Dongri to Dubai (36 page)

Memon, in the meanwhile, managed to smuggle over eight tons of RDX and thousands of grenades and Kalashnikov rifles from the coast of Raigad, Maharashtra, all into Bombay, in February 1993. The scene was set.

On 12 March 1993, a series of ten bomb explosions disrupted the uneasy calm of Bombay. The city, wrecked by bloodshed, firings, and communal divide, was just returning to normalcy after two months of relative quiet. The explosions began at 1: 28 pm at the Bombay Stock Exchange Building, ripped apart the Air India Tower, the grain market at Masjid Bunder, Plaza Cinema and Sena Bhavan at Dadar, Passport Office at Worli, and five star hotels in Bandra and Santa Cruz. Grenades were also hurled at the airport and the Mahim Fishermen’s Colony.

Long before 11 September 2001, the Bombay attack was one of the most audacious attacks of its kind. The 12
th
March attack on Bombay was regarded as the biggest terrorist act on any city in the world at the time. While all such terrorist attacks are usually the handiwork of highly trained and seasoned men, police investigations revealed, ironically, that this attack was carried out by a handful of young men who were neither religious bigots nor highly motivated. The entire operation, which had resulted in 257 deaths and injured 700 people, was the result of indiscreetly and hurriedly placed bombs, planted more out of fear of Tiger Memon than out of any religious zeal.

On the morning of 12 March, hours before his men had began planting the bombs, Tiger Memon and his entire family—including his old parents, four brothers and their wives—left the country. The Bombay police were already on his trail. They had gotten lucky and had several breakthroughs in the first few hours after the blasts. This included a clumsily abandoned Maruti van at Worli and a carelessly parked scooter at Dadar. The van belonged to Tiger Memon’s sister-in-law Rubina and the scooter belonged to his brother, Yaqub Memon.

While most of the perpetrators of the blasts and their accomplices were arrested, some of them who had managed to reach Pakistan, including the Memon clan, managed to evade the law. Yet, Deputy Commissioner of Police, traffic, Rakesh Maria, who had additional charge of Zone IV, was assigned the investigation and managed to gather evidence and arrest over 200 people. He chargesheeted them under the stringent Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (TADA) Act.

Meanwhile, the entire country blamed Dawood Ibrahim for the blasts. Everybody was convinced that it was he alone who had planned the attack. Only he had the power to bring Bombay to its knees like this.

When the Indian government clamoured for Dawood’s deportation from Dubai and began exerting pressure on the United Arab Emirates government to launch a crackdown on the fugitive don, India’s most powerful gangster was actually worried for a moment. For, the pressure was so considerable that the UAE’s mighty sheikhs were shaken by it.

Barring its neighbours, the Indian government had always enjoyed smooth and harmonious relations with countries across the globe. The respect that the country had earned was by its sheer goodwill and over eagerness to help everyone; apart from China, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, India had never overly antagonised other countries. The Middle Eastern countries, which were at loggerheads with each other, had always been friendly with India.

However India, as usual, failed to capitalise on its clout. Post the 1993 blasts, a wave of sympathy for India had swept across the world. If India wished, she could have used the opportunity to bring Pakistan to its knees and get Dawood back to the country. But the opportunity was frittered away. The shrewd, wily rulers of UAE realised the pressure from India was weakening and immediately announced that Dawood was not on their soil. This was a baseless claim but the Indian establishment never pursued it aggressively, as reported widely in the media at the time.

However, India’s outspoken media did not spare the government and its half-hearted effort. They launched a massive effort to expose Dawood Ibrahim. While the English media published reams of newsprint detailing the don’s vast empire in Dubai and the Gulf region, the local Marathi press branded him as a ’traitor’—a
deshdrohi
.

But those who knew Dawood very well were certain that even though he had the resources to do orchestrate something of this scale, the Mumbai blasts were not his brainchild. His best friends were Hindus and he was not known as a religiously motivated person. Dawood Ibrahim’s core group, which included several of his non-Muslim aides like Sunil Sawant, Manish Lala, Anil Parab, and above all Chhota Rajan, were sure that Dawood was not involved in the blasts.

In fact Dawood’s close allies know that upstaging and exiling Tiger Memon from Mumbai was one of the don’s masterstrokes. Memon was fast growing as a smuggler in the city, and clients in the Middle East had started to deal with him. Dawood never entertained a rival’s growth and increasing influence lightly. But Memon had never even thought of Dawood as competition, instead actually wanting to be in his good books, so it was not easy to upstage him or stall his growth with direct intervention.

However, if Tiger Memon got entangled with the law in a messy manner, he would have to escape from the country and abandon all operations. He would thus not be able to expand his influence and Dawood could reign supreme. So, when the proposal for leading the attack and blasts in Mumbai came up, Dawood had cleverly asked the ISI to make Tiger Memon the hero. Memon bit the bait and was ousted from the city, and Dawood managed to outmanoeuvre his competitors without shedding a single drop of blood. This is why Indian agencies could never pin the whole operation onto Dawood and named Tiger Memon as the key accused and perpetrator.

The public was not fully convinced, however. And when Shiv Sena supremo Bal Thackeray wrote scathing editorials calling Dawood a ‘deshdroshi’ and dubbed Hindu dons like Arun Gawli and Amar Naik ‘Aamchi muley’ or our Maharashtrian boys, Chhota Rajan rose to Dawood’s defence.

Rajan, also a Maharashtrian, was aware of the extent of Dawood’s involvements in the blasts. He decided to prove his loyalty to his friend and boss. Rajan began calling up and sending faxes to newspaper offices, defending Dawood. He labelled the accusations of Dawood’s involvements in the blasts as flimsy and religiously motivated.

In fact, Rajan went a step further and took on Bal Thackeray. He began sending faxes to English newspapers, where he wrote in Marathi that Thackeray should mind his business and focus on politics and stop commenting on the business of the underworld. Rajan went on to proclaim that Dawood was not a
deshdrohi
and that he did not need a certificate from Thackeray.

8

Surrender Offer

T
he events of 12 March 1993 had left the country, its citizens, and the government shell-shocked. They were not the only ones rattled; Dawood Ibrahim was seriously shaken by the events which unfolded on that fateful day. However, there is no real evidence to suggest why he was in that state of mind. His friends and associates believe that when he provided logistical support for Pakistan’s ISI to smuggle in the RDX via the long coast of Maharashtra, he did not realise the magnitude of the act of terror they were to perpetrate on Indian soil, six years after he left.

Dawood believed that the plan was to conduct one of those ‘prick and bleed’ operations that had almost become an ISI calling card in the Kashmir region, where a small number of casualties and minimal infrastructural damage was regularly witnessed. The all-seeing and all-knowing don who sat atop his throne in the White Castle had no clue, say those close to him, that this operation would turn out to be the most heinous terror attacks that had ever been orchestrated anywhere in the world, until then.

A doleful Dawood now wanted to get out of the whole mess and come out clean. He wanted to assert his innocence and convince people he was not involved in the blasts. The irony was that the don, who was once near impossible to seek an audience with, now found no one willing to give him a patient hearing. A flood of hate mail had been steadily piling up in Dubai where he lived then. Epithets like ‘Qaum gaddaar (traitor to the community)’ and ‘mulk gaddaar (traitor to the country)’ were frequently hurled at him. Avalanched by all the ill-will, Dawood could barely bring himself to read a couple of bile-filled letters before returning to his despondent state.

It was shortly after this incident that it began to dawn on Dawood that the hate mail cut across communities, coming from those of every faith and allegiance, and among those leading the charge were his fellow Muslims. In fact the day after the blasts, he received a call from a Maharashtrian woman police officer of the Mumbai police then posted at the Mumbai airport. As one of his aides brought him the phone, Dawood was not prepared for her angry, accusatory speech. ‘
Besharam! Tujhe sharm nahi aati hai? Jis mitti par tune janm liye, ussi mitti ko badnaam kiya!
[Have you no shame? You have humiliated the same country where you were born!]’ raged the officer on the phone. Dawood had nothing to say, silently hearing her out. The barrage left him so stunned that even when it was over he held the phone close to his ear until much later. As if it was not enough that his post box was full of such hate, it was now being delivered to him on the telephone.

The fact that Muslims were also so angry with him left him flummoxed. After all, it is a documented fact that when Hindu-Muslim violence broke out across Mumbai in 1992-93, Dawood categorically refused to be drawn into the mess of communally motivated action. It was then that he began receiving ‘gifts’ at his White House villa in Dubai. Some of these dubious presents included boxes of broken bangles with a note attached: ‘
Yeh us bhai ke liye jo apni behen ki hifazat na kar saka
[this is for that brother, who couldn’t defend his sister]’.

Mocked and chastised for not taking up arms back then, he was now a traitor in the eyes of the entire world for allegedly taking action. This was a very sticky situation. Dawood sat for hours, mulling over each option. These options, he noticed, were slowly dwindling. Finally, he decided to make his move and called out to one of his aides for the telephone.

The period immediately after the blasts and months after that were difficult for Dawood in more ways than he could have imagined. He used his contacts in the police and found out the enormity of charges and the strength of the evidence against him. He realised that the Mumbai police, despite all their fancy investigation and sleuthing, had managed to only extract two confessions against him under the heinous TADA Act. (Later the Central Bureau of Investigation got one more confession that named Dawood in the conspiracy.) All the statements dwelled on the fact that Dawood was involved in the conspiracy and had agreed to provide logistical support to Tiger Memon for the execution of the serial blasts. But Dawood realised that this was hardly a watertight case and that he could easily defend himself in a court of law.

Dawood was aware of advocate Ram Jethmalani’s reputation as one of the top lawyers in India. If there was anyone who could get him out of this mess, it was Jethmalani. So, the don decided to call the advocate at his London residence. Typically not wanting to waste time in small talk, Dawood kept it short and simple. ‘Mr Jethmalani, I want to surrender,’ he said, quietly and humbly.

Surprised that a fugitive don was calling him and that too for legal counsel, Jethmalani was not very keen on speaking to Dawood. But the don was insistent that he wanted to return to India and he persistently called the advocate, who at last relented. Dawood said he was willing to face the government and the charges against him in the blast case and that he would do so with total cooperation.

However, he had certain conditions which were to be fulfilled before he would turn himself in. Apart from the charges in the 1993 blasts case, he wanted all previous charges against him to be dropped. Additionally, for the duration of the blasts case, he was to be kept under house arrest and not in a jail. If these two conditions were accepted, he added that he would happily return to the country of his birth and surrender.

Dawood’s offer sent ripples across India and created an uproar in Parliament and Mantralaya in Mumbai. A section of senior intelligence operatives did not want Dawood to come back as they felt he would go back on this deal. Yet senior leaders in Parliament wanted him to return and face the music, because having Dawood Ibrahim surrender to their government would be a historic achievement. Members of the ruling party could thump their chests in pride at what they had accomplished.

A spanner was, however, thrown into the works by the apprehensions of a few politicians from Maharashtra. They were concerned that if Dawood was to return and come clean, a lot of shady dealings by a number of people in the state and at the Centre would be revealed. As the man on trial, Dawood was ironically shaping up to be the executioner for a number of politicians. If he was brought back, information on all illegal meetings with him in Dubai and London would be out in the open. Every instance of Dawood coming to the aid of these politicos would be out in the open.