Maximum City

by Suketu Mehta

  When you live in a world of fear, you give unlimited power to the state. “What about the human rights of the innocent businessmen killed by the criminals?” demands a trader at a large public meeting of traders and state government officials, called to discuss the widespread extortion threats that the businessmen have been receiving. A few of them have been shot dead for not paying. The speeches at the meeting are a curious mixture of fawning obeisance and veiled threat. The favorite comparison of the Bombay Police is with Scotland Yard. “Best in the world after Scotland Yard” was something I’d grown up with, probably a misquote of some survey carried out in the West. And the people on the other side of the law repeated the phrase as if it were established fact. Amol the street ruffian, who has been suspended between two tires hanging in midair and beaten by the police, said to me with no little pride, “After Scotland, our Bombay Police are number two.” Now it has changed, as at the traders’ meeting, to “Better even than Scotland police.” But the traders are upset. They are threatening to stop paying sales taxes, which are collected by the state government.

  In the meantime, the city goes about its business, convinced of its own menace. The newspaper headlines, the movies, suit gangsters and cops both: the gangsters because it increases their stature in society—after all, they live on fear, fear is their sugar solution—and the cops because the public now grants them the highest power, the power to take a life without a trial. I get the sense of a city straining to imagine itself more violent than it actually is.

  ONE EVENING, on the way home to Nepean Sea Road, I get a ride in the commissioner’s car. I tell Ajay about my meeting with Salaskar. “They’re exterminators,” he says of Salaskar and other encounter specialists like Pradeep Sharma and Pradeep Sawant. “Good police work involves picking up a little clue and building it and staying with it till you crack the whole puzzle.” He elaborates on the encounter specialists. “They’re contract killers. They get orders from one faction to shoot members of the other gang.” He has heard reports that Gawli himself ordered some members of his gang killed, men who could become potential rivals. For this reason, the moment Salaskar or Pradeep Sharma does an encounter, “immediately a big question mark is put. He cannot do all and sundry which he probably did a couple of years back.”

  Although Ajay is a leader of one of the six Special Teams, he does not have a reputation as an encounter specialist. But he uses the fear that Salaskar and Sharma and Sawant evoke to good effect in his own investigations. When Ajay threatens the men he’s interrogating with encounters, they believe him. Every single time I’ve seen him interrogating suspects in his office, he’s threatened to kill them without benefit of a trial. Ajay keeps tight control over who his people shoot. He doesn’t give his lower ranks the discretion, the license to kill. “I have told my entire people, no encounters without telling the DCP and myself. Unless we give the green signal, no. We have done twenty-three in our region in the time I have come.” It hasn’t even been a year.

  How does he deal with the responsibility? He sees the decisions he makes, whether to take a man’s life or spare it, as courageous ones. “It is a thin line. It requires moral fiber on the part of the police officer to decide on encounters.”

  I ask Ajay if he has ever killed anybody with his own hands.

  “During the riots one has opened fire,” he says carefully. “There were four incidents. Six people died. It was a mob situation. I was DCP Traffic. When Mahim went out of control, the commissioner asked me to take care of Mahim, and so I went to Mahim.”

  But Ajay also sees the reasons why encounters are so prevalent. “The judicial system is so tilted in favor of the accused that he is not at all afraid. It’s very frustrating for the police. Someone is arrested in a murder case, the case comes up in four years, the witness is threatened and turns hostile, and you know the man is going back to kill again. He is operating with absolute impunity, and the courts are giving him bail.” This agreed with my own experience. All the hit men I had spoken to, men who had murdered many people, had been in and out of jail on murder charges. The only fear they had was of the encounter.

  When Ajay catches a gangster and releases him into the judicial system, the chances of securing a conviction are, at the best of times, 10 percent. The conviction rate for criminal offenses, which was 18 to 25 percent a decade earlier, fell to an all-time low of 4 percent in 2000. But before the case comes up for trial, it lolls around for several years in the courts. This is the only time that a criminal might see the inside of a jail—but only if he is too poor to make bail or afford a good lawyer. Seventy-three percent of the country’s jail population is on trial or waiting for a trial; only a quarter of them are actually serving out a sentence. Each year, forty thousand new cases are filed in Bombay.

  The country’s criminal laws need a total overhaul, says Ajay. The pillar of the justice system today is still the Indian Penal Code, which dates from 1861—almost 150 years ago—and the Criminal Procedure Code is 50 years old. The facilities Ajay has access to need to be modernized, as do the personnel. The force has a lie detector today but no personnel trained to operate it. It owns a voice identification system, but the results are not admissible in a court of law as evidence. The public prosecutors who argue the state’s cases are at the bottom of the ladder in terms of quality—they are the ones who cannot get jobs in the private sector—and they are pitted against the finest legal minds defending the gangsters.

  But it’s not just the criminal laws that need to be revamped. This becomes apparent to me one evening when I have dinner with a cousin from Surat. He is a small businessman and appears troubled; I know he has been having money worries. I tell him about my book, that I am meeting gangsters. He listens closely, then asks me for my help. He has given nine lakhs to a business associate, partly in cash, partly in shares, to invest. The associate, in turn, gave the money to a builder in Bombay, who put the money in real estate and has declined to return it. It has been a year and nine months since my cousin last saw the money. The builder simply refuses to give it back; he is thriving. My cousin wants to know if I will ask the gangs to help him get the money back.

  “Why don’t you file suit against the builder?” I ask him.

  My cousin looks at me. “If I file a suit now, my four-year-old son’s son will see the verdict.”

  He is desperate. He hasn’t told his father about the nine lakhs, and his business is failing. It’s a huge amount for him; one night, driven by business worries, he had paced up and down in his house, a bottle of sleeping pills in his hand, as he thought about ending his worries once and for all. The sight of his sleeping wife and child kept him from swallowing the pills.

  I tell him I can introduce him to someone.

  Then he thinks. “We should be very sure of who we go to. Because the builder too will have his contacts. And his contacts shouldn’t be greater than our contacts. We should go to the Supreme Court.”

  The judicial system of the country he is in provides him absolutely no recourse in recovering money that is rightfully his. He has to turn to the alternative judiciary. Their justice will be swift and sure, but the court fees are high. “What the courts don’t do, we do,” Mama, a top member of the Chotta Rajan gang, had told me. The gangs thrive in Bombay first and foremost because the judiciary doesn’t. “Backlog and delay plague a wide variety of legal systems,” in various countries, the authors of a 1998 study of the Indian civil justice system, published in the New York University Journal of International Law and Politics, concede. “Nowhere, however, does backlog and delay appear to be more accentuated than in modern-day India.” The total backlog of cases in the Indian courts at the close of the twentieth century stood at 25 million cases at least, one lawsuit for every forty men, women, eunuchs, and children in the country.

  The judge/population ratio in the United States is 107 judges per million people; in India it is 13 judges per million. Forty percent of the judge-ships in the Bombay High Court are vacant; each judge
has over three thousand cases pending. Qualified lawyers do not want to be behind the bench, because the pay is too low compared to what they can earn in private practice. There are no costs associated with filing lawsuits; so the overwhelming majority are frivolous. Adjournments are too readily given. In 1996, hearings of interim—not final—appeals were proceeding with appeals filed only in 1984. Disposal of suits proceeds at the rate of half of fresh filings each year. This means that every year the Bombay High Court adds as many new cases to the backlog as it resolves.

  At the current rate, it will take 350 years to end the backlog.

  The tackling of evidence in a civil case averages five years. For many cases, final appeals take over twenty years to be decided; many cases languishing in the courts today were originally filed in the early 1950s. So if my family had been sued or had sued somebody when I left Bombay as a child, the matter would only now be close to being settled. Unless we had gone to someone like Mama. “If someone is sitting on your property, whatever is pending for ten or twenty years in the courts, we goondas will resolve in ten days. Whatever the police, the politicians, the courts can’t do, we goondas do. When people are tired of the courts, when they are ruined, when they are looking for a way out, they come to us and say, ‘Do something.’ What you have forgotten is yours, we will restore to you.”

  At a party in Cuffe Parade, I meet a woman who is in the middle of a property dispute with her landlord: She’s an educated woman who travels abroad extensively. She has engaged a consultant to help her get back a large amount of money from the landlord. “We’ll have his daughter abducted,” the consultant tells her. She is taken aback. Will it be that easy? “If I have my back to the wall I’m not sure I wouldn’t do that.”

  You have to break the law to survive. I break the law often and casually. I dislike giving bribes, I dislike buying movie tickets in the black. But since the legal option is so ridiculously arduous—in getting a driver’s license, in buying a movie ticket—I take the easy way out. If the whole country collectively takes the easy way out, an alternate system is established whose rules are more or less known to all, whose rates are fixed. The “parallel economy,” a traveling partner of the official economy, is always there, just turn your head a little to the left or right and you’ll see it. To survive in Bombay, you have to know its habits. If you have a child, you have to know how much “donation” to give to the school to get admission. If you have a traffic accident, you have to know how much to give to the cops to dispose of the matter and how much to give to the father of the child you’ve run over to stop the mob from lynching you. If you’re a tenant, you have to know how much to demand in key money from the landlord to move out. The parallel economy is fed on a diet of judicial rot. The system of justice, supreme legacy of the British, is in tatters, starved by a succession of governments afraid of its power over them. It was a judge in the Allahabad High Court who nullified Indira Gandhi’s election victory in 1975; she promptly suspended the constitution. It was another judge who finally had the courage to name Thackeray as the agent behind the Bombay riots. But politicians have power too. They have the power to impoverish judges, to not name new ones when a vacancy on the bench comes up. So the parallel economy lives, fat, rich, and happy, because human beings need a system of exchange, to trade their labor for the goods and services of this world.

  “It is a good city for gangwar,” observes Mama. Like an area of low pressure in the atmosphere, the underworld enters the areas that the state has withdrawn from: the judiciary, personal protection, the channeling of capital. The men in the gangwar see themselves as hardworking men. As Chotta Shakeel explained it to a journalist friend of mine, “There are blue-collar workers and white-collar workers. We are black-collar workers.”

  TANUJA CHANDRA, the movie director who is a mutual friend of Ajay’s and mine, calls up shortly after Ajay has left on a holiday to England. A senior police officer has told her producer and mentor Mahesh Bhatt that the Central Bureau of Investigation is tapping Ajay’s phone because they suspect he has dealings with members of the underworld: financial dealings. Tanuja is very disturbed and asks me if I think there’s any truth to this. His lifestyle is not commensurate with his salary: his trips abroad, the appliances in his house, the Guy Laroche watch he wears. Mahesh tells me that Ajay has been very jumpy of late and doesn’t want to talk on the phone. “Who knows human motives?” he speculates. He remembers the policeman telling him that if Mahesh ever needs it, Ajay can intervene personally with the gang lords: “He’ll talk to the guys and exchange a favor.”

  I ask Ajay directly about this. “In eighteen years of service I haven’t taken a glass of water from anybody,” he declares. He had long ago made a career decision. “In the long run, it pays to be clean.” His money comes from college friends who, he says, have invested wisely on his behalf. But there are people in the police force out to get him. They plant stories about him. “Only Ritu and my mother and my sister have stood by me.” Ajay and his family have just come out of a departmental inquiry instigated against him, on allegations of corruption, that dragged on for four years. Ritu had to account for every rupee she spent during those years, down to where she got the money for the washing machine. Finally, Ajay was cleared of all charges.

  So Ajay, like Commissioner Forjett a century ago, is bitter. He has the bitterness of someone from a good family who has taken a job he has given his life to and feels he is not being rewarded for his sacrifice. “This morning when I was driving to the office I was seeing in Shivaji Park a father teaching his son how to play football. I was thinking I was such a good sportsman but I have never had time to teach my son how to play football or basketball. Yesterday my son had a football match in school. All the parents went. I couldn’t go. I feel I am doing gross injustice to my family.”

  I ask Ajay about what he sees as his future. “I know the department. The authorities are going to use me. Apart from going abroad there is nothing else. There is nothing here.”

  I help Ajay prepare his résumé and send it sailing into the ocean of the Internet. Bruce Hoffman of the Rand Institute, the world’s leading authority on terrorism, writes back. He invites Ajay to come to Washington for a research stint. He will be able to work with the best minds on the subject, and the force would profit greatly by his knowledge once he returns. But Ajay can’t get a letter of permission from the Commissioner of Police. It would have to go through the Indian Police Service and then the Ministry of External Affairs. The commissioner is suspicious of Hoffman. “This is how the CIA recruits people,” he tells Ajay. “They give them scholarships to go abroad.” Ajay tells his boss about the prestige of Rand. The commissioner counters with another argument: “He said the battle is only half over, how can you leave now? I felt like saying I’ve been fighting the battle for so many years.” But Ajay does not say this to his superior officer, and so he continues in Bombay, ready to join battle with the newest crop of the underworld.

  AFTER THE NEW CONGRESS GOVERNMENT assumes power in Maharashtra in 1999, Ajay is kicked upstairs; he is made Commissioner of Railway Police. The most skilled detective in the city has now been put to work chasing ticketless travelers. Ajay is hurt that “there was no hue and cry over my transfer” on the part of all the people he had protected in his region. But as Commissioner of Railways, Ajay Lal is a relaxed man. He can now go to a movie with Ritu, “to a three o’clock show!” In his new posting he chases pickpockets, thieves who administer stupefying drugs to travelers and rob them of their possessions, and chain snatchers. In the first week after taking up his post, he asks for the files of the previous five years and pores over them. He notices a pattern with train robbers on the longdistance routes: Most of the robberies are committed between Santacruz and Khar. He figures out that this is where the long-distance trains intersect with local trains: The robbers do their work, leap out of the trains, and climb directly aboard the locals. So Ajay stations some of his men at those points and immediately catches a gang of ro
bbers. It is not big-news work, but for the first time in many years he has time to spend with his family. His son loves it. Ajay is now able to attend Rahul’s football game on Sundays.

  Ajay asks me what Vinod is filming these days; a visiting friend from the police force would like to see a movie shoot. I look up the schedule for Mission Kashmir. On the day Ajay’s friend is in town, Vinod is due to shoot a scene where a police officer is getting information from captured militants. “It might be interesting for your friend, as a police officer, to watch this interrogation scene,” I say.

  “And who plays the policeman, Sanjay Dutt?”

  I pause, realizing the multiple ironies—Ajay himself had sent Sanjay Dutt to jail for a year and a half for his role in the bomb blasts—and laugh.

  “He would be better at advising the person being interrogated on how to act,” Dutt’s real-life tormentor notes.

  Sanjay Dutt later tells me that he became good friends with the other men accused in the bomb blasts. One of them was someone who called himself the Nawab of Tonk, Salim Durrani, “an educated man,” as Sanjay repeatedly refers to him. The Nawab wrote and smuggled a pamphlet out to Sanjay, “Voices,” about the tortures the police purportedly inflicted upon those accused in the blasts. Sanjay describes its contents. “They made a daughter-in-law suck her father-in-law’s cock. He committed suicide afterward.”