Dongri to Dubai - Six Decades of the Mumbai Mafia

by Hussain Zaidi

  After spending months in jail, the criminals got bail and returned to their base at Carrom Club in the BIT compound. They were plotting to eliminate Natiq but somehow were not able to summon enough audacity to kill him. After all, they had just got bail.

  Nonetheless, they began making threats to Natiq. They tried to ransack his small editorial office. Natiq lodged a complaint at the Dongri Police Station, saying that the Carrom Club had become a den for several anti-social activities and the cops subsequently raided the club and shut it down—a major victory for Natiq and the last straw for the Pathans.

  On the fateful night of 17 August 1977 around 3:30 am, after Natiq had gone to sleep, he was woken by a persistent knocking at his door. A sleepy Natiq opened the door and found Saeed standing on the door.

  ‘Bhai has called you,’ Saeed said. ‘Bhai’ here referred to Amirzada.

  ‘What the hell! Have you seen the time? I cannot come now. I will meet him tomorrow,’ Natiq replied.

  ‘No, he wants to see you now,’ Saeed insisted.

  ‘Are you crazy? My wife is alone at home, I cannot leave her like that and go,’ Natiq tried to reason with him.

  ‘Iqbal bhai, Bhai is in a very angry mood. If you meet him now you will be able to ward off the trouble lightly. If you provoke him by defiance, it may prove very costly to you,’ Saeed said, indicating by the menace in his tone that they were willing to drag him out from his house to the Bhai’s den if need be.

  A reluctant Natiq realised there was no point in arguing with them anymore. He might as well just go talk to the Bhai, to simplify the issue.

  Natiq’s 22-year-old wife Zaheda was new to the city. She was worried and a vague premonition gripped her heart; she wanted to dissuade her husband from going out at that hour. But Natiq was sure that they would not go as far as to actually kill him, and somehow consoled her, and left with Saeed and Ayub. They crossed the road and sat in the car, which was parked outside the petrol pump just outside the BIT compound.

  No sooner did Natiq enter the car than he was greeted with a volley of expletives. Taken aback, Natiq tried to get out of the car immediately, but by then the car had begun gaining speed. Ayub and Saeed also slapped him hard. The attack came totally unexpected to Natiq, and he could not bear the humiliation as tears welled up in his eyes.

  Despite Natiq’s protests, the car kept running and halted only at the Kadar building at Grant Road, which housed the office of Amirzada. Natiq was subjected to further humiliation and violence in this office.

  ‘Dawood ke kutte, bahut hoshiyari karta hain [Dawood’s dog, you think you’re being very smart]!’

  A thin and wiry Natiq was reduced to a punching bag; blows and kicks were showered on him brutally. Then Saeed, who had been waiting to exact revenge for all the hardship he had encountered in prison following Natiq’s articles, brought out a chopper and inflicted several serious injuries. Natiq began to bleed profusely and lost consciousness. The goons again bundled him into the car and took him all the way to Mahim, where the half dead Natiq was dumped at an isolated spot near the Mahim creek.

  Lying in a heap of faeces, urine, and other filth near the massive gutter of Mahim, Natiq regained consciousness to the brightness of a shining afternoon sun. He had no clue how many hours he had been lying in that state. But he was aware that he had lost a lot of blood; life was slowly draining out of him. No strength left, he felt his limbs had turned to lead.But Natiq knew that if he was to remain alive, he would have to make a grand effort. Since he could not stand, he began to crawl on his hands and his knees and somehow got to the road, where two men and a traffic cop spotted him, fortunately.

  They immediately put him in a cab and rushed him to the JJ Hospital, where his family was informed. Dawood too was given news of the assault, and came running to meet his friend. A weak Natiq gave a statement to the police officers in the Dongri Police Station, and other revealing details to his friend Dawood. Likha himself had come to talk to Natiq, and he stood by as the man spoke.

  Dawood blamed himself for Natiq’s plight, in a sense, and he was to feel even worse. Despite the best efforts of the doctors, Natiq did not survive; after two days of an excruciating battle in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU), he succumbed to his injuries. Dawood, Sabir, and their boys were furious at the Pathans’ beastly behaviour and felt beaten by them. Natiq had, after all, been a bulwark against the Pathans.

  Dawood had not known bereavement earlier. This was the first such instance where someone who was so dear to him—a dear friend and almost a brother—had been so brutally killed. He vowed to take revenge in such a way that the Pathans would never dream of ending up on his wrong side. Revenge was the only way to salvage pride. Standing on the freshly made, flower-laden grave of Iqbal Natiq, Dawood swore revenge,.‘Iqbal Bhai, main kasam khaata hoon, jis tarah unlogon ne tumko maara hain, us hi tarah main bhi unko maaroonga [I promise to avenge your death in the same torturous manner they killed you].’ Officer Likha, standing next to Dawood, kept a hand on the 22-year-old avenger’s shoulder and assured him all support.

  The chroniclers of the Bombay mafia debated for decades whether it was the killing of reporter Iqbal Natiq that was the great watershed. For until then, the 22-year-old Dawood had never tried his hand at killing or bloodshed. Natiq’s murder opened a bloodletting spree in Bombay.

  15

  The Executioner

  It was 1977. Death loomed like a dark mist that seemed to engulf Dawood’s every sense, tinged with a sense of deception. Dawood’s only promise of deliverance from the vagaries of fury and the hollowness he felt inside was vengeance. Every single Pathan in Bombay was abhorrent to him.

  It had been only around a year since Baashu Dada had been repressed and isolated from the kingdom of the Bombay mafia, discredited, but this accolade felt inadequate in the face of the void left by Iqbal’s death. Khalid Pehelwan, who had earlier been Baashu’s right-hand man, now approached Dawood to place before him his brutal, instinctive and biased form of expression of solidarity towards a man he had grown to respect after Baashu Dada’s decline.

  Khalid was an austere, self-made man, inclined towards incisive precision in all he did. He had been Baashu’s right-hand man for a long while and his status as a serious player in the mafia was formidable. After Baashu’s ousting, his admiration for the way Dawood had fortified his status within Bombay had grown tremendously. Khalid had far-reaching influence and assessing the power that Dawood himself had come into, he deemed it honourable to collaborate with Dawood. He offered him his services.

  Khalid and his posse had already earned a name for themselves. His notoriety was catapulted to greater heights when a heist he had masterminded and taken part in, targeting a diamond merchant in Grant Road, resulted in the arrest of most of his men, while Khalid himself walked away unscathed. After all, he was the mastermind, who had to be, by default, elusive, unlike the smaller fry.

  Dawood’s notion of Khalid’s personal courage and a primitive sense of authority gave him an idea of how he could help him discredit his opposition. He brought Khalid on board. In turn, Khalid decided to become the symbol of Dawood’s fight against the Pathans. He knew that at this point Dawood had nothing on his mind but to wipe out the Pathans’ empire in Dongri. The ending of this vendetta had almost become Dawood’s right as well as a necessity, to quell anyone who sought to oppose him.

  Two men had had a bigger hand in the business of Iqbal’s murder, Saeed Baatla and Ayub Lala, and Dawood had no intention of sparing these two Pathans. Khalid, in his bid to prove his loyalty and detonate the drama that was to unfurl, promised Dawood that he would personally ensure the two were punished. Thus the campaign of extermination had begun.

  By this time, word had gotten around all over Bombay that Dawood was on the lookout for Ayub and Baatla. Knowing they were on Dawood’s hitlist, and definitely with a bounty on their heads, the two men went under
ground. Their every move was discretely handled; a maze of secrets played out as they maintained a difficult safety. But theirs was not an impenetrable group, and it was not long before Khalid caught on.

  An informant told him that Ayub Lala was visiting a bar at Girgaum Chowpatty. He wasted no time in heading out straight for the bar with his men in tow. Now, while Khalid was a sturdy, well-built wrestler, Ayub Lala was a well-built man himself. But Khalid was a man driven by the motives of a grand revenge that he had to enact to prove his loyalty, while Ayub was already weakened. He had already displayed his cowardice when he chose to escape Dawood.

  Transfixed by Khalid’s sudden entrance, Ayub knew that the sinister gleam in Khalid’s eyes held nothing but sadistic intentions for him. Ayub and his men struggled to put up a stiff resistance, but the sheer strength of Khalid and his men seemed to overpower even the considerable might of his men. Mercilessly, they beat up Ayub and his group of gangsters.

  Khalid dragged Ayub all the way to Dongri market. Not satisfied with the moans of Ayub after his beating, Khalid took his knife out and slowly but surely started to slice into Ayub’s ankles, leaving him at the mercy of his arms to drag himself forward in a hopeless, desperate bid to get away from the inhuman torture he was being subjected to.

  As the veins of his ankles trickled blood onto the road he lay on, Khalid gently grabbed Ayub’s hand and slowly cut into his wrists, the veins spurting blood across his own face. Ayub’s hoarse cry for help went unheard and the stream of blood grew into a pool of futility. Profusely bleeding and unable to move, Ayub Lala succumbed to his wounds on the street.

  News of this inhuman killing sent shock waves across the city, reverberating into the depths of the Bombay mafia. Dawood was mighty pleased. The killing had effected evidence of his status. But with moral perversion comes venomous prejudices. In any case, the political might of Dawood’s mafiadom had come into its own.

  A few months after Ayub’s murder, the alcoholic Saeed Baatla headed out to a country liquor bar in Dongri. He had earned the name ‘Baatla’ because of his excessive drinking and his huge pot belly. Baatla was a distorted version of baatli, which means bottle in Bombay slang. Saeed Baatla was a crude, frivolous man who engaged in the deep vulgarities of a man with too much fondness for drink. He was known, for example, for molesting women on the street.

  Tipped off, Khalid and his men headed out to the little bar to hunt down Baatla. Patience exhausted, this time Dawood accompanied them to witness and be a part of the execution. Cruelty was becoming, increasingly, Dawood’s forte.

  Dawood, Khalid, and their men found an almost drunk Baatla at the bar. Caught off guard and thwarted by liquor, Baatla had no time to react as one blow after the other landed on his chubby frame. If he was even capable of thought at that point, Baatla was left with none as the men threw him around the bar, wreaking severe damage to his face and body. As onlookers scattered from the bar, Baatla lay gasping for breath. Desperately, he tried to writhe free. Suddenly, he felt two men grab his arms and drag him to the same table he had been sitting on. As the men laid his hands on the table, he saw a knife flashing in the light of a low-hanging light bulb, out of the corner of his swollen eyes. Khalid approached the table, a strange expression on his face.

  As Baatla lifted his beaten head, the only sound he heard was a clean crunch that went all the way through to the table and a screeching pain that ran through his body into his head, from the end of his palm. He had just lost a finger. Khalid proceeded to cut off Baatla’s fingers one by one, savouring each moment before moving on to the next. As the bones crushed under the blade and blood gushed across the table, Khalid never completely severed each digit, instead letting it hang by a piece of skin as Baatla knelt on the floor of the bar, grimacing in agony. This incredulous craft, that of sick pleasure, seemed only to please Dawood and the men around him at the bar.

  As tears of pain scored down his shocked face, Baatla somehow managed to slip out and darted towards the door. He bolted out of the bar and towards the Dongri Police Station, which loomed close; as though fate had placed it there for him. Screaming in anguish, Baatla gave himself up to the police, confessing his every crime. Even in his intoxicated state, Baatla knew that he would be safer with the police than out on the streets. Dawood and his men had pursued Baatla for a while but when he entered the police station, they let off their chase, knowing there was no way out for him either way.

  Baatla spent fourteen years in jail after this incident. And Dawood asked Khalid Pehelwan to move into Musafirkhana, the headquarters of the D Gang. Dawood had underscored his point—made it loud and bloody clear. He had just begun to arrive into his element and the first stage of his dominance in the Bombay mafia was ushered in with the advent of Khalid Pehelwan.

  16

  The Emergency

  The Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), India’s premier spy agency, was constituted in 1962 at the end of the war with China. The idea was to improve India’s intelligence abroad, because during the hostilities against the Chinese there was a total failure of intelligence. Biju Patnaik gave a helping hand in the initial stages because he had earned a reputation of ‘working well behind the enemy line’ when, many years ago, during Dutch rule over Indonesia, he had himself flown a plane to Jakarta to rescue Sukarno, the then head of Indonesia’s national movement.

  RAW was directly under the Prime Minister’s secretariat. Indira Gandhi was the first prime minister to use it for political intelligence within the country. Its advantage was its compactness and the personnel, who were chosen either for their brilliant academic record or for their relationship with a dependable top civil or police officer. RAW had built up dossiers on government opponents, on critics within the Congress party, businessmen, bureaucrats, and journalists. Preparing lists of opponents was no problem; RAW had everything ready in its files.

  It was during a meeting between the then Maharashtra Chief Minister V.P. Naik and Prime Minister Indira Gandhi that it was concluded that the mafia could not be controlled by intelligence or prohibition; but rather by tougher laws, which showed no leniency. As the mafia had become a big menace in Gujarat and Bombay, two of the most flourishing regions in the country, it became imperative for the Central Government to act.

  And thus began promulgation and implementation of tougher laws which until then were unprecedented. The Maintenance of Internal Security Act (MISA) had been amended in 1974 to authorise the government to detain or arrest individuals without producing charges before a court of law. However, when this law was passed, the government had given its assurance to the Opposition in Parliament that MISA would not be used to detain political opponents. The MISA was originally constituted in 1971 and since then had undergone several amendments.

  One of the points that Indira Gandhi raked up as a 20-point programme was special legislation for confiscation of smugglers’ properties. Gandhi also said that MISA would be used to catch smugglers. Indeed, their operations were worldwide while their headquarters were in Dubai. Banks and insurance companies had opened their offices there to finance as well as cover the risks involved in smuggling. An elaborate network of transport by sea, land, and air had been built. The long coastline from Gujarat to Kerala was dotted with marked points where smuggled goods were received and then transported to numerous consumer centres in the country.

  Madras was a hub for smugglers while Bangalore (present day Bengaluru) provided a safe retreat for them to meet and compare notes. They had their own godowns, markets, and code of conduct. There was a direct link between smugglers and black money operators.

  As the government went on overdrive against the smugglers, criminals, and black marketeers on a war footing, it decided to tighten the grip on the country further and declared a state of Emergency on 26 June 1975. One gain of the Emergency was stabilisation of the prices of essential goods. Schools, shops, trains, and buses showed the effects of discipline. And effect
ively, the mafia was underground for nineteen months during the period of Emergency.

  On the political front, the killing of Shaikh Mujibur Rahman, the president of the newly-formed Bangladesh and most of his family in cold blood on 14 August, caused ripples in New Delhi. Neither RAW nor any other intelligence service had had the faintest clue beforehand. They had failed Gandhi once again. In fact, from that day on, Sanjay, her son and confidant, began to call RAW the ‘Relatives of Wives Association’; there were too many ‘relations’ of top RAW officials within the organisation. Gandhi expressed to the RAW chief Ramji Kao her unhappiness over the lack of prior intelligence reports on Bangladesh. What worried her was that if the intelligence could fail her in Bangladesh, it could fail her in India as well. Emergency, though imposed for political reasons and with the ambition to sustain supremacy in Parliament, had crippled the Indian media and deprived a common man his basic rights. To the Bombay mafia, it in fact dealt a death blow.

  For the first time, on the floors of Parliament, the names of Bombay smugglers Haji Mastan, Yusuf Patel, and Sukur Bakhia were mentioned. And this was enough for the government machinery to swing into action.

  Mastan, who was already under detention under MISA for ninety days since 17 September to 19 December 1974, could not even rally round to plan his next move as the government slapped on him charges under yet another law: Conservation of Foreign Exchange and Prevention of Smuggling Act (COFEPOSA). Mastan, despite hiring the best criminal lawyers like Ram Jethmalani, had to spend the entire period of the Emergency in jail.

  An ordinance was issued on 1 July 1975 under which persons detained under the COFEPOSA need no longer be given grounds for detention. Whatever Indira Gandhi’s political compulsions might have been for imposing Emergency, it became an era of ruthless enforcement against the smugglers. A good deal of black money was unearthed and a number of traders were held under MISA for ‘economic offences’.