’t as easy as rearing a family. Yet, like the perfect Bharatiya naari, who swears to protect her husband from the enemy, these women took their place in the world of organised crime. With chutzpah, they shed their timid and cocooned selves to turn into conniving, ambitious, competitive and sharp women. Soon, their involvement became so vital to the gang that the dons could not imagine isolating their wives from any of their activities.

  These housewives now ordered executions, threatened people and ran huge crime syndicates. While Padma, the ambitious wife of former Rajan aide Ravi Poojary, chose to stay on the sidelines and work as the brain of her husband’s gang, other wives dabbled in politics, social activism and white-collar jobs to keep their husbands’ gangs in the big business of bloodshed, with a regular flow of income. For instance, Sujata Nikhalje, wife of fugitive don Chhota Rajan, started a million-dollar real estate enterprise to legitimise her husband’s criminal activities. Asha Gawli, a devotional singer and the wife of underworld don-turned-politician Arun Gawli, helped her husband start his own political party, and used it to protect him against fake encounters. Ashwin Naik’s wife Neeta, on the other hand, persuaded her London-educated engineer husband to join the crime syndicate. Ashwin eventually became a hardened gangster while Neeta took to politics, to shield his activities.

  As a result of this passing of the baton, the police, who until then seemed determined to nip the underworld in the bud, suddenly began to falter. This unexpected power shift, at least for a while, threw their investigations out of gear.

  These women rattled the police as they climbed the criminal ladder to become ‘Mummy’ and ‘Nani’ to petty criminals and hardened gangsters alike. These are the stories of Asha Gawli, Neeta Naik, Sujata Nikhalje and Padma Poojary.

  ASHA GAWLI

  An elderly gentleman strolls up to a small but predominandy Muslim crowd of old and middle-aged men gathered outside a slum in Mumbai’s Byculla area. The gentleman is tall and big-built, yet unimposing. His right hand spends a large part of its time caressing his flowing white beard as he takes his place with the crowd that is evidently waiting for someone. The men, speaking in hushed tones, pause to warmly greet the seventy-something-year-old gentleman and call passers-by over to be part of their gathering.

  When the car they’ve been waiting for finally pulls up in front of the slum, the men draw closer, led by the man with the flowing white beard. They raise their right fists to yell in unison, ‘Mummy zindabad! Mummy zindabad!’

  ‘Mummy’, clad in a green saree,
steps out and smiles in appreciation of their overwhelming reception. To an outsider, the admiration and adoration she is receiving from this elderly crowd of Muslim men, who address her as ‘mother’, would appear strange—with her jet-black hair and only-slightly lined brown skin, she doesn’t appear to be a day over fifty. It’s not by virtue of her age or that she was born a Muslim, that she enjoys this respect and adulation; it is the fact that she is married to the Hindu don, Arun Gawli, christened ‘Daddy’ by the locals of the area.

  Today, she is here to campaign for Daddy, the candidate of an otherwise insignificant party in the state’s political circuit. The gathering listens with rapt attention as she asks them, with her hands folded humbly, to vote for her husband to get a second-term in the state assembly.

  With her symbolic vermillion and mangalsutra, Asha Gawli portrays convincingly the humble Hindu wife, someone to be pitied because her ‘social worker husband’, wrongly framed by the cops, is currently behind bars. Police records, however, sketch a very different picture of Asha Gawli.

  Asha can be credited with safeguarding her husband against the police machinery, and fake encounters on innumerable occasions. She helped her husband float his own political party, the Akhil Bharatiya Sena. Due to her efforts, Arun eventually went on to become a member of the Legislative Assembly in the state government. With a strong ally in his wife, it is not surprising that Arun is practically the only don who has been able to stay on in Mumbai and shape a career in crime and politics, right under the nose of the police and the Maharashtra government.

  Arun was already an established gangster when he married Zubeida Mujawar, aka Asha. Like his father, he had first landed himself a job at Shakti Mills in Mahalaxmi at the young age of twenty. It was when Arun shifted to Crompton Greaves Ltd in Kanjurmarg, that he began to get involved with the underworld. He joined hands with his old friend and schoolmate Rama Naik, and the two got involved in several local intra-gang brawls. He shot to fame when he, along with his accomplice Naik and another goon Babu Reshim (a leader of the canteen workers in the Mazgaon docks), murdered Parasnath Pandey—who ran major matka and liquor rackets—in 1980. They killed Pandey in order to gain control of the collection of matka and liquor money in central Mumbai.

  Arun was consequently detained under the National Security Act but was released after a month of custody. His power and influence grew after his release from jail. It is during this time that he met and fell in love with seventeen-year-old Zubeida who, like Arun, lived in Byculla. Zubeida’s marriage had already been arranged with a boy from within the Muslim community, but when Arun asked her to marry him, she accepted happily. Naik and Reshim opposed the alliance on the grounds that the two were from different communities; they were aghast that Arun, a Hindu Maharashtrian, was marrying a Muslim. Arun refused to budge, and finally married Zubedia, who then converted to Hinduism and changed her name to Asha. In her, Arun came to find a dependable aide and a woman who would run his household at Dagdi Chawl in Byculla.

  Asha, who went on to give birth to five children (Geeta, Mahesh, Yogita, Yogesh and Asmita), initially stayed away from her husband’s criminal activities. She raised and educated her children and watched anxiously from a distance as Arun indulged in the bloody battles of the mafiosi.

  However, with Arun being a frequent guest in jails in the city, Asha had no option but to take the reins and run the show by proxy. This she did, very effectively, and went on to formulate ingenious ways to protect her husband from the law. Holes were dug inside their kitchen in which Arun would hide whenever the police arrived with an arrest warrant. According to the police, Asha had a pit dug right below the area that housed the gas cylinder.

  Soon her involvement became so vital to the gang that Arun began treating her as his most trusted lieutenant. Over the years, Asha’s demeanour changed, as she shed her shy and orthodox ways and turned aggressive and wily in her dealings. Since Arun’s gang members addressed him as ‘Daddy’, Asha automatically came to be known as ‘Mummy’.

  In 1996, when Arun was locked up in the Kolhapur jail and serving time under the Terrorist and Disruptive Activities Act (TADA), I paid him a visit for a story. At the time, he had fleetingly mentioned his aspirations to join politics. The reason—to save himself from a police encounter. The previous year, Asha had stood for the civic corporation elections, hoping her political standing would help her husband but she had lost terribly. After this, she shifted her focus to her husband’s political career, In 1997, with his wife’s encouragement and support, he started the Akhil Bharatiya Sena. While he was the president of the ABS, Asha headed the women’s wing. It is the women’s wing which was used as a shield for the don against arrests and police encounters. A group of women would constantly surround Arun every time he walked out of Dagdi Chawl— something that other dons in the underworld made fun of. But the strategy worked. The cops could neither trace him in the crowd nor get violent with the women, hence he was able to escape unscathed on more than one occasion.

  In 1998, Asha herself was arrested for her involvement in the Manish Shah murder case.

  Shah, a partner of industrialist Vallabh Thakkar, was killed on 2 February 1998 near his Sagar Mahal residence at Malabar Hill. Police investigations revealed that Shah had been shot by four of Arun’s henchmen, at his command. At the time of the murder, the ABS president had been detained at the Amravati Central Prison, under the Maharashtra Prevention of Dangerous Activities Act.

  Later, the police stumbled upon some tiny slips of paper during a raid of Arun’s home in Dagdi Chawl. One of these contained a note concerning Manish Shah. It read, ‘Asha, Rajala saangun Bandyakadun Manish Shahache kam laukar karun ghe.’; (Asha, tell Raja to get Bandya to deal with the Manish Shah matter immediately.)

  Express Newsline carried a series of stories and reports that exposed Asha’s covert involvement in her husband’s mafia activities. Under interrogation, Arun confessed to sending the chit addressed to his wife while he was in prison in January 1998. Asha was later released on bail, for lack of evidence, but the police now started keeping close watch on her.

  Subsequently, Asha, in an interview to a tabloid, said she knew that Arun was a criminal but supported him primarily because she loved him. She also said that she longed for a normal life but knew that it could never happen. ‘But I love Arun more than I love myself. Without him, I am nothing. I will do anything for him,’ she said.

  In 2002, the ABS contested the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation elections. In its very first attempt at entering the city’s civic body, two corporators were elected—Arun’s eldest daughter Geeta Gawli and Sunil Ghate, who was a one-time contract killer. In 2004, Asha’s management and supervision of Arun’s political party finally bore fruit when her husband was elected the MLA from the Byculla constituency. In the same year, Asha was once again arrested, this time for assaulting a woman. Asha, along with her two of her domestic helpers, Archana Kate and Bhavana Patil, was arrested on 20 December 2004 forassaulting a woman called Sushma Sawant with sticks. The trio was released on the same day, after they were granted bail on a surety of Rs 3,000 each, Incidentally, Asha had filed a complaint about the theft of her daughter’s ornaments, and had accused Sushma’s son. Asha had called Sushma home to enquire about her son but the meeting had resulted in a verbal duel between the two, after which Asha and her domestic help had beaten Sushma.

  With her husband’s encouragement, Asha launched a music company and churned out several albums of paeans to her deity. Despite the songs having no takers, her company Aai Music Service seemed to rake in big profits. When the Income Tax department announced amnesty under the Voluntary Disclosure of Income Scheme (VDIS) a couple of years ago, the don admitted to an annual income of over Rs 1 crore. By 2004, when Arun filed the statutory income statement before fïghting the state elections, the income of his music company had swelled to Rs 2 crore.

  A couple of years before the Legislative Assembly elections of 2009, Gawli was again put behind bar
s. This time he was being tried under the Maharashtra Control of Organised Crime Act (MCOCA).* However, Asha didn’t give up. She filed his nomination papers for him, and along with her daughter Geeta, took it upon herself to campaign for him. A pre-election report in The Asian Age by Jigna Vora also mentioned how Agni, an NGO, had rated Arun the most competent MLA during his term. In fact, it had been Asha who had worked in the constituency on her husband’s behalf. While Arun spent most of his time as an MLA in jail, Asha had ensured that she redressed the grievances of the people in the locality, as she knew that only their satisfaction could give her husband another shot at the MLA seat. While campaigning, she spent money from the gang’s resources to ensure that people were happy with her husband. However, they did not stop to think about one crucial aspect—Arun’s own absence. Besides, his lack of attendance in the Assembly session hadn’t gone unnoticed by political observers. The people of his constituency voted against him and Arun failed to clinch the MLA post.

  Mummy, however, is not a disappointed woman. For her, the very fact that Arun is safe and unharmed by police forces, even after being tried under several stringent laws, still makes her a clear winner. Several top dons like Amar Naik, Sada Pawle and Nari Khan have been killed in fake police encounters. In fact, even low-level acolytes have not been spared by the cops. If Gawli has managed to survive the encounters, and even gone on to win MLA elections, and if his daughter and party workers have become corporators, it’s largely because of his wife. Arun Gawli rarely steps out of his fortress; it is Asha who goes out and does everything for him, whether it’s canvassing for elections, making the rounds of the courts for legal battles or staging dharnas outside police stations and ministers’ offices.