Dongri to Dubai (41 page)

The murders of Kukreja and Wahid opened the floodgates to trigger-happy dons and uncontrollable bloodshed. Rajan, Shakeel, Gawli, and now the new entrant Salem had begun ordering the killings of gang loyalists or covert financiers. At times they were also gunned down because they refused to pay up the extortion money that the gangsters demanded. Builders like Manish Shah, Dilip Valecha, and Natwarlal Desai were killed in broad daylight, as were tycoons like Karim Maredia, Vallabh Thakkar, and Sunit Khatau.

While these killings were feathers in the caps of the warring dons, they also served as a warning bell for those who were dithering over whether they should loosen their purse strings.

Meanwhile, the list of murders was growing with each day. Months turned to years but there was no letting up. In four years, gang warfare became bloodier and violent. And the dons were safe, keeping their distance as their foot soldiers and loyalists paid with their lives.

Salem had decided to focus on the film industry, and after the aborted attempts on the lives of filmmakers Subash Ghai and Rajiv Rai, he got Riyaz Siddiqui killed. Shakeel did not want to be left behind and commissioned the killing of filmmaker Mukesh Duggal, claiming that his association with Rajan made him a target. Salem, for his part, set his eyes on a bigger and better target. After three years in Dubai, Salem finally closed in on his biggest quarry.

Gulshan Kumar was a self-made man. As a son of a humble fruit juice seller on the streets of Daryaganj in New Delhi, Kumar had always aspired to make it big. At the age of 23, he founded the company Super Cassettes in Noida, which marketed cheaply priced audio cassettes. The low cost of the cassettes made Super Cassettes a super success. Subsequently Gulshan Kumar began promoting audio cassettes of Hindu religious songs. With his business flourishing, he ventured into producing video cassettes on Hindu mythology and made every effort to promote Hinduism through his company in India.

In the late eighties, the film industry was controlled by powerful cartels, which promoted only select artistes. Gulshan, who had slowly managed to gain clout in the music world, introduced fresh new talents like Sonu Nigam, Anuradha Paudwal, and Kumar Sanu. He also brought new actors and directors into the industry. He promoted these new singers through a new brand in Mumbai called the T-Series. T-Series became the most popular brand in entertainment, not just in India but abroad, and Gulshan Kumar was hailed as a music baron with the Midas touch.

As a devout Hindu, Gulshan Kumar organised a free meal provision every year for the pilgrims of the shrine of Vaishno Devi known as Devi ka Bhandara. Slowly his popularity, wealth, and clout increased manifold; so much so that in 1992–93, he was said to be the highest taxpayer in the country.

During his hunt for a movie moghul between 1994 and 1997, Salem had thought of two other people: Subhash Ghai and Rajiv Rai. But when his plans failed with both, his shooters being caught both times, he began to focus on Gulshan Kumar. Salem had been threatening Kumar for a long time, demanding money from him, which the latter had adamantly refused to pay. This infuriated Salem to no end, and he soon hatched a master plot to eliminate the music baron.

On 5 August 1997, after the attack on Rajiv Rai, a reporter from the
Indian Express
called Salem on his Dubai number and tried to ferret out information from him about the attacks on film personalities.

Salem said at the time: ‘I never wanted to kill Subhash Ghai or Rajiv Rai, the idea was to only scare them. But watch out next week when my men kill a film personality. This time the idea is not to scare anyone but to warn the entire industry.’

The reporter immediately hailed a cab for the Crime Branch police headquarters, near Crawford Market. He reproduced the entire conversation to the Crime Branch chief, Ranjit Singh Sharma who took a serious note of the whole episode and personally began calling the crime unit chiefs. Immediately, security was provided to several bigwigs of Bollywood, including Pahlaj Nihalani, who was the head of the Indian Motion Pictures Producers Association (IMPPA) at that time.

Sharma made one major mistake. He failed to cover Gulshan Kumar. To be fair to Sharma, no one in the police machinery anticipated that he might figure as a target.

Much later, during their investigations, the cops discovered that Salem had begun to demand 5 lakh rupees from Gulshan Kumar every month. Kumar defiantly told Salem that he would rather donate the money to Mata Vaishnodevi’s
bhandara
(coffer) than to the Dawood gang. A vengeful Salem decided to kill him right in front of a mandir.

Every morning when Gulshan Kumar started for work, he visited the Jeeteshwar Mahadev Mandir in Andheri to pay obeisance. As a matter of precaution, he had hired a private security guard, who had reported sick for a couple of days. So on 12 August 1997, Salem’s men reported that he was unguarded. Salem immediately instructed them to kill Kumar outside the temple, adding that they should call him from their cellphone when firing so he could hear Gulshan’s screams of agony. As Gulshan Kumar emerged from the temple the killer, known as Raja, opened fire on him. Kumar was hit in his arm and waist and began bleeding profusely.

He tried to duck for cover and found a public urinal. The killer followed him and pumped some more bullets into him. Gulshan, who was writhing in pain, began to crawl out of the urinal. He spotted a shanty next to the urinal and, desperate to save his life, Gulshan crawled inside it. Blood and life were both slowly leaving him, when a breathless and panting Kumar pleaded with an old woman inhabitant to save him by shutting the door and not allowing the killers inside.

The old woman, too stunned by the sound of gunshots and the sight of so much blood on this badly wounded man, could not muster enough courage to close the door. The killers, who had all the while kept their cellphone switched on, made sure that Salem could hear everything on the other end. They finally decided to complete their assignment.

They entered the hut, pumped fifteen bullets into Gulshan Kumar, and left him dead. The whole sordid drama had continued for over 15 to 20 minutes in a busy bylane of Andheri in broad daylight, but none of the bystanders tried to help Gulshan Kumar or sought police help. The story of this rags-to-riches man who had helped countless people, ended with his dying alone, without any succour.

The cruel and heartless manner in which Kumar was killed shocked the entire nation. Mumbai had witnessed many mafia killings but this one simply surpassed all degrees of cruelty. It was beyond heinous, and Salem’s monstrosity was discussed everywhere from Parliament to pubs.

The Prime Minister of the coalition government Inder Kumar Gujral reacted to the killing at once. ‘This criminal act is totally out of place in a civilised society and particularly in a city known for its discipline and civic consciousness...’ Gujral said, in the
Indian Express
. He added how Gulshan Kumar had ‘carved a niche for himself in the world of film music’, concluding that ‘his loss will be mourned by all music-loving people’.

The film fraternity was frozen with fear following this cold-blooded murder, which was so much worse than anything they had dreamt up in their movies. Director Mahesh Bhatt, who directed the hit film
Aashiqui
for Kumar, summed it up aptly when he said, ‘When you kill Gulshan Kumar, you kill one of the biggest people in the entertainment industry. By killing Gulshan Kumar they are saying, ‘We are calling the shots,’ and they have proved it... The entire film fraternity is in a state of terror.’

The
Indian Express
reporter called Abu Salem again and enquired, ‘Was this the murder you were talking about?’ he asked. But this time the bluster was missing. His own gang members had quartered Salem. From Mumbai to New Delhi and from Delhi to Dubai, the mafia was getting hot under the collar with outrage; such a significant act perpetrated by a relative small-timer, yet to find his feet. The entire Dawood gang was scared with tails between their legs.

The reporter noticed that Salem was not the same authoritative, confident, boastful don he had been last week. Salem’s tone and tenor was entirely different. He hesitated for a moment before he could speak and when he did, he said something highly incredulous. ‘
Yeh murder
Lal Krishna Advani
ne karvaya hain.
[Lal Krishna Advani had commissioned this murder.] Why don’t you call and ask him?’ (Advani was a senior leader of the BJP, the ruling party in the state at the time.)

Shocked, the reporter could not think of anything to say.

14

Peanuts That Proved Costly

J
oint Commissioner of Police Ranjit Singh Sharma, despite his army background and his interactions with international police organisations, was finding it difficult to handle the intense media glare and political pressures following the Gulshan Kumar killing.

His overly hectic daily routine was such that even his worst detractors were pleased that he was at the helm of the Crime Branch; he was experiencing one of the most turbulent phases of his career.

His days after the killing comprised a series of calls from the Police Commissioner Subhash Malhotra and calls from several ministers from Mantralaya, including Chief Minister Manohar Joshi and Home Minister Gopinath Munde. Sharma also had to give a lot of explanations to several other bigwigs in the state and top leaders from the Bharatiya Janata Party. Each time a heavyweight called Sharma, he offered explanations and provided reasons for not being able to make a breakthrough in apprehending the killers.

Several days after the music magnate had been gunned down, the Crime Branch, which usually made a big show about getting a lot done, had not been able to produce any tangible results in this investigation. Sharma and his deputy K.L. Prasad were constantly on their toes and worked round-the-clock to make some headway in the killing. But despite all their efforts, there was no progress.

Normally, after any criminal incident, the police pick up some informants at random. These informants, even if they are unable to provide any vital clues in the ongoing probe, can at least give the cops a line of investigation to follow that may eventually lead to cracking the case.

All the units of the Crime Branch were working on the brief to tap all their informers and ferret out important information relating to the case. Nizamuddin, who was close to the Abu Salem gang, was picked up. He was detained in the Crime Branch lock-up for days and subjected to intense interrogation, before being let go, but without the cops being any wiser.

The cops’ failure to stem the escalating law and order situation in the city put immense pressure on the state government. Right-wing political party Shiv Sena’s supremo Bal Thackeray was at his vitriolic best in the editorials that appeared in his party’s mouthpiece
Saamana
. Every day, he took potshots at the city police and even branded the Police Commissioner Subhash Malhotra a scarecrow who had failed to scare anyone.

But even while the cops were still smarting from Gulshan Kumar’s killing, the mafia struck again and gunned down builder Natwarlal Desai in the business district of Nariman Point, just below Tulsiani Chambers. The high rise is just across the road from the seat of the state government; newspapers screamed the next day: ‘Murder under the nose of Mantralaya!’

The then Chief Minister Manohar Joshi and Home Minister Gopinath Munde were finding it difficult to put up a brave front continuously. They concluded that the police machinery was seriously failing them. Some heads had to roll if they were to survive. Munde decided that Malhotra was incompetent to lead the police team and so, two weeks after the killing, he was unceremoniously shunted off to the nondescript posting of police housing and welfare. Malhotra’s name will go down in the police record book as the first police chief to have suffered the ignominy of transfer just because of one high-profile killing.

Among all the police commissionerates in the country, the job of the Mumbai police chief was the most fragile and insecure. The city police chief has to please many bosses and suck up to many power centres to retain his job. Whoever understood the essence of survival managed to stay put longer and whoever failed to impress all bloated egos, had to make a disastrous exit. Malhotra and his predecessor Ramdev Tyagi were both thrown out because they could not win Bhartiya Janata Party leader Munde’s approval.

Ronald Hyacinth Mendonca was appointed as the police commissioner of the Mumbai police on 28 August, in Malhotra’s place.