Authors: S. Hussain Zaidi
Section 100 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) clearly states that if during the course of a violent assault a victim ends up killing the assailant, the killing is not tantamount to murder. Using this particular section of the law, the cops always maintained that it was the criminal who had opened fire on the police. Claiming that this was life threatening, the police team would suggest that they had to fire in self-defence–even if they had initiated fire. Now if the assailant was killed in the exchange, the policemen who had actually ‘gone with the intention only to arrest him’ should not be held responsible.
No one knows how and when the idea of this extra-judicial killing was mooted, but certain police historians have tried to record the evolution of police encounters.
According to the history of the Mumbai police, the first ever encounter that took place at the hands of the Mumbai police was that of Manohar alias Manya Surve, in which Ishaq Bagwan was hailed as a hero and got his name into the police archives as the first encounter cop. Reams and reams of newsprint were devoted to the pontification that the encounters were the brainchild of the then police chief Julio Ribeiro. During his stint in Punjab, it was said, he had found this to be an effective method to handle anarchists. Later, when Khalistani separatist ultras tried to make Mumbai their base, Additional Commissioner of Police Aftab Ahmed Khan, who was the chief of the Anti-Terrorism Squad, had taken on the Sikh militants and ostensibly dubbed the whole skirmish as encounters.
However, encounters were brought into fashion and given respectability by Police Commissioner Ramdev Tyagi. During the course of weekly crime meetings, Tyagi clearly exhorted his people to chase down the criminals and, if need be, ‘encounter’ them.
His successor, Subhash Malhotra, continued with the tradition but had to be stopped in his tracks after the police goofed up the Javed Fawda killing.
As petition after petition was filed in the High Court, all of them insisted that encounters were actually cold blooded murders, as if the criminals were awarded the death penalty right there on the streets without a trial. The High Court then came down heavily on the police, forcing them to consign their guns to their holsters.
The embargo on police actions continued for several months. The petitions around the Fawda encounter and subsequently around Sada Pawle’s encounters put the brakes on the Mumbai police’ crime busting aspirations. And when a division bench of the Bombay High Court was appointed in 1997-98 to probe into the veracity of these controversial encounters, the cops were caught on sticky ground.
The sessions court judge Aloysius Stanislaus Aguiar was the head of the probe committee. Judge Aguiar was a maverick judge and known for his unyielding integrity and probity.
Aguiar was one of the few Catholics of Mumbai to be elevated to the position of judge, and then to the elevated position of High Court judge. In his acceptance speech, he said, ‘Critics of the legal system, and not without justification, refer to the Law as an Ass, but let us not forget, that it was on an Ass that Jesus Christ, the Ultimate Judge, rode triumphantly into Jerusalem (http://spotlight.net.in).’
After several months of investigation, Judge Aguiar filed a 223-page report on the encounters and declared that the police encounters of Javed Fawda and Sada Pawle were fake and did not match with the version and explanation that the cops had given to describe proceedings.
The report was so scathing and critical that the cops under question began to twitch in their seats.
Meanwhile, Ronnie Mendonca took over as the police commissioner. Mendonca was known for his integrity but had the mild mannerisms of a college professor. His tenure had started off in a controversial manner; he had named Nadeem as the key accused in the Gulshan Kumar killing and stirred up a hornet’s nest. This was no sleepy professor.
But Mendonca did not believe in the unconventional policing methods practised during encounters. For months, he tried to experiment with laws like Maharashtra Prevention of Dangerous People’s Act, which was commonly known as MPDA. As sterner laws like TADA had been repealed by 1995, the criminals were emboldened.
The year 1998 recorded the highest number of shootouts: over 100 people were either killed or badly injured by the firing of underworld operatives. ‘Shootout’ in police parlance means a firing incident, where a gunman opens fire on the victim, with the intention to kill, but sometimes if the victim is fortunate he may survive.
The police registers recorded a shootout every third day. The Crime Branch was constantly on its toes and the morale of the police force hit an all-time low. The human rights activists, the courts, and the media had all lambasted the cops in their respective manners. Arguments over the genuineness of the encounters and the Judge Aguiar Committee report raged on in the Bombay High Court.
The cops realised that they had to retaliate. They could not allow the gangsters to run amok and cast aspersions on both their practices as well as their competence. Every shootout was like a mockery of Mendonca’s three-decade long career. Media pundits and columnists were writing blistering reviews while Mantralaya mantris had begun to lose patience at the worsening law and order situation.
And then something unexpected happened. The division bench of High Court rejected the Aguiar report and declared that the encounters were not fake.
Fawda encounter was genuine, says HC
EXPRESS NEWS SERVICE
MUMBAI, FEBRUARY 24: In a major boost to the Mumbai Police, the Bombay High Court today rejected the findings of the Aguiar Committee while upholding the genuineness of the encounter in which dreaded gangster Jawed Fawda alias Abu Sayama was killed on the midnight of August 28, 1997 at Ballard Pier. Justice Aguiar, who was asked by the High Court to conduct a probe into the encounter killings of Jawed Fawda, Sada Pawle and Vijay Tandel, had indicted Mumbai police for staging encounters and had said that they had killed an innocent peanut vendor Abu Sayama mistaking him for Jawed Fawda.
The division bench of Justice N Arumugham and Justice Ranjana Samant-Desai while dictating their order in a series of public interest petitions filed by the Samajwadi Party, the Committee for Protection of Democratic Rights (CPDR) and the Peoples’ Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL), said that the police had fired at Fawda in self-defence. The bench had said yesterday that there was no mistake on police’s part and that person killed was indeed Jawed Fawda the gangster.
The Bombay High Court judgement came as a major shot in the arm for the Mumbai police. Their enthusiasm and self-confidence returned with full vigour and gusto. And now they wanted the top brass to help them formulate a strategy to take on the underworld.
Mendonca decided to shed his mild manners once and for all. He had roped in retired colonel Mahendra Pratap Choudhary of special operations to train the cops in gunbattles with the underworld and to meet any eventuality. One day, he called a press conference and announced his bullet for bullet plans for the underworld. The plan had two dimensions to it: one, psychological warfare and two, covert operations.
The next day, the media went to town with Mendonca’s gameplan. The
Indian Express
, which had taken a serious anti-encounter stance earlier, appreciated that he was bravely challenging the underworld. Their front page report declared:
Mendonca’s battle cry: We’ll now retaliate in gangsters’ lingo
S Hussain Zaidi
MUMBAI, May 12: After a lull of six months, Mumbai police is all set to renew its fight against the underworld. And the battle is going to be bloody. For, Police Commissioner Ronnie Mendonca has promised this time his men “will answer the gangsters in their language.”
His pronouncement is as much a warning to the gangsters as it is a signal to his own men that the unofficial ban on use of arms against gangsters, that was imposed after human rights organisations raised a hue and cry against encounters, has been lifted.
Mendonca’s bullet-for-bullet game plan is based on a strong conviction that any more dithering on his part would adversely affect the morale of his men and boost that of the gangsters. He has already taken steps to send the message across that he is serious -- a group of 100 policemen are currently undergoing advanced armed combat training at Ghatkopar under Col M P Chaudhary, an ex-serviceman. Apart from sophisticated arms, they are also taking lessons in guerrilla warfare. The first batch of 25 men is likely to be out next week and that’s when the police intend to raise the battle cry.
The commando teams will work in tandem with the elite Anti-Extortion Cells (AECs). Besides one such cell in the Crime Branch, there are four more cells created under the command of each regional additional commissioner of police. As the officers in these AECs have not been trained in handling automatic firearms, setting up ambushes and chasing criminals, the commando combat teams will provide them with the required “muscle and fire power.” While the first batch of commandos will be attached to the Crime Branch, the subsequent teams will go on to consolidate the regional AECs.
And though not a single bullet has been fired yet, the entire police force is crackling with enthusiasm. At a meeting to discuss the measures to tackle a resurgent underworld last Saturday, senior officers had unanimously supported Mendonca’s aggressive posturing. An additional commissioner of police who attended the meeting said: “In a nutshell, the strategy that we discussed was attack.” One of the deputy commissioners of police added: “We are already cleaning our guns.” But they have an uphill task ahead.
The covert aspect of operations had a much more aggressive gameplan. Additional Commissioner of Police Dr Satyapal Singh and Param Bir Singh were assigned the task of wiping out the underworld from the city. Both the Singhs had a superb rapport and a burning desire to rid the city of its pervasive mafia menace. The two stalwarts formed three elite encounters squads under the leadership of three daring officers, inspectors Pradeep Sharma, Praful Bhosale, and Vijay Salaskar. The three officers belonged to the same 1983 batch and had certain ‘killing instincts’ in them.
Also, they were known to have the best intelligence network in the city. While Sharma was a protégé of Satyapal, Bhosale, and Salaskar owed allegiance to Parambir. As Chhota Shakeel and Arun Gawli were the immediate priorities of the Mumbai police, the three encounter squads were working on a specific brief: ‘Finish off the Shakeel and Gawli gangs’.
Salaskar and Bhosale went after Gawli, while Sharma decided to take on the Shakeel gang. Between the three of them, they eliminated over 300 gangsters, of which Sharma scalped the highest number. Sharma alone managed to eliminate over 110 gangsters, which also included three terrorists from the Lashkar-e-Tayyeba, while Bhosale managed to kill over ninety gangsters from both the Gawli and Chhota Rajan gangs.
Salaskar could only kill sixty gangsters but he managed to singlehandedly finish off the muscle power of Gawli gang. Almost all the top shooters of the Gawli gang met their fate at Salaskar’s hands.
The police top brass believed that encounters would prove to be a major deterrent for the underworld as they would instill the fear of God in the minds of the reckless gangsters. It was a grim war. As rising unemployment continued to drive scores of youths to join Mumbai gangs, earning anything from 5,000 to 25,000 rupees, the cops had found it difficult to stem the growing number of sharpshooters. But encounters ensured one thing: the young men who had been inveigled into this life of crime realised that the underworld was a one-way street. The fate of joining the underworld could only be death.
This understanding seriously depleted the growing numbers of underworld recruits. The bullet-for-bullet and life-for-life credo the Mumbai police began to follow ensured that the mafia ran out of getting fresh blood. The ranks and files of the underworld were thrown out of gear.
Finally, the cops had something to smile about.
16
Tech That
T
he British must have had their reasons to shift the Mumbai Police Commissioner’s office in 1896 to an Anglo-Gothic building, which faced a very busy thoroughfare and a wholesale fruit and vegetable market. Although the majestic Arthur Crawford Market building, an architectural marvel, overshadows all other British architecture in its vicinity, the Mumbai Police Commissioner’s office which serves as the headquarters of the city police is no poor cousin. It too figures on the heritage list.
More than a hundred years later, the Mumbai police headquarters (HQ) is still sitting in the midst of the sprawling Crawford market and many other shopping plazas and markets that have mushroomed around it. For great bargains there are Mohatta Market and Lohar Chawl, Manish Market on the other side, Dava Bazaar on Princess Street, and Fashion Street if you walk a little further on the Metro Cinema side. While the entire stretch near the Mumbai police HQ is a shopper’s delight, for traffic, pedestrians, and the police it is a nightmare junction. It is always throbbing with roadside vendors, the
mathadi
workers pushing handcarts and a sea of shoppers who spill over onto the roads jostling for space with the oncoming traffic.
Back in the early nineties, when the then Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao and then Finance Minister Dr Manmohan Singh ushered in economic liberalisation, most of Mumbai’s traders and businessmen quickly cashed in on the moment to import things that were once only smuggled in. It was a time of sweeping changes everywhere in India, more so near the Mumbai police HQ’S unofficial shopping district. Rundown old shops were giving way to swankier departmental stores with elegant facades and amazing window displays. While the wholesale markets were still doing business in small, stuffy shops, new stores like Roopam, Roop Milan, and Metro, bang opposite the police headquarters, were actually minting money as shoppers went berserk.