Authors: Suketu Mehta
Unlike the riot cases—where there was no effort by the Sena government to prosecute the murderers from their own party named in the Sri-krishna Commission Report—the state government went after the (mostly Muslim) bomb-blast plotters with a vengeance. In the end, charge sheets were drawn up against 189 people; 44 were absconding. Ajay’s team seized 2,074 kilograms—almost two and a half tons—of RDX, 980 kilograms—over a ton—of gelatine, 63 AK-56 assault rifles, 10 9mm Tokarev pistols, 13 9mm magazines, 1,100 electric detonators, 230 AK-56 magazines, 38,917 AK-56 rounds, and 482 Arges hand grenades. These were not weapons for an underworld skirmish. These were armaments for civil war.
But civil war didn’t happen this time; the Hindus’ hatred of the Muslims had been spent in the riots four months ago. The city recovered quickly after the blasts. The Stock Exchange, which had been bombed, reopened two days later, using the old manual trading because the computers had been destroyed, and its index actually gained 10 percent in the next two days. Just to show them.
I
SHAQ
,
A YOUNG
M
USLIM ENTREPRENEUR
to whom Girish the computer programmer introduced me, knew about the bomb blasts before they happened. One evening outside the Maratha Mandir cinema, Ishaq casually comes out with it. He’s talking of his days running with the gangs in the Madanpura district, now called mini-Pakistan. The local bhai, Tajul, would give him and his friends 15,000 rupees a day without much trouble. Ishaq never spent it; he considered it haraam—profane. But he did the work.
“What kind of work?”
“Picking someone up. Giving a couple of slaps to someone. I used to go around with a Mauser in my belt. During the bomb blasts I had six AK-56s. Tajul came to me the night before the blasts and told me to hide the guns, hand grenades, and RDX. Thirty-six kilos [eighty pounds] of RDX. It was in a green box with a white skull on it. There was a whole gunnysack full of grenades, this big”—he cups his hand so—“with pins. Tajul gave me one half of a ten-rupee note. I buried the stuff in some loose earth and threw chili water on it and water mixed with mint over it, so that the dogs couldn’t sniff the RDX if they came. My father abused me the whole night. He said, ‘Do you know what will happen if they find out?’ The next day the men came—big men with crew cuts. They had the second
half of the ten-rupee note. I checked the number and gave them the stuff. Tajul had told me two hours before the blasts: ‘Tell your family not to move out of Madanpura today, on any account.’ So we stayed in. And then we heard a huge explosion and saw smoke coming out of the Stock Exchange building. We went to J.J. Hospital. There were stacks of corpses, twenty to twenty-five bodies on each stack.”
In comprehending what the bombs he helped store did, Ishaq’s mind starts playing tricks, as he thinks of the scene at the hospital. “There must have been ten thousand corpses at least.”
Neither Tajul nor Ishaq was caught, even though Tajul had a very big part in the conspiracy. Ishaq still has some AK-56 bullets; he stole them from the shipment to keep as souvenirs. But he didn’t want to keep the assault rifles. He touches his earlobes, shuddering at the memory. “I gave them back in three days.”
T
HE BOMB BLASTS CHANGED
B
OMBAY.
Until then, terrorism usually meant Sikh terrorism, linked to the troubles in Punjab. The Bombay underworld was completely secular until then. After the blasts, it became communalized, says Ajay. “There is a challenge before the police today. Hindu leaders who led rampaging mobs during the riots are targeted by Muslim gangs; Hindu gangs have targeted the bomb blasts’ accused out on bail.” Although there are Hindus in Dawood’s gang and Muslims in the Rajan Company, “they are of local compulsions,” he says, private needs. One crucial difference between the Muslim and the Hindu gangs explains why the former are more powerful. “The Dawood group probably doesn’t have to pay for weapons; Chotta Rajan does.” The Muslim gangs operate with arms provided by Pakistan. The normal strategy of the ISI, the Pakistani intelligence service, was to smuggle sleepers into Bombay and let them stay for years at a stretch, working unobtrusively as mechanics or factory workers, and then activating them as necessary, to plant a bomb or kill a politician. But during the blasts, the Pakistanis, working through the newly aggrieved Muslim underworld, whose families had suffered during the riots, didn’t have to go through the lengthy gestation period. In addition to men, the gangs also provided the ISI with their smuggling networks and safe houses.
After the blasts, Ajay was asked to give presentations to the U.S.
ambassador and to Interpol on the Pakistani involvement in the bombings. Ajay had interrogated the bombers and seen passports, four of them, with exit stamps from Bombay and Dubai and a missing period in the dates of fifteen days. This was the time, they told Ajay, when they were taken to Islamabad and then driven north to the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. There they stayed in camps and underwent a rigorous program of anti-Indian indoctrination; an incendiary tape of the riots in Surat after the Babri Masjid fell was shown, and the boys were told, “This is what is happening to our sisters and mothers in India.” The training was along military lines; they were taught the use of sophisticated arms and explosive devices. Then they were sent back to extract vengeance.
In 1994, Chotta Rajan made his break with his Muslim boss, Dawood—he fled Dubai for Kuala Lumpur, taking a chunk of the gang’s top Hindus away with him. He announced publicly that he did so because he could not work with a traitor to the nation, and he swore to eliminate the bombers himself. Dawood and Shakeel sent out a group of men to kill Rajan, and Rajan sent hit squads to Karachi, where the D-Company was now headquartered, to kill Dawood. On the ground in Bombay, meanwhile, hundreds of people started dying every year in police shootouts, gunfights between rival gangs, and extortion-related killings.
The break, according to Dawood, had nothing to do with the blasts; it was a personal falling out over a commissioned killing, a vendetta between him and Rajan that piled up bodies in Bombay, Dubai, Kathmandu, and Bangkok; an international Ping-Pong game of murder. The boys on the ground kill each other over control of the numerous lucrative rackets in Bombay, and they kill each other because their dons want to kill each other. Each member of the other gang killed, no matter how minor, is a body blow scored by one don on the person of the other. The D-Company has about eight hundred shooters, and the Nana Company between four and five hundred.
Dawood and his gang moved from Dubai to Karachi in the mid-nineties because the ruling Maktoum family was under pressure from the Indian government to extradite him. The gang’s activities are run by Chotta Shakeel from Pakistan. Dawood’s hand is now seen in every bad thing that happens in India, from bombs to murders to corruption; and his wealth is depicted in fantastic terms. “He is probably richer than Bill Gates and the Sultan of Brunei,” one journalistic profile begins. The same profile
features Dawood himself complaining, “The government of India wants to blame me for every calamity that has befallen them, even to the extent of the death of a dog. Thank God I was not around in 1947; otherwise they would have accused me of having partitioned India.”
Bollywood—the Bombay film industry—Partition, and the gangwar share a common theme, a common formula: the breakup of the family. The families of the exiled dons are still in Bombay, forever sundered from them. Dawood’s sister and other family members still live in Bombay, unmolested. “The police know not to bother Dawood’s home people. You can kill his men—that is a give-and-take barter system,” one of his lieutenants tells me. “But if they bother his home people he will bother them.” The enforced separation leads to maudlin moments, filmi moments. In a newspaper interview, Rajan says, “Oh, I miss my kids enormously. But I am constantly on the phone with them. Sometimes, it’s through videoconferencing. In fact, when they celebrate their birthday parties, I keep the phone on continuously throughout the entire length of the party. Almost as if I am participating in the fun—joking, singing, and talking to them.”
Chotta Rajan is referred to contemptuously as the “bhangi” by Shakeel and his troops. Rajan sometimes gets drunk and calls up Shakeel: “I’m going to kill you.” “You know where I live, you know my address,” responds Shakeel. “Why don’t you come and get me if you have the guts? Give me your address and I’ll come and finish you.” They ate from the same plate, they were both the favorite sons of Dawood. There is a photo of Dawood at Rajan’s wedding; Rajan’s wife, Sujata, tied a rakhi around Dawood’s wrist and made him her brother. And then Rajan betrayed him. It is a fight between estranged brothers.
There is also a third and smaller gang, led by Arun Gawli, an ex-Dawood man. Gawli floats in and out of jail, holding court from his fortress in Dagdi Chawl. He commands total loyalty in his neighborhood. Parents in the vast apartment complex of Dagdi Chawl instruct their sons, when they come of age, to go work for Gawli. The Gawli gang is also known as the chaddi company, because of their predilection for wearing shorts. They drink country liquor and eat vadapav sandwiches, so their needs are inexpensively fulfilled. But the Dawood people have more refined tastes. “They need to go to beer bars with lights,” a senior Dawood operative explains. The chaddi gang is mostly staffed with laid-off millworkers; they might be selling vegetables at Dadar market when they get a call to
leave their vegetable stall for half an hour and go knock somebody off. The D-Company shooters speak admiringly of the Gawli gang: “They have the most daring shooters. But then Gawli went into politics and fucked his company.” He started thinking of himself as a social servant. In 1997, Gawli floated a political party that, when it became a threat to the Sena, led Thackeray to bring the police down hard on Gawli. When he is in jail, Gawli’s wife, Asha, runs the company, but as a D-Company man explains to me, “Only a man can run a gangwar.”
Organized crime in Bombay is unique. “All our killings, our terrorist activities, are ordered from abroad,” says Ajay, speaking about why the Bombay Police aren’t able to put a definitive stop to the underworld. “We arrest the shooters, the people who did the job. If we are lucky, we are able to get the people who provided the weapons. But we only have the hands and feet here. The brains are outside the country.” The gang lords—who travel under different passports all around the world, from Buenos Aires to Bangkok—move their troops around on the ground through satellite phones. “They really burn up those phone lines.”
The revenues of the Bombay gangs come from protection rackets, extortion, money laundering, gambling, bootlegging, film financing, upscale prostitution, and drugs. Lately, the Bombay gangs have been networking with terrorist outfits from around the subcontinent, such as the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam in Sri Lanka, the United Liberation Front of Assam, and the People’s War Group in Andhra Pradesh. These outfits sell weapons to the gangs, and the gangs act as their financiers. “I have names of Dawood gang members in Guwahati,” in distant Assam, says Ajay.
The revenues from prostitution and bootlegging are used to look after the rank and file, for the gang lawyers’ fees, and for salaries paid to families while their men are in jail, Ajay tells me. The revenues from extortion payments are split. For every 100,000 rupees extorted by the gangs, 60,000 go to the boss abroad and 40,000 are kept in the kitty to be distributed to the troops on the ground. The money goes abroad through the hawala networks, a paperless money-laundering system in which a bag of rupees given to a shopkeeper or diamond merchant in Bombay transforms itself quickly and efficiently into an envelope full of dollars in Dubai.
The gangs are in the process of going “white,” forming companies that run hotels, resorts, and department stores, even banks. The entertainment
industry is particularly loved by gangsters: Chotta Rajan is heavily invested in Bombay’s cable networks. They also deal in overseas rights for films and traveling stage shows and control much of the music industry, because banks generally won’t finance entertainment ventures—the accounting controls are close to nonexistent.
Contrary to the public proclamations of the dons, they are involved, inevitably, in drugs. But they are afraid of the American and British authorities, who go after drug traffickers with a special vengeance, so they never talk about this part of their business and keep it on a relatively low scale. The barbiturate Mandrax is the only drug that is produced extensively in India, where many loss-making pharmaceutical units manufacture the tablets. The price of one tablet of Mandrax, which includes the costs of manufacturing, bribes, and transport to Mauritius—close to the shores of South Africa, which is its eventual destination—is 99 paise, or 2½ cents. The moment it reaches South Africa, that tablet’s value is $2.50, a hundredfold increase. One container holds up to two tons of these tablets. “If you have one container reaching the shores of South Africa, you’re made for life,” observes Ajay.
The boys don’t refer to the organizations they work for as gangs, they call them companies, and there is indeed something corporate about the organization. Within the structure of the gang, there is a minute specialization of labor. There are people responsible for giving out salaries every month, just like in a company. There are others in charge of supplying weapons, and a separate group responsible for storing weapons. There are special cells that are in charge of threatening witnesses. They haunt the courtrooms and make sure that, in cases involving the gang, hostile witnesses are turned to their favor. There are doctors, lawyers, sympathizers, foot soldiers, scouts, and people who run safe houses. Then there is the elaborate support structure for members of the gang in jail. To avoid gang warfare inside the jails, the government has earmarked specific jails for different gangs: The Gawli gang is spread out over the Yerawada and Amravati jails; the Rajan gang is in Arthur Road; and the D-Company is put up in the Byculla, Thane, and Nashik jails. Near the Nashik jail, the D-Company has purchased a number of flats and auto-rickshaws and hired cooks and delivery boys. Chefs in the flats prepare breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and delivery boys hop into the rickshaws and deliver hot meals to the jailbirds. It is a thoroughly planned, thoroughly efficient catering system.
The man lucky enough to be arrested after a hit looks forward to a spell inside, with all his needs taken care of in style. And there is also a strange kind of competitive generosity behind bars. During the Ganesh festival, Arun Gawli sent a box of sweets to the D-Company jailbirds in Thane, one of them had told me. “The D-Company boss said ‘Accha! Is that so?’ and sent a huge plate full of halva back to Gawli.”