Byculla to Bangkok

by S. Hussain Zaidi

  The police dossier on the Samant killing is revealing. ‘During investigation, it was revealed that Datta Samant had hired the services of underworld gangsters to eliminate those who defected from his union and the leader of the opposite union. Having learnt about the plan, Ramesh Patil, son of Ratan Patil, spoke to Chhota Rajan through Bharat Nepali, a gangster from the Chhota Rajan group.’

  The crime branch had questioned several hundred people in the case, including Sachin Ahir, who was repeatedly interrogated for several hours. After eleven months of investigation, the police managed to arrest three shooters and six others for conspiracy, including a couple of union leaders. However, only three shooters were convicted and the conspirators were acquitted for lack of evidence. Mystery surrounded the killing of Samant; his murder was likened to the assassination of Shankar Guha Niyogi, an activist who was killed in Bhilai in 1991. Analysts tried to draw parallels between the killings and even pointed accusatory fingers at the ruling BJP government, as both union leaders had been killed during BJP rule.

  There were various conspiracy theories. Some said it was the miffed managements, some said it was the Shiv Sena, yet others blamed RMMS and some Congress bigwigs, and of course, the cogs in the wheel of the Chhota Rajan gang.

  Despite the arrest of sixteen people and the conviction of three, Dr Datta Samant’s killing has remained an unsolved case. The real conspiracy and the truth behind the killing will probably never be known. But it did expose Chhota Rajan’s hollow claims of being a patriotic don and a messiah of the underdogs, for Dr Samant was most certainly a man who represented the masses.

  Thousands of workers participated in Samant’s funeral, shouting ‘Doctor Datta Samant zindabad’ and ‘Joshi–Munde aaj ke gunde’ (Joshi and Munde are today’s goons). The Saki Naka intersection, in the north-western suburbs, which witnesses some of the worst traffic snarls in the city, has become a memorial to Samant. It is now called the Kamgar Aghadi Chowk. The emblem of a closed fist rising above the roofs of mills immortalizes Samant and his endless struggle.

  Samant’s killing cleared the path for mill land redevelopment under the aegis of Sachin Ahir. Parel became upmarket and upper Worli – Currey Road, Chinchpokli, Byculla and Sewri, where the chimneys towered over a labouring population – boasts the highest number of towers.

  Tragically, the textile mills strike has had a ripple effect on all industrial and manufacturing sectors in Mumbai. The workers are now a marginalized lot. There are no real trade unions that look after their interests. Those that exist are management-appointed. History will remember Dr Datta Samant for leading the last big battle of workers against industry in India. It will also remember him for changing the dynamics, geography and profile of the south-central mill pockets of Mumbai.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  Shakeel Stuns the Sena

  After Bal Thackeray adopted ‘amchi muley’, ‘our boys’, from the mill heartlands and other pockets of Mumbai and called the Dawood gang Pakistanis and Muslims (Thackeray always equated Indian Muslims with Pakistanis), the mafia too got segregated along religious lines.

  The Karachi-based gangsters of the D-Company chafed at the accusations and wanted to hurt the Sena. The D-Company, however, was already fraying at the edges; things were never the same after the serial blasts in Mumbai in 1993. The absence of Chhota Rajan, who had held together all the disparate groups within the gang, was keenly felt. Sautya had been mowed down in Dubai, and Subhash Singh Thakur, the late bloomer in the gang who had managed to inveigle his way to the boss’s heart, had been arrested (and is now comfortably ensconced in Gujarat’s Sabarmati jail). Dawood had had to relocate to the safe houses of Karachi and had his hands full trying to cope with being a yes-man to the ISI. It was in these circumstances that Shakeel Baubumiya Shaikh, alias Chhota Shakeel – who had started off as a local ruffian and became part of the inner circle of Dawood Ibrahim – took centre stage.

  Dawood’s men looked up to Chhota Shakeel and took instructions from him because they knew that he had virtually become the Chief Executioning Officer of the company.

  The gang wanted to respond and retaliate to Thackeray’s ‘our boys’ rhetoric at the party’s annual Dussehra rally. Elaborate plans were drawn up, strategies were discussed and, after many brainstorming sessions, they decided to hit the Shiv Sena as a party. They spoke about many possible scenarios and some improbable ones.

  They all agreed that liquidating Bal Thackeray or his family members might prove counterproductive for Muslims, who were still reeling from the communal flare-up and the resultant backlash in 1992–93. Finally, after toying with the idea of bumping off different Shiv Sena leaders, they came to the conclusion that they would target those Sena leaders who had been at the forefront of the communal riots of 1992–93.

  However, the dossier on Dawood prepared by the Mumbai police attributed a larger cross-border conspiracy to the attack on the Shiv Sena. ‘The Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) wanted to instigate communal unrest in the country so, along with Dawood Ibrahim and Chhota Shakeel, the ISI hatched a conspiracy and masterminded a plan to attack the office-bearers of the Shiv Sena. Chhota Shakeel instructed his gangsters to go after the office-bearers of the Shiv Sena and kill them. He was so desperate that he ordered his gangsters to even kill Shiv Sainiks of any other part of Maharashtra if the gangsters were unable to liquidate the Shiv Sainiks of Mumbai. Chhota Shakeel arranged for the delivery of weapons and money to the shooters. This resulted in a number of attacks and killings of office bearers of the Shiv Sena in and around the city.’ (‘Organized Crime’, Dawood Ibrahim files, p. 43.)

  The police version notwithstanding, one thing was certain. The D-gang was not going to sit back and listen to Bal Thackeray rant against its proud members. They were tired of Thackeray usurping the garb of patriotism by virtue of being a Hindu. They were sick of his constant haranguing and unforgiving of his role in the riots.

  The first Shiv Sena leader that Shakeel’s men targeted was former Mumbai mayor Milind Vaidya. Vaidya had been indicted by the Justice B.N. Srikrishna Commission inquiring into the communal riots for inciting violence against Muslims in the Mahim area. On 17 December 1998, Vaidya was travelling in his Tata Safari. As the vehicle passed through Bandra, six men from the Dawood gang fired at him through the windscreen, injuring him. However, he survived the assault. Shakeel was furious at the botched attempt, and immediately issued orders to target Vaidya again.

  Within three months, a nine-member team was put together. This time, the weapons were upgraded and the assailants were given AK-56s. The plan was to shower Vaidya with enough bullets to leave no room for survival. On 4 March 1999, Vaidya was sitting on the porch of his Mori Road residence in Mahim with his friends when the assailants drove up in a Maruti 800. They fired indiscriminately at Vaidya and his friends and fled the spot. All the injured were rushed to the nearby Hinduja Hospital. Vaidya was blessed with the proverbial nine lives; although three of his friends died and six were injured, he lived to tell the tale.

  ACP Pradip Sawant investigated the case and arrested all the assailants. He recovered the AK-56s and automatic pistols used in the crime. This haul resulted in the conviction of all the nine men by the special MCOCA court. Later, Sawant was awarded the Deepak Jog trophy for best detection.

  Even as the trial in the Vaidya case was continuing in the special court, Shakeel dispatched seven men to carry out a hit on a Shiv Sena shakha pramukh, or branch head, Vivek Kelkar. Kelkar was also a local cable operator. The man had his brains blown out on 9 December 1999 when he was sitting in his office at MIDC Andheri (East).

  Within months of the Kelkar killing, Shakeel’s men killed another shakha pramukh, forty-year-old Shivaji Chavan, at a suburban railway station in Goregaon, on 19 April 2000. Chavan was an employee of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI). He was involved in several controversial land deals which he had executed with the help of the Shiv Sena–BJP government when they were in power in the state. His job took him away from the city o
ften and he was also known to spend long hours at the party office. He was shot dead at point-blank range shortly after he had parked his scooter outside the Goregaon railway station. Chavan’s killing, however, remained unsolved.

  The killings had the desired effect. Shiv Sena leaders now lived in mortal fear of being targeted by Shakeel’s men. There was widespread panic and fear among the Sena shakha pramukhs across the city. None of them ventured out alone after dark. Some hired private security and ensured there were people around them to deter any attack.

  It had turned into a small cottage industry. The remuneration for the hit squad was much higher than for other mafia-related murders. This spurred a lot of young men to volunteer for these assignments.

  Mujahid Shaikh, popularly known as Raju Plumber, was an immigrant from Assam who struggled to make a living from his assignments as a plumber at his stall in the Dadar TT area. When he heard that Shakeel’s men were scouting for shooters to kill the Shiv Sena men, he offered to moonlight as a hitman.

  While newspapers and the media were still reporting on Chavan’s killing, the next day, Shakeel’s men struck again. Baban Atmaram Surve, a shakha pramukh in the Malvani Malad area, was known to intimidate local Muslim residents. People were so scared of him that he had become a law unto himself. Surve had the habit of inviting friends for drinking sessions in the open grounds in front of his house. His neighbours deeply resented this nuisance, but they were helpless to stop him.

  On 21 April, while Surve was in the midst of one of his boisterous boozing sessions with his friend Bajaj, Raju Plumber zoomed up on his bike and opened fire on them. He did not leave until he was sure Surve had breathed his last. This proved costly, however, as Raju was identified and apprehended, and through him, other co-conspirators were arrested. He was finally convicted for the murder.

  On 24 September 2000, Vivek Kamble of the Shakeel gang killed another Shiv Sainik, Ramakant Hadkar. The police reaction to the killing was particularly swift. When the first Shiv Sena murders happened, they had started by booking the gangsters under the draconian – and non-bailable (except under special circumstances) – MCOCA, but when they realized that even this was not proving to be a deterrent, they fell back on their favourite method of policing: extra-judicial killings.

  Crime branch officers tracked down Vivek Kamble and snuffed him out on 29 September, four days after he had killed Hadkar. This halted the spate of killings of Shiv Sena men.

  Several months passed peacefully and the Sena men finally relaxed. But just when they had let their guard down, thinking the worst was over, on 11 April 2001, Ram Agale, a shakha pramukh from Saki Naka area, was shot dead while he was on his way to a chemist’s with his young daughter. A special squad led by Inspector Praful Bhosale hunted down the killers and, the very next day after his killing, even before his funeral, they had killed both the shooters of Agale in Mulund.

  The determination of the police to hunt down and kill the shooters spooked Shakeel’s men and the juggernaut finally stopped.

  Mumbai, however, took a long time to come to terms with the killings of the Sena leaders. The cycle of vendetta deaths had made the metropolis unsafe for ordinary people. Before Shakeel, it had been Chhota Rajan, who had started the so-called reprisal killings, bumping off at least six of the accused – almost all of them Muslims – in the 1993 serial blasts.

  Later, in an interview to the media, Chhota Shakeel claimed that if Chhota Rajan could anoint himself as a Hindu don, there was no reason why he, Chhota Shakeel, should not avenge the Muslims who were butchered during the communal riots. Since the Sainiks had been actively involved in the communal riots, he would target them.

  Barring the attack on Vaidya, most of the other killings were inexplicable. Old-time police hands who knew Shakeel well claimed that he killed only if the victim was openly hostile to the company and could inflict some harm on it. Shakeel had been in Dubai since 1987, but there was no official record of his participation in the serial blasts of 1993.

  Bal Thackeray alleged that the killings were happening at the behest of the Congress–NCP alliance. Narayan Rane, who was with the Shiv Sena at the time, also made the same allegation. He said the Democratic Front government headed by the Congress–NCP was behind the killings. But Chhota Shakeel had set the wheels of revenge in motion even while the Shiv Sena–BJP was in power in the state. Six Shiv Sena workers had been killed then.

  City-based Dawood loyalists give another explanation for this killing spree. After Gawli had formed the ABS in 1996, his political party had begun to grow rapidly. The growth was so swift that even the ruling coalition of the BJP and the Shiv Sena had become jittery.

  Gawli had managed to establish over 650 branches of the party in 31 districts of Maharashtra, of which 109 were in Mumbai. In the initial stages, the party had contested the corporation elections and performed well in them. Their next target was the assembly elections.

  A joint commissioner of police of the crime branch, in one of his speeches at the Indo-American Society in Mumbai, said that the way the party was growing, Gawli might well end up in the home minister’s chair. The state administration and police machinery were feeling increasingly insecure and frustrated. Despair was writ large in the corridors of power.

  It was in this atmosphere that Shakeel opened a front against the ABS office-bearers. He fired the first salvo by targeting the founder secretary of ABS, Jitendra Dabholkar.

  Shakeel unleashed two of his most dreaded shooters to eliminate Dabholkar. The shooter duo included Munna Jhingada and Sadiq Kalia. Jhingada means prawn-like, and the nickname had stuck because of his rather scrunched-up appearance. But Jhingada was a dangerous man and such a dependable shooter that he had been assigned the task of killing Rajan in Bangkok – he was no little prawn to be dismissed. Kalia had earlier served as a hitman of the Gawli gang, but Shakeel had managed to lure him over and he became a Shakeel loyalist. It was because of Kalia’s recce and network that they managed to trail Dabholkar for a week.

  Finally, on 4 October 1997, Shakeel’s team intercepted Dabholkar’s car near Khar subway and killed him. An innocent bystander was caught in the crossfire. Dabholkar’s killing was a major setback to ABS. He was the founder, and there was a perception that the party might wind up as, in his absence, Gawli would not be able to sustain it. But Gawli, who had been witness to such setbacks earlier when all his ace gunmen had been killed, refused to buckle under pressure. Like in the mafia world, where he rose time and again even after being battered by rival gangs and the police, he rose like a phoenix in politics too.

  For six months after Dabholkar’s death, ABS floundered for lack of a leader. Finally, Gawli got his act together and asked Dabholkar’s second-in-command, Bharat Mhatre, who was the party secretary, to take over the reins. Mhatre had earlier been close to the former Shiv Sena leader Chhagan Bhujbal, and he was conversant with the functioning of a political party. He was an ambitious man and had been waiting in the wings for some time; he jumped at the offer.

  But this marked his doom. The moment Mhatre was announced as Dabholkar’s successor, Shakeel pounced once again. Mhatre had just begun to draw up plans for the party when Shakeel’s team of six shooters struck and shot him dead on 18 May 1998, at Nagpada.

  Within a month, on 9 June, Shakeel’s men killed another ABS leader, Dharmadas Solanki, in Goregaon. Police records indicate that this time Shakeel might have received assistance from the Ashwin Naik gang.

  On 16 December, Sudhakar Lone, also of the ABS, was killed by Shakeel’s gunmen in Byculla. Within weeks of this, they killed Prakash Mayekar in Agripada on 27 January 1999. The Mumbai police then swung into action and killed both shooters in an encounter.

  But by then, the ABS workers were paralysed by fear. The party administration was in a shambles. Shakeel had managed to achieve what he had set out to do – nip Gawli’s political aspirations in the bud.

  While Shakeel was systematically mowing down ABS men, a rumour began doing the rounds in poli
tical circles, at beer bars, gatherings and closed-door meetings: did Shakeel’s sudden interest in the decimation of ABS emanate from mafia rivalry alone? He should have been killing Gawli’s aides, why target political functionaries? There was speculation that some political party had outsourced the contract to Shakeel.

  As both the police and the political parties of the country are known to operate within and outside the formal apparatus of the state, both these narratives seem plausible.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  Ashwin at the Helm

  When the landline buzzed, Ashwin Naik was sitting in his expensive Los Angeles apartment, sipping his daily poison. He wheeled his chair towards the phone to check the number. Calls from Chinchpokli were not just welcome, they were the only reason for his heart to continue beating. But for some strange reason, this time, he felt an icy clamp grip his chest even as he reached for the phone.

  Amar’s wife Anjali was on the line and she was weeping. ‘They finished him. He is gone. The police killed him last night!’

  Strange, Ashwin thought, as he felt his heart thump in his chest. His trusted aides, Amit Mukherjee and Kishore Rajput, were looking at him, aghast. Was he having a heart attack? What was wrong?

  Ashwin turned around and told them, ‘They have killed Dada.’

  Then he wept like a man who had lost his last lifeline. ‘Dada, mala sodoon gele? (Brother, where did you go abandoning me?)’ he cried plaintively through the day.

  Later that night, he spoke to the two friends who had been his only anchors during his most trying times. ‘Though Salaskar killed him, I bet Gawli is behind this. I can’t understand how Dada was caught unawares. He was so careful.’ Ashwin looked down at his useless limbs and felt a burning rage engulf him. First, Gawli had paralysed him and now he had managed to kill his brother. He had destroyed the peace and happiness of the Naik clan.