Mafia Queens of Mumbai

by Zaidi, Hussain S

  And as long as Asha has the support of the hordes who thronged her Byculla rally on the campaign trail, Mummy and Daddy’s days of working outside and around the system are far from numbered.

  NEETA NAIK

  ‘I breathe Ashwin. I don’t need food or water to survive; only my fond memories of him,’ Neeta Naik, wife of fugitive gangster Ashwin Naik, told me in an interview from the comforts of her gaudily furnished tenement No. 144 at Subashnagar in Byculla in 1997. A powerful statement coming from a strong-willed politician and commanding civic corporator.

  I remembered this statement, and her large sunken eyes and the impossibly high cheekbones that reminded me of Hollywood actor Maggie Gyllenhal, three years later, when I awoke to the news that Neeta had been murdered by her husband.

  Ashwin, who apparently suspected his wife of infidelity, allegedly had her killed by his henchmen. It was a gruesome end to the fairytale romance of a couple who had both loved and lived dangerously.

  Neeta and Ashwin Naik’s story dates back to the early 1980s. She was a convent-schooled Gujarati girl from the upmarket south Mumbai locale of Breach Candy, while he was Maharashtrian and the brother of the vegetable vendor-turned-don Amar Naik. The couple was very much in love but their relationship suffered when news of it reached the ears of Neeta’s family.

  Neeta went on to complete her Bachelor of Arts from Sophia College while Ashwin moved to London to study for a degree in electrical engineering. Despite the distance, their affair continued.

  On Ashwin’s return from London, the couple eloped and got married despite severe opposition from Neeta’s orthodox Gujarati family. The first few years of marriage were happy ones; soon, however, Ashwin—upset with the stigma of being the brother of a don—decided to move to Chennai with his family. He and Neeta made a couple of trips to Chennai to find a house. It was on their return from one of these trips, in 1991, that the couple had an encounter with death. It was an incident that would change their life completely.

  On his way back home from the Santa Cruz airport in Mumbai, Ashwin’s car was attacked by members of the Chhota Rajan gang. Neeta and her father-in-law were in another car behind his. Panic and chaos hit the Kherwadi highway as around twenty men opened fire at Ashwin’s car. Knowing that her husband was unarmed, Neeta stopped her own car, got out, and began screaming, hoping that someone would call the police. By then, Ashwin had dodged the bullets and managed to make an unlikely escape. ‘It was then that I knew my husband was unsafe. I told Ashwin that I wanted him alive and not dead. For this, I didn’t mind if he had to join hands with his own brother and become part of the crime syndicate,’ Neeta revealed in her 1997 interview.

  After much persuasion from his wife, Ashwin finally gave in and joined the underworld. He went on to become the first educationally-qualified gangster in Mumbai’s mafia circuit.

  Over time, Ashwin became known for his meticulous planning and organisational abilities. People still remember him for the killing of Tanya Koli in a Kalyan local train and the murder of textile tycoon Sunit Khatau in Mahalaxmi. Ashwin was later arrested under TADA but this did not deter him. After Chhota Rajan’s split from Dawood, Ashwin became an ally of the latter and was thus able to build a strong criminal base for himself. All along Neeta remained his pillar of support; she was his close confidante and personal advisor.

  The first cracks in their marriage developed early in 1992, when, much against her husband’s wishes, Neeta decided to join Bal Thackeray’s Shiv Sena and stand for municipal elections.

  Though Neeta considered politics a ‘dirty business’, she wanted to carve out an identity of her own; she was also aware of the possibility of her political clout being used to legitimise her husband’s activities. It came as no surprise when she won the elections by a huge majority. Later, she attributed the win to her husband, as she knew that people voted for her because they feared her husband. But she was determined to be an efficient corporator and earn herself a good name. She now began to live a double life—as a politician and as a gangsters wife.

  Meanwhile, Ashwin’s powerful affiliations began to hurt Dawood’s rival Arun Gawli. In 1994, Gawli’s men shot at Ashwin and rendered him wheelchair-bound for life. With rival gangs and the police closing in on him, Ashwin took a flight to safety and fled to Canada, then South Africa and Singapore, leaving his wife and two children in Mumbai. After his escape, the couple did not keep in touch—a deliberate move on Neeta’s part. She knew her phone lines were being tapped and whereabouts closely monitored and she did not want to do anything to jeopardise her political career. Although she knew all Ashwin’s gang members by their first names, she had never personally involved herself in any of their extortion activities. Now she distanced herself even more from them.

  The police never really maintained any dossier on her, because she was not a criminal. The special branch only had a thin file on Neeta, which stated that she had been in touch with her husband while he was absconding and that she had handled his finances for a while. Neeta, however, feigned innocence and portrayed herself as the wife of a misguided man, forced to fight her own battles.

  Now, with Ashwin on the run, Neeta began enjoying her new-found freedom. She was making her presence felt in the Shiv Sena, despite the party not being entirely open to recruiting women. Her convent education had proved an advantage in her dealings with people; further, she was also making an impact as a powerful orator in the standing committee meetings of the Bombay Municipal Corporation, as it was then called. It is this political acumen and connections that won Neeta acceptance among the masses and another term in the BMC in 1995. While her sister-in-law Anjali Naik (wife of Amar Naik) and Asha Gawli (wife of Arun Gawli) had also contested for the 1995 municipal elections, it was only Neeta who managed to secure a berth in the BMC.

  With her husband still absconding, Neeta made it clear that the victory was her own and no one else’s. She was educated, shrewd and a quick learner, making her a valuable member of the Shiv Sena. Now, with a second term in hand, she also had easy access to Sena chief Bal Thackeray at his Matoshree residence in Bandra. This period of self-realisation created another wide crack in the Neeta-Ashwin relationship. By then, the separation period had been a few years and Neeta was beginning to feel very lonely. Both Ashwin and Neeta had tried their best to shield their two children from the shadows of the world of crime and provide them with a good education. But the lonely battle was getting to her and she began to look for support elsewhere. And she allegedly found it in private bodyguard Laxmi Zhiman.

  In August 1999, the police arrested Ashwin while he was trying to cross the border from Bangladesh into India. He was sent to Tihar jail. A week later, Neeta in an interview to a tabloid, said that his homecoming was not really a celebration. ‘I am back to being Ashwin Naik’s wife. I can’t face people. I just can’t fight anymore ... no, I don’t regret being Ashwin Naik’s wife but I do regret my whole existence ... I want to meet him and talk about our future together.’

  The media had written a lot about Neeta’s alleged extramarital affair. Ashwin apparently could not stomach her relations with Zhiman. Always a possessive man, he had earlier ordered the killing of electrical contractor Eknath Khanvilkar after he worked in his house for a few weeks and had supposedly been intimate with Neeta Naik. The final straw for him was when he, through his henchmen, acquired photographs that had captured Zhiman and Neeta together,

  On 13 November 2000, Neeta arrived at her Byculla home around noon. As she got to the door and was unlocking it, two men—identified as Manoj Bhalekar and Sunil Jadhav—brutally gunned her down. Neeta was rushed to KEM Hospital in Parel where she succumbed to her injuries a day later.

  The following day, the media was filled with stories of Neeta’s murder. Her liaisons with other men were ascribed as the cause for her tragic end. Unfortunately, this end was said to have come at the hands of her own husband, the very person she had encouraged into the world of crime.

  After Neeta’s murder,
five persons were arrested but two of them were later acquitted. Three others—Bhalekar, Nilratan Mukherjee and Jadhav—were convicted. Jadhav was later killed in an encounter. Based on the confessions of Bhalekar and Mukherjee, Ashwin, who was already behind bars, was charged under the special MCOCA for the murder of his wife. According to police records, the conspiracy was hatched by the gangster while inside Tihar jail.

  On 31 January 2009, a special MCOCA court acquitted Ashwin of his wife’s murder for lack of evidence and the Ashwin-Neeta love story that had turned sour, was finally shut for good.

  SUJATA NIKHALJE

  A decade ago, Tilak Nagar was an obscure lower-middle class residential locality in suburban Mumbai, dotted with decrepit government quarters. One woman with ambitious designs wanted to change the whole topography of this area and transform it into upmarket real estate for the crème de la crème of the city. This woman was Sujata Nikhalje, alias Nani, wife of self-proclaimed patriotic don Rajendra Sadashiv Nikhalje, alias Chhota Rajan. Sujata Nikhalje is also the only ‘don wife’ to have been slapped with charges under the MCOCA for using a business enterprise to legitimise her husband’s criminal activities.

  Early in the year 2000, Sujata Nikhalje started a construction company with the ill-gotten money of her fugitive husband, despite having no knowledge of the industry. Surprisingly, her company soon began leading the race in remodelling Tilak Nagar into an upmarket suburban destination in Mumbai. It was only a little while before the police learned that Sujata, through her business, was playing financial manager and banker to Rajan.

  With agencies such as the Directorate of Revenue Intelligence, Mumbai police’s Crime Branch, Enforcement Directorate and the Income Tax department of India keeping tabs on her activities, Sujata earned herself a very menacing reputation.

  Sujata and Rajan lived in the same neighbourhood when they fell in love. She lived in a government chawl in Tilak Nagar and Rajan, a native of Lonar village in Satara, lived near Sahakar Cinema in the same area. Rajan dropped out of school after Class 5 and went on to join a group of boys who used to tout film tickets on the black market in front of Sahakar Cinema.

  Rajan first came into the limelight in 1979 when he took the lead in assaulting police officers of the Tilak Nagar police station who were trying to stop the black marketing of movie tickets. He then joined local gangster Rajan Nair, alias Bada (big) Rajan. Following Nair’s murder, Rajan decided to step into his mentors shoes and take over the reins of the gang, which is how he eventually earned the title of Chhota (small) Rajan. Later, he affiliated himself with underworld don Dawood Ibrahim, at whose behest he began handling all the activities of the D-gang in Mumbai.

  It was somewhere around this time that Rajan and Sujata fell in love. He was a notorious goon, feared amongst the people of the Tilak Nagar area, while she was a girl from a simple lower middle-class Maharashtrian family. Rajan’s growing reputation in Tilak Nagar as a prominent gangster only drew Sujata closer to him. They both eventually fell in love. Rajan and Sujata’s courting period came to a brief standstill when the former, fearing arrests by the Mumbai police, escaped the city and moved to Dubai to be with his boss, Dawood. Fortunately for their romance, the separation period was brief.

  In 1987, within a year of his escape, Rajan called Sujata to Dubai and the couple was married in a special ceremony arranged by Dawood. A photograph taken at the wedding— showing Dawood and his wife Mehjebeen standing beside the newlyweds Rajan and Sujata—was splashed across the Indian media. Dawood and Rajan were very close at this time, so much so that years later, their relationship was depicted on celluloid by Bollywood director Ram Gopal Verma in his film Company.

  In 1993, Rajan split from the D-company and went into hiding somewhere in Southeast Asia. Meanwhile, Sujata flew back home to India with her three young daughters Ankita, Nikita and Khushi. Rajan went on to build a huge business empire, which included extortion, property deals, the film industry, gambling and betting dens, prostitution rackets and horse racing. For some time, his trusted associates looked after his properties across India. However, Rajan lost some of his close aides to police encounters and bullets from the enemy camp, including his most capable hitman and financier Rohit Verma, who was killed by the henchmen of Dawood aide Chhota Shakeel. Over the next couple of years, Rajan was left with no trustworthy second-in-command. With a mini-empire in Mumbai itself, Rajan needed someone to handle both his finances and extortion business in the city. But a series of betrayals had made him wary of his own men. So Rajan looked homewards for support to prop up his financial empire, and found the desired handier in his wife. A housewife and mother of three daughters, Sujata was suddenly pushed into taking up the reins of her husband’s illegitimate empire.

  Sujata began to slowly and steadily expand Rajan’s extortion business and supervise the activities of his gang from the comfort of her home in Tilak Nagar. She soon went on to be recognised as Nani, a sobriquet she earned not because she was grandmother to anyone but because she was the wife of Rajan, alias Nana.

  According to the police, because of her lack of knowledge in business and finances, Sujata initially worked with a group of consultants to get a clearer picture of her husband’s financial stocks and to seek advice on how her husband’s businesses could be legitimised. Her advisors zeroed in on Bollywood and the real estate industry, as they were businesses where black money could be invested. However, Sujata’s brother-in-law, Deepak Nikhalje, had recently been hit by allegations of using his brother’s money to fund a film. In 1999, he had produced the Hindi film Vaastav, starring actor Sanjay Dutt. When Vaastav became a hit, the media raised a hue and cry as they thought that Deepak was a front for his gangster brother. Deepak had a hard time proving that it was his own money and not his brother’s that had funded the film. This storm deterred Sujata from investing in films because, if the brother could be accused of being a front, then the wife would be a surefire target of such allegations. So Sujata went for the other option—real estate,

  In the late ’90s, real estate and rental prices were soaring across Mumbai and builders were looking for better prospects beyond the city. Tilak Nagar, which until then had been merely a ‘township colony’ comprising wide open spaces and old buildings, was an attractive destination for redevelopment. Builders had already started taking an interest in the area and had begun redeveloping old buildings. More often than not, Sujata’s intervention was required. With her reputation as ‘Nani’ and wife of a gangster, Sujata often managed to arm-twist several people into selling their homes for good prices.

  Soon, realising the money-spinning options in the construction business, Sujata began her own construction company, Khushi Developers Private Ltd, named after her youngest daughter. But before she went into business, she employed a powerful team of chartered accountants to handle the finances of the company. With their help, she prepared a strategy to slowly transform Tilak Nagar into a plush suburban locality, pulling down old buildings and replacing them with sprawling mails, high-rises and office complexes. Sujata turned into a corporate don wife, meeting builders through the day and signing deals worth crores of rupees.

  Throughout, she kept Rajan informed of these meetings via telephone calls. Following the advice of her husband, she also involved his men to ensure she had her way. Often, Rajan’s goons would terrorise builders through extortion and land-grabbing. Due to the fear psychosis generated among the builders and the common masses by Rajan’s gang, Sujata managed to run her business smoothly. This honeymoon period, however, didn’t last long.

  The police, who had been tapping Sujata’s phone lines, learned that, while speaking to Rajan, her conversations would often drift into the acquisition of land and deals. Sensing that something was up, the police decided to close in on her. At the same time, one of the builders from a society in Chembur who had been threatened by Rajan’s gang in a building contract deal, filed a complaint with the police. This witness provided the police with the much-needed impetus for thei
r case.

  Following the complaint and police inquiries, Sujata and three other accomplices, i.e., Suresh Shyamrao Shinde alias Don, Harvinder Singh Bedi alias Kukku Daruwala and Rakesh Surver, were arrested under the MCOCA on 14 December 2005, on charges of aiding and abetting the activities of an organised crime syndicate run by Chhota Rajan. Though Sujata was remanded to police custody till 27 December 2005, the police initially found it very difficult to make any headway in the case. Allegedly, by this time Sujata had become so hardened and obstinate, that she refused to drink water or eat anything during the first sixteen days of custody.

  Police investigations showed that Sujata maintained thirty-seven accounts in various banks, including Standard Chartered, State Bank of India, Sangli Bank, Canara Bank and the Union Bank of India. These bank accounts were in the names of her three daughters. The police suspected that the money in these accounts came from extortion payments from India and abroad but were passed off as goodwill donations in the name of the three daughters. Foreign exchange worth Rs 13 lakh had also come into these accounts from countries like Singapore and Abu Dhabi. Sujata maintained that these were voluntary contributions made by businessmen and well-wishers, a claim that the police was not willing to accept. Following this, all her accounts were frozen.

  For the police, the manner in which the money had been safely stacked in banks across the country pointed towards external help. Further investigations revealed the involvement of a prominent chartered accountant, identified as Bharat Dhudani who allegedly handled the financial transactions of the real estate projects of Khushi Developers. The police alleged that Sujata had given Rs 2 crore (obtained from Rajan) to Dhudani, who gave it to eight firms to buy shares in her company. The police traced most of Sujata’s accounts through documents, which included fourteen files found at Dhudani’s Bandra office.

  At one stage, the police realised that the whole case was getting very complicated. Hence, the police sought the help of the Directorate of Revenue Intelligence, Mumbai police’s Crime Branch, Enforcement Directorate and the Income Tax department of India to help them put the pieces together. With their help, the police managed to get enough evidence to incriminate her and Sujata was charge-sheeted under the MCOCA in 2006.