Authors: Suketu Mehta
I meet Ajay, who is best known for rapidly solving the case of the 1993 bomb blasts, when he comes with his wife, Ritu, to my friend Vidhu Vinod
Chopra’s house for dinner one evening. Vinod, a film director, has asked him over because he wants Ajay, his good friend, to read the script for
Mission Kashmir
and offer expert guidance, especially about a scene in which a police inspector interrogates a militant. Ajay Lal has the look of an intelligent boxer. His hair is cut short, more like an army man than a police officer. He has a cleft chin and is a star athlete on the force. Unlike other cops I’ve met, Ajay is sophisticated, well-spoken, well-dressed. He could be an executive or, with his towering good looks, a movie star. Smita Thackeray, the daughter-in-law and companion of Bal Thackeray, has been calling Ajay at home.
“All women like Ajay,” his wife says, sighing.
Sitting at ease in Vinod’s living room, Ajay instructs us in methods of police interrogation. First of all, he points out, it is not always done in the police station. During his investigation of the bomb blasts of 1993, the interrogation was carried out in the compound of the special reserve force. Sometimes, lacking a safe house, he has to conduct the interrogation in a moving car with darkened windows, barking questions from the front seat as his men slap the suspect around in the back.
If Ajay has the time, the suspect is deprived of sleep for a whole week. Usually, neither party has such luxury. So another method is to take two ends of an old-style telephone wire and apply it to the arms or the genitals; a portable dynamo is whirled, and a powerful electric current is generated. Sometimes, he takes the suspect to a creek and ties a heavy stone to his legs. Then one of his men gets behind, puts his arms under the suspect’s, and takes him into the water, where the weight of the stone pulls him downward. All that’s keeping him up is the cop; the cop is his savior, his last hope. The suspect is dunked a few times in the water; gasping, screaming, he comes up out of the water and tells Ajay what he wants to know.
“Fear of death is the most effective. During the bomb blasts I just took a few of the suspects to Borivali National Park and fired a few bullets past their ears.” But with many of these suspects, ordinary violence wouldn’t work. There had to be special methods. “Those who have no fear of death also have no fear of physical pain. For them we threaten their family. I tell them I’ll plant some evidence on their mother or their brother and arrest them. That usually works.”
When Ajay’s boys make an arrest, they tell him, “Saab, we would like you to frighten him a little.” So as they are bringing the prisoner into
Ajay’s imposing office, they say, “The Saab will finish you; it is not in our hands now. You are a dead duck.” It would be best, they suggest to the suspect, if they intercede on his behalf, make a good report to the Saab, so that he is spared the very worst of the torments ahead of him in the long night. In short, summarizes Ajay, “That very old technique: the hard and soft approach.”
One last method: Give the suspect one kilo—more than two pounds—of jalebis. Then you don’t give him water. This sounds like an unusually enticing form of torture, I say.
“Have you ever had sweets and not had water? If you have one kilo of sweets you must have water.” A man will do anything for water after so many sweets.
A
FEW WEEKS LATER
, Ajay Lal pulls a thick leather-bound ledger from a drawer in his office. They are his notes of the bomb-blasts investigation, kept every day for years. It is also the story of the beginning of the gangwar.
Organized crime in the city of Bombay is controlled by two exiles, or nonresident Indians (NRIs). One is in Karachi and one in Malaysia—or Bangkok, or Luxembourg, depending on which night you ask. The gangwar is the fallout from the bomb blasts of 1993, during which a series of bombs planted by the Muslim criminal syndicate headed by Dawood Ibrahim—the D-Company—killed 317 people in the city, in revenge for the anti-Muslim pogroms of a few months earlier. After the blasts, Dawood’s main lieutenant, a Hindu named Chotta Rajan, broke with him and formed his own gang, the Nana Company, so-called because Rajan is nana, elder brother, to his troops. He swore to eliminate all those involved in the bombings. The two dons—bhais, in Bombay—control their organizations from outside the country, and they have been at war ever since.
In Bombay, a gang war—gengwar, as it is pronounced with the Bambaiyya inflection—doesn’t just mean a fight between two gangs. Run together, the words are another term for the underworld in its entirety, in its complexity. People identify themselves by it—“We are the folk of the gangwar”—as opposed to petty criminals, robbers, rapists, pickpockets. It is a permanent state of being. Underworld is also an expansive term and has mystique, power. But it is the wrong word to use for organized crime in
Bombay, since it implies something hidden, something beneath. In Bombay, the underworld is an overworld; it is somehow suspended
above
this world and can come down and strike any time it chooses. The hit men refer to the operational centers of the gangs—Karachi, Dubai, Malaysia—as upar, “above,” and Bombay as neeche, “below.” There can be nothing under “below.”
Dawood Ibrahim Kaskar was born in Ratnagiri, on the Konkan coast, in 1955, one of ten children of a police constable in the Crime Branch, Ibrahim Kaskar, who was known for his brutality. Once a group of boys robbed a bank, but they made a mistake of going to a Muslim saint’s tomb and garlanding it with 100-rupee notes, and giving away money to the fakirs. The police found out that four boys had been throwing money around at the tomb and caught them. The commissioner ordered the money to be recovered at any cost, and two boys were killed while being beaten by Ibrahim Kaskar’s squad.
Dawood started out as a small-time hood in Nagpada, in central Bombay. At that time the city was dominated by Haji Mastan, a gold smuggler who started his career when somebody gave him a sackful of gold coins for safekeeping. He helped the poor and drifted off into politics and social service. Mastan was replaced by the Pathan gang, immigrants from Afghanistan led by Karim Lala. Dawood’s steady rise as a smuggler brought him into conflict with two of the Pathan gang’s chiefs, Amirzada and Alamzeb Pathan. One of Dawood’s brothers, Sabir, was killed by the Pathans in 1981. Dawood swore revenge and had Amirzada shot and killed in the sessions court as he was being led to the witness box. In 1984, hounded by the police, he moved out of the country to Dubai, where he had powerful contacts in the gold smuggling business. He took advantage of the fact that gold, the supply of which was controlled by the Indian government, cost much more than in the Middle East. At the height of the business, in 1991, some two hundred tons of gold were being smuggled into the country every year. But in 1992, gold imports were liberalized and prices decreased substantially. Dawood turned to extortion, real estate, and film financing.
In 1989, he was joined in Dubai by his top lieutenant in Bombay, the thirty-one-year-old Chotta Shakeel—also a Nagpada boy—who had jumped bail. Shakeel’s place at the head of the gang in Bombay was taken by a small-time black marketeer of cinema tickets, Rajendra Sadashiv Nilkhalje. He was born in 1960 and was known as Chotta Rajan—Small
Rajan—to distinguish him from his mentor, Bada Rajan. (Chotta Shakeel is so called because he is—well, short.) Chotta Rajan made his mark first by avenging the murder of his mentor. He gave a country-made pistol to a tea boy and told him to go to a cricket match where Bada Rajan’s assassin was sitting. The boy killed the hit man in front of hundreds of spectators, then ran three and a half miles to safety. Chotta Rajan earned Dawood’s respect after that, by arranging the killings of several important members of the Pathan gang.
Dubai suited Dawood; he re-created Bombay in lavish parties, flying in scores of the city’s top film stars and cricketers as guests, and took a film starlet, Mandakini, as his mistress. His empire in the country he had exiled himself from grew, and it would have been a comfortable existence. Then came the riots. Then came the blasts.
A
JAY WAS A BRIGHT YOUNG OFFICER
who’d grown up in Bandra, unlike many of the other Indian Police Service officers in the city. At the time he was deputy commissioner of police for Traffic, stationed at Mahim. His duties dealt with easing congestion on the Bombay roads, possibly an even more difficult job than fighting the gangwar. On the afternoon of March 12, 1993, a bomb went off outside the Sena headquarters at Dadar on the premises of a petrol pump, and the party’s senior politicians rushed to the spot. They were highly nervous, and they asked Ajay to check the place to see if there were any more bombs inside. Ajay went inside with a stick and prodded the corners. There was nothing there. Within fifteen or twenty minutes, however, the next bomb blew up at the nearby Plaza Cinema, in a parked car. Ajay realized what was happening and was the first officer to alert the Control Room; he told them to block all the airports and railway stations. “This is a chain. It is done to start communal riots.”
A total of ten powerful RDX bombs exploded all over the city; three more, in the crowded inner city, failed to go off. The targets were the most prominent buildings in Bombay: the Air India building, the Stock Exchange, the Centaur Hotel, the headquarters of the Shiv Sena. In one day, 257 people died and 713 were injured. At the international airport, hand grenades were lobbed from the access road toward parked aircraft, but they couldn’t reach the planes. Late that night, Police Commissioner A. S. Samra visited the sites. All this was on March 12. Two days later, Ajay
got a message on the police radio that a scooter had been found abandoned at the Dadar railway station. He went there with bomb experts, who defused the bomb in it.
The commissioner told Ajay to take charge of the investigation. For two days, the police had made no headway in trying to find out who was responsible. On the night of the fourteenth, Ajay called twenty of the best police detectives he knew in the city. They gathered in a command room at 11:30 p.m., and the process of putting information together began; five hours later, on the morning of the fifteenth, Ajay arrested the first suspect.
A Maruti van had been found abandoned near the Siemens office at Worli; Ajay remembers the license plate, MFC 1972, six years later. Detonators had been found in the vehicle, but the policemen who spotted the car had not given it much attention, believing it had been abandoned just before a police checkpoint. Ajay thought the car should be investigated thoroughly, and he asked to see its papers. They showed that the car belonged to a smuggler named Mushtaq “Tiger” Memon, who had a house in Mahim behind the shrine. The police team investigated the house in Mahim but found nothing except the key to a scooter, marked with its manufacturer’s name,
BAJAJ.
Something clicked. Ajay remembered the scooter that had been abandoned at Dadar, the one with the bomb in it. He asked one of his officers to go to Matunga Police Station, where the scooter had been taken, and try the key. It fit the scooter.
It turned out that the man assigned to take the bomb-laden scooter to its designated station had heard a blast while driving, and, thinking the vehicle between his legs would also explode, had pulled off the road, abandoned the scooter, and run off. His cowardice led to Ajay’s most important clue. Now he had Memon’s house searched intensively. They found a pair of chappals—sandals—with a sticky black claylike powder on them. They didn’t know it then, but the powder was RDX, “black soap.” In the garages of Memon’s building, they found more packages of black soap, with wrappers bearing Karachi markings. “Now we were certain the scooter, the Maruti, and this house were connected.”
Memon was not in the house, but people in the area told Ajay that a young man in Andheri named Manager took care of his affairs. Ajay told the team to go to his house and pick him up. “Our chaps picked up his father, mother, uncle, aunt, and Manager and brought them to the police station. Manager said, ‘I’ve left Memon’s employ; I am not working for
him.’ And he cursed me, mother-sister curses. I could tell he was lying. I told him, ‘You are lying. If you lie I will have to trouble your mother and father and arrest them also.’ He didn’t give a damn. All the time his uncle and aunt kept calling him, ‘Son, son.’ He was responding more to them than to his parents, so I told the uncle and aunt, ‘I will arrest you.’ One of my officers slapped the uncle, and Manager flinched. He said, ‘Please don’t do anything to my uncle and aunt. They have adopted me since birth.’ I said okay, and he gave me the whole thing.”
The bombmakers had been filling the trunks of cars in Memon’s garages with the black soap. Three ships had left Dubai early in 1993. At Karachi they were loaded with RDX and weapons. The hand grenades bore the marking
ARGES
, an Austrian company that had licensed a Pakistani firm to make the grenades. One of the ships came to Mhasla and two went farther south in Gujarat. Customs officials along the coast were bribed to look the other way. Different groups smuggled the weapons in trucks into Bombay. Some groups were trained to connect the detonators and set the electronic timers, which bore different colors, depending on the duration: red for fifteen minutes, yellow for an hour, and green for two hours. Other squads of Muslim boys were armed with AK-56s and ready to defend Muslims in case communal riots broke out.
Tiger Memon had left on the morning of the twelfth. He embraced his men and said, “You are all soldiers. Leave the city. There will be riots.” The bombs had been set off by Muslim gangsters in the hope that the city would explode again. It had done so just a month earlier, in riots aimed at the Muslims that left thousands dead and wounded, for the first time in the city’s history. The blasts were in revenge, and as an incitement to more riots. The whole operation had been planned at a meeting in Dubai organized by gang lord Dawood Ibrahim. All the participants had taken an oath of secrecy on the Koran.
A total of 168 people were arrested for the Bombay blasts. Of these, Ajay or his deputies were responsible for 160, including the most celebrated arrest, that of the actor Sanjay Dutt. “I interrogated each and every one of these hundred-sixty-odd guys. I know the connections between these people.” For this work, Ajay received the Police Medal for Meritorious Service from the President of India. He got it out of turn. The medal is normally awarded to an officer with at least fifteen years’ service; Ajay had only thirteen.