Byculla to Bangkok

by Hussain Zaidi

  The DCPs now began vying with each other to get the best men for the job.

  Satyapal Singh, who was DCP Zone VII – the area ranges from Bandra to Andheri – formed a special squad and made Pradeep Sharma its head. DCP Param Bir Singh, Zone II – which spanned almost half of south Mumbai – formed two special squads led by Praful Bhosale and Vijay Salaskar.

  These three officers belonged to the 1983 batch of the Maharashtra police service. There was something about the officers of that batch. They had no qualms about killing and were utterly fearless daredevils. Almost all the encounter specialists came from this batch.

  According to orders from above, in Zone II, Salaskar and Bhosale went after Arun Gawli and his men while Sharma took on the Shakeel gang. Between the three of them, they eliminated more than 300 gangsters. Sharma alone took out 110 gangsters, including three LeT terrorists. Bhosale killed more than ninety gangsters from both the Gawli and Rajan gangs. Salaskar managed only sixty, but these were important hits: he managed to destroy the prime muscle power of the Gawli gang.

  In ten years, between 1993 and 2003, some 600 criminals were killed in Mumbai. Every time the bell tolled for a gangster, it was the cop who walked away with the good press. The only time the cops were overshadowed by the victim was when the quarry was a big fish like Amar Naik, Sada Pawle or Suresh Manchekar.

  At last, Tyagi, who had never bowed to the home minister, was shunted out of the police commissionerate unceremoniously. His strategic positioning as a Bal Thackeray-approved officer did not help.

  Subhash Malhotra succeeded Tyagi as the police chief. Malhotra did not have a proven track record either in the crime branch or in the zones, but because he had seen Tyagi’s strategy of ‘shoot first, talk later’ work, he allowed the encounters to continue. The police believed that these encounters worked as deterrents for the mafia, as they instilled fear into the minds of the otherwise reckless gangsters. Also, a section of the press glorified the encounter cops, who were portrayed as heroes.

  The media loved to write about Daya Nayak in particular. His story had all the elements of a fairytale: the little boy from a blink-and-you-miss-it village called Yennehole in Mangalore, who came to work as menial help in a Udupi hotel, swabbing the floor and scrubbing the dishes, and studying in a night school before joining the police force. Nayak was hailed as a hero both in Mumbai and his hometown in Mangalore, where he built a multi-million-rupee school that was inaugurated by none other than Amitabh Bachchan.

  Then there was Vijay Salaskar, who seemed fearless as he knocked off the big fish. Salaskar was not media savvy, but he got his fair share of good press.

  Salaskar and Daya Nayak’s stories inspired several policemen. They all wanted to be famous and they all wanted to be encounter specialists. So the killings continued, with more trigger-happy policemen added to the list of encounter specialists. They were now posing with their guns, strutting like peacocks, a la Dirty Harry. Alex Perry, the bureau chief of the Indian subcontinent for Time magazine, did a full-page article on the encounters of the Mumbai police, in which he called the officers ‘urban cowboys’.

  The press notes from the police on the early encounters were the same. ‘That the police received information that the fellow was about to commit such and such crime and we laid a trap. The criminal arrived in a white Maruti 800 and we saw the car from a distance. We identified the criminal and called out his name. But he opened fire with his AK-47 and we had to resort to firing in self-defence. The criminal was injured in the melee and we took him to the nearest hospital but he succumbed to his injuries and was declared dead on arrival.’

  Initially, the public, happy to see the city rid of criminals, was very supportive. They were happy that a motley bunch of uniformed men had changed the character of Mumbai from a mafia city to a moderately safe city. Trouble started when the encounter specialists went out of control. Their methods had now become a short-cut to fame. Some unscrupulous officers began attributing unsolved cases to their encounter victims and claiming that the cases had been detected and solved.

  Human rights agencies were watching this trend. They had remained mute spectators in the beginning, but when they saw that the encounters had become the norm rather than the exception, they cried foul.

  In an interview to the Telegraph, P. Sebastian, of the Committee for Protection of Democratic Rights (CPDR), said that when they were investigating the encounter deaths for a writ petition, they found that the criminals were always shot in the head and the chest, which indicated that the cops meant to kill and not injure their targets. Sebastian, who investigated 137 deaths and filed a writ petition stating that the deaths be treated as culpable homicide, was stonewalled by the courts, which threw out the petition. But he believes that ‘the story that the dead criminal was armed with an AK-47 is the most outrageous. An AK-47 is a battle weapon and can mow down a crowd. It can fire ten bullets in a second and 600 in a minute. But, invariably, the policeman at the receiving end of the AK-47 would come out of the whole episode smelling of roses and without a scratch, and the criminal would be dead as a dodo.’

  Also, the cops’ thirst for blood was becoming like that of the mythical demon Bakasura. It showed no sign of abating. The good thing was that for the first time, young men who may have been lured into a life of crime were rethinking their choices. They didn’t want to end up in body bags, adding to the count of the encounter specialists.

  Meanwhile, television highlighted the killings, the blood and the gore, and it was all very unsavoury. Soon, the press notes stopped making any difference: every time somebody got killed, people wondered about the motive.

  Tracing the trail of disrepute, Rakesh Maria, Joint Commissioner, Crime, said in an interview, ‘Initially the encounter cops targeted the top rung of the mafia, the ones who were in power. Then they started off with the third and the fourth rungs, then it was the turn of the robbers. And then the public didn’t know who was being shot and everybody was suspicious. And soon there were too many watchdogs – the electronic medium, the press, society, the human rights activists.’

  It was the murder of music magnate Gulshan Kumar on 12 August 1997 and the subsequent encounter which put the spotlight on police excesses. After Gulshan Kumar’s killing, Joint Commissioner of Police, Crime, Ranjit Singh Sharma, found it difficult to handle the intense media glare. His daily schedule was so hectic that even those eyeing his position were pleased that they were not in his shoes. He had to constantly field phone calls from several ministers, including the chief minister and the home minister. Each time a heavyweight telephoned Sharma, he offered explanations and provided reasons for not being able to make a breakthrough.

  The police had barely recovered from the backlash of the Gulshan Kumar murder when the mafia struck again and gunned down builder Natwarlal Desai at Nariman Point on 18 August 1997, in front of Tulsiani Chambers, opposite Mantralaya. The newspapers the next day screamed: ‘Murder under the nose of Mantralaya!’

  Joshi and Munde were under fire from the media and the business community. They felt that the police machinery was failing them, and that there had to be a change of guard. Munde felt that Subhash Malhotra was incompetent to lead a police team and so, two weeks after the killing, he was unceremoniously shunted to the nondescript posting of police commissioner, housing and welfare. His name would go down in the annals of Mumbai police history as the first chief to have suffered the ignominy of a transfer because of one high-profile killing. On 28 August, Ronald Hyacinth Mendonca was appointed police commissioner of Mumbai.

  On the same day that Mendonca became the commissioner, there was a controversial encounter that killed a man called Javed Fawda, at Ballad Pier. Assistant Police Inspector Vasant Dhoble headed this encounter, and his men cleverly leaked news of it to some of their friends in the print media. ‘Gulshan Kumar’s shooter killed in an encounter’, ‘Crime branch hits back in style, guns down Gulshan Kumar’s killer’ read the headlines.

  The press, especially th
e Marathi press, applauded Dhoble’s courage. However, the mood was far from celebratory at the crime branch headquarters. In underworld parlance, the man who pulls the trigger on his victim is the main shooter, while the man who gives him cover is merely a sidekick and is known as the second shooter. That the cops were quiet over the role Fawda had played in Gulshan Kumar’s murder meant the case came under a cloud.

  Javed Fawda turned out to be the crime branch’s nemesis. Abu Sayama Abu Talib Shaikh, also known as Javed, had earned the nickname ‘Fawda’ because of his bucktooth. Unfortunately, the man Dhoble had killed wasn’t the real Javed Fawda, the gangster, but Abu Sayama, a peanut vendor.

  His sister Rubina, who lived in a Bandra slum, kicked up a storm. She cried that her brother had sold peanuts outside the masjid near Bandra railway station and had been missing since 26 August, following which she had lodged a missing person complaint. On 29 August, she was summoned to identify her brother’s badly mutilated body. The autopsy revealed that Javed had been riddled with bullets at close range. He had also been run over by a vehicle, his ribs crushed under the impact of the wheels.

  The Samajwadi Party, which was trying to project itself as the messiah of the Muslim community, raised a massive stink about the killing of an innocent Muslim. Abu Asim Azmi, the man at the helm of the party in Mumbai, went after the police administration with zeal. This put the police in a difficult spot. DCP K.L. Prasad and his chief R.S. Sharma desperately tried to explain to the media and human rights watchers that they had killed a criminal and not a harmless peanut vendor.

  Three days after the encounter, the crime branch chief hoped that his sensational disclosure about ganglord Abu Salem’s musical extravaganza in Dubai, attended by Nadeem–Shravan and other Bollywood biggies and business rivals of Gulshan Kumar, would distract the press. The conspiracy to kill Gulshan Kumar had been hatched at that particular party, the police said. Following the press conference, the police commissionerate was besieged by fans; they sought to catch a glimpse of their favourite stars, who all came in to to give their statements.

  The press forgot Fawda – but Sharma didn’t. For a long while after that, there were no encounters.

  A series of Public Interest Litigations petitioning the Bombay High Court to stop the encounters had also kickstarted. The petitions insisted that the encounters were actually murders in cold blood, and that victims were handed the death penalty on the spot, without a trial. The high court came down heavily on the police, forcing them to consign their guns to their holsters. The petitions around the Fawda encounter, and subsequently around the Sada Pawle encounter, put the brakes on the Mumbai police’s extra-judicial killings – and when a division bench of the Bombay High Court was appointed in 1997– 98 to probe the veracity of the controversial encounters, the cops were caught on the back foot.

  Sessions court judge Aloysius Stanislaus Aguiar was the head of the probe committee. After several months of investigation, he filed a 223-page report and declared that the police encounters of Javed Fawda and Sada Pawle were fake and did not match the version cops had given during the proceedings.

  Mendonca, known for his integrity, did not believe in the methods practised during such encounters. For months, he tried to experiment with more punitive laws like the Maharashtra Prevention of Dangerous People’s Act, which did not allow for easy bail.

  With this cessation of encounters after more than a decade of living in fear, criminals heaved a sigh of relief and went into celebration mode – by launching a spree of killings. The year 1998 recorded the highest number of shootouts: more than 100 people were either killed or badly injured in firing by underworld operatives. In police parlance, the word ‘shootout’ means an incident where a gunman opens fire on the victim with the intention to kill; sometimes, if a victim is fortunate, he may survive. The police registered a shootout every third day. The crime branch was constantly on the alert, and the morale of the police force was at an all-time low. Arguments over the genuineness of the encounters raged on in the Bombay High Court.

  The cops realized that they had been pushed to the wall and had to retaliate. They could not allow gangsters to run amok, for every mafia shootout was a mockery of their presence and Mendonca’s three-decade-long career. Ministers from Mantralaya had begun pressing the panic button at the sight of so much lawlessness.

  Then the unexpected happened and the proverbial Red Sea parted for the cops. A division bench of the high court rejected the Aguiar report and declared that the encounters were not fake.

  Mendonca decided to shed his mild manners for good. He roped in Colonel (retired) Mahendra Pratap Choudhary of special operations in the Indian Army to train cops for gun battles with the underworld. He organized a press conference and announced his ‘bullet for bullet’ strategy against the mafia. There were two aspects to the plan: psychological warfare and covert operations.

  The encounter cops were back in business. After a hiatus of a year or so, the specialists began shooting to kill again. Even Bollywood decided to pay tribute to them. Film-makers like N. Chandra, who made Kagaar, and Ram Gopal Verma in Ab Tak Chhappan, made encounter specialists their main protagonists.

  THIRTY-THREE

  Death of a Doctor

  A new year had dawned, but trade union leader Dr Datta Samant was not happy. The continuing mill strike was weighing him down. In two days, it would be exactly fifteen years since he first called for the strike on 18 January 1982.

  ‘I think I am the only foolish trade union leader fighting for the workers’ rights and I know I am going to die an unsung hero,’ he had said in a rare public display of emotion, a couple of days earlier. He was being driven in his jeep from his residence in Powai to his office at Saki Naka. Though he had a house in Ghatkopar East, he lived in a one-storey house in Powai.

  As Samant’s driver Bhim Rao took a sharp turn on Padmavati Road near IIT Powai, a rickshaw appeared out of nowhere and headed towards the jeep. Samant was used to being accosted en route to his office by mill workers, party workers, or activists, or workers in engineering and other companies who sought his intervention in some matter or the other. Samant usually met them briefly and went onward. At any time, there was a motley group around him, of four to 40 people. These gatherings always ended in loud chants of ‘Doctor Datta Samant zindabad’.

  That particular day, on 16 January 1997, when Samant saw the four men who had intercepted his jeep, he didn’t think there was anything out of the ordinary. As was his habit, he asked his driver to halt. The men came up to the jeep and took their target by surprise, riddling him with seventeen bullets.

  Samant succumbed to his injuries while his driver Bhim Rao survived. The case, initially registered by the Saki Naka police station, was later taken over by the crime branch. It was one of the most complex cases that the crime branch had handled, and Inspector Teja Chavan managed to only partially uncover the conspiracy behind the murder.

  Dr Dattatray Narayan Samant, originally from Sindhudurg in Konkan, Maharashtra, had become one of the most popular and powerful trade union activists in the world in a short span of less than twenty years. Samant had stumbled onto the plight of his patients, most of whom were quarry workers in the Thane–Dombivli belt, and taken up the battle against the injustice and hardships inflicted upon them by powerful industrialists.

  At a time when trade unionism was in the grip of communists, the management-pliant Shiv Sena and the Congress, Samant’s fresh and practical approach to labour disputes had made him a darling of the workers. Though he had kickstarted his political innings with the Congress when he contested the state assembly elections in 1972 from Mulund and won, he could not live with the Congress hegemony and struck out on his own. During the Emergency, while the Shiv Sena almost sang paeans to Indira Gandhi, Samant found himself behind bars for being too militant and vocal about his opinions. In the Lok Sabha elections of 1984, post Indira Gandhi’s assassination, there was a huge sympathy wave for the Congress – the joke was that if a
dog or a donkey had contested the elections on a Congress ticket that year, the animal would have won hands down. But the Congress, which swept Mumbai, lost one seat, and that was to Samant. The victory wave had humiliated all the anti-Congress parties, including the BJP, which could manage only two seats in the entire country and the CPI(M), which was routed in its home turf of West Bengal.

  Most of the strikes called by Doctor Saheb had wound to their logical end but the textile mill strike was never officially called off. It petered out gradually and Samant began to lose his grip over the trade union movement in the city. As a result, he also got a sound thrashing in politics. He had launched the Kamghar Aghadi Party, but he lost all three assembly elections he contested from the same working-class mill pockets of south-central Mumbai.

  The Congress had a hand in undermining Samant’s clout; the Indian National Trade Union Congress (INTUC) and RMMS had revived their stranglehold on the dying textile mills once again, turning into stooges of the management.

  When Sunit Khatau of Khatau Mills joined hands with Sachin Ahir of RMMS to sell the surplus mill land and make his fortune, they came into bitter conflict with Samant. Though the state government stalled the sale of surplus land after the killing of Khatau in May 1994, the hostility continued between the two unions. Soon, Ahir toppled Samant from Modistone’s Sewri unit and anointed his own man as the president. He also systematically began ousting Samant from all the major unions in the city where he had clout.

  When Samant was upstaged during the Premier Automobiles Limited (PAL) lockout in 1996, fingers were pointed at Ahir’s clever manipulations. Samant’s union in PAL and the Shiv Sena called for a strike, but the INTUC union continued working. PAL had two plants, one in Kurla and another in Dombivli. Clever politics resulted in the defection of two of Samant’s aides, Eknath Angre in Kurla and Ratan Patil in Dombivli, who were known as the right and left hand of Samant. Consequently, Samant lost his hold over both the plants of PAL. This gave rise to bad blood and intense animosity among the various union leaders.