Byculla to Bangkok

  At the time, I was barely two years into the profession and was accompanied by my wife Velly Thevar, by then an established crime reporter. We took the overnight train from Mumbai to Aurangabad for the meeting, which had been set up by Gawli’s aide-de-camp, Santosh.

  The trigger for the interview was my amazing boss, Sai Suresh Sivaswamy, at the time the editor of the newly launched Express Newsline. The idea of a city pull-out edition along with the mother brand was just catching up. Bombay Times, unlike its tame avatar now, was posing a challenge to readers of its main newspaper, the Times of India, and in response, both the Asian Age and the Indian Express had launched their own city editions: The Mumbai Age and Newsline respectively.

  Sai and I hit it off instantly. Unlike other editors, he did not bark out instructions but threw out challenges instead. ‘Dum hai toh jaa Gawli ka interview jail me karke dikha (If you have the courage, go and get an interview with Gawli in jail)’, he said to me. And so I set off brazenly for Aurangabad, unsure whether I would bag the interview in the first place and wondering how the hell I was to circumvent jail regulations.

  I first landed at Dagdi Chawl to get a contact from the gang, and finally got introduced to Santosh. I was so naïve that when he asked, ‘Daddy ko milna hai,’ I actually thought he was asking whether I wanted to meet his father instead of Gawli. Santosh laughed and clarified: ‘Mere daddy ka interview lene upar jaana padega!’

  The meeting was set up. At the Harsul compound, we did not flaunt our press cards. Velly was essentially a reporter and I must say I have not seen a journalist quite like her. While I was waiting for my contact to appear and take me inside the jail for the interview, she was already walking around and listening to the stories of the people sitting on their haunches inside the compound.

  She later told me, with much regret, that she had witnessed an amazing sight and, for the first time in her life, felt she had failed as a journalist. She had met an old man waiting with impatient eyes and an obvious eagerness for somebody. When she checked with the cops, they told her that the man had just come out of jail after spending almost a lifetime there. Velly tried to talk to him, but he was too preoccupied. Finally, after what seemed like hours, a frail old lady in a nauvari (nine-yard) sari wrapped in the traditional Maharashtrian style stepped out from the women’s section of the prison. The man ran to her and they hugged and cried like young lovers.

  Velly was moved but did not feel like disturbing their reunion. Also, she was too worried about what I was up to inside the jail to chase the couple for a story.

  Velly’s concern was not misplaced. Unlike her, I was a rookie. I was only twenty-seven years old and had never seen the inside of a jail except in Hindi movies. Harsul was an awe-inspiring fortress, swarming with security personnel, and I was very anxious about the interview.

  While everybody else was frisked, my contact and I seemed to have escaped the guards’ attention. After passing unchecked through several big halls and labyrinthine corridors, we were finally led into a large room. It was sparsely furnished, with only two chairs and a bench. The police officer who had led me and my contact into the room said, ‘Please wait here. Daddy will come in a while.’ I was flabbergasted. Why was a khaki-clad officer referring to Arun Gawli as Daddy?

  We waited for Gawli to appear. After a few minutes, we heard the clanging of a big iron gate and light footsteps like those of a woman or a child. We looked up and saw a thin, puny man, less than 5 feet tall, frail but neatly dressed in a starched white kurta and pyjamas, a Nehruvian cap completing his attire. The man could pass for one of Mumbai’s iconic dabbawallahs, except for his slight frame. He was clean-shaven, with a neatly trimmed Kamal Haasan-style moustache and well-oiled hair, and flanked by two cops who seemed to be melting in awe of him. He did not look like a prisoner. Gawli appeared well-dressed, comfortable and perfectly at home.

  The mediator announced in a reverential tone, ‘Daddy aa gaye.’ Daddy has arrived.

  I had to conceal my shock. I had seen photographs of the man, but nothing had prepared me for this. After having been fed a diet of Hindi film villains with their larger-than-life personas – booming voice and broad shoulders – this was an anticlimax. But his eyes were interesting. There was guile and many secrets in them: eyes that had lived life and thirsted for more.

  ‘Namaskar,’ I said, folding my hands.

  Arun Gawli folded his hands in the same gesture.

  ‘Haan bol, kya chahiye.’ (Tell me what you want.) The way he spat out the words, it was like he was an emperor doling out largesse and I, a humble servant begging for an audience. I had to pinch myself to believe that I was standing before a TADA accused in a high-security prison.

  ‘I want an interview with you, maybe 15–20 minutes of your time,’ I replied.

  The don seated himself in a chair and offered me tea and snacks. I refused, adding for good measure, ‘I don’t want anything from your money.’ I felt brave after saying this but many summers later, I realized I could not show my antipathy to gangsters so blatantly. Now, when I am offered something, I tell them I have just had lunch or do not consume tea/soft drinks, etc., or I tell them I am unwell. I remember, as recently as three years ago, when my wife and I had gone to interview the sister of one of the most wanted men in India at her residence – my wife had come along because the journalist in her could not resist an interview with a female don – I refused to get up to greet her, and was chastised by my wife.

  Any other man would have walked out of the interview after my self-righteous outburst, but not Gawli. His eyebrows arched, but he did not say anything.

  The interview began and I found myself in my element, refusing to play ball and asking him all kinds of uncomfortable questions. We spoke about his rivals: Dawood Ibrahim and those who were baying for his blood, including Bal Thackeray, the Mumbai police, etc.

  Twice, during the course of the interview, we were interrupted by a cop asking him to return to his barracks as the IG of prisons was about to go on his rounds. Both times Gawli screamed at him, shooing him away.

  That was the first time I experienced the impotence of khaki. First impressions rarely die; to date, few policemen – a handful, really – have managed to make an impression and rise above my general prejudice about them.

  After the interview, Gawli warned me, ‘Sambhaal ke likhna, be careful you don’t write about the jail meeting.’ It was more than a warning – a veiled threat, actually. But I was a reporter and reckless.

  I returned and wrote the whole story in detail. Newsline ran the interview as an eight-column flyer across the page. ‘“I will join politics to save myself from a fake police encounter,” says Gawli from jail’, was the headline of my story. It created a big hue and cry. (Incidentally, Gawli went on to keep his promise and became a politician. The first time, he got a few thousand votes, but my cop friend, the late Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS) chief Hemant Karkare warned me that it would take only a couple of elections more for Gawli to become an MLA. Karkare, one of the best policemen the force has seen, was so right.)

  Ranjit Singh Sharma, then joint commissioner of police, crime, summoned me to the crime branch office and asked me to disclose how I had managed to get inside the prison and do the story. I refused to spill the beans. Sharma politely mentioned that he could issue summons against me under Section 60 of the Indian Evidence Act, 1872. I said, ‘Sir, you can arrest me if you want. I can sit behind bars for a few months, but I cannot disclose how I got the interview.’

  Mr Sharma was one of the finest crime branch officers the city had. When he realized that I was adamant and that a clash between the media and the police could get out of hand, he became concerned about me and warned me to be careful of the Gawli gang as they could make my life hell.

  Later, when Gawli got bail and I met him with some foreign journalists at his fortress at Dagdi Chawl, he looked at me accusingly. ‘Tumne mera boochch laga diya (you fucked me royally)’, he said. Soon after my story was published, several
jail officials got transferred and that had made his life miserable, he said.

  I was lucky to be spared. Two journalists, one from the Times of India – my friend, Mateen Hafeez – and Anandita Ramaswamy of the Asian Age, had got roughed up by Arun Gawli and gang. Anandita had written a story about how Gawli’s political party was going broke and not paying salaries to party workers. And then she did something reporters should avoid doing – after the story was published, she landed up at the infamous Dagdi Chawl for first-hand verification. The party workers roughed her up. They assaulted her physically, causing injuries and bruises.

  Once upon a time, Dagdi Chawl was impregnable. It still is, to some extent. Gawli’s top-floor terrace house in a six-storey building is so big that you could play badminton there. His drawing room is lined with various pictures and idols of a pantheon of Hindu deities and looks like the sanctum sanctorum of a temple.

  Gawli’s gang has a larger base than other gangs, with a lot of members in and around Mumbai and Pune. In Wadgaon Pir, where his in-laws live, he is revered like a saint. His other Maharashtrian peers have not been so lucky. Amar Naik is dead, Suresh Manchekar is dead, Sunil Sawant is dead, Chhota Rajan is absconding, Ashwin Naik is in a wheelchair, Anil Parab is in prison.

  This is the story of the Maharashtrian mobsters who, in the words of Sena supremo Bal Thackeray were ‘amchi muley’ (our boys): sons of the soil, who greatly influenced Maharashtra’s politics and drove the economy of the city of Mumbai.

  TWO

  Ghatis versus Bhaiyyas

  A few decades before the Shiv Sena raised the bogey of ‘Bhaiyya bhagao Mumbai bachao’ (drive out the north Indians and save Mumbai), Arun Gawli had embarked on a similar mission, its forerunner.

  Except for the Pathans, who never allowed a non-Muslim into their crime syndicates, the Mumbai mafia was a melting pot of cultures: a miniature Mumbai. When Gawli began establishing his supremacy in the Byculla region, he was first challenged by a local gang made up of a majority of north Indians – referred to by some as bhaiyyas – and so he became the first gangster to target the north Indian ‘bhaiyya’ gangsters. Bhaiyya means elder brother, but in Mumbai the Maharashtrians throw the word around as a pejorative to denote anybody who hails from the north of the Godavari.

  In fact, the Mumbai mafia has never been racist or communal like the exclusivist American syndicates: in the US, you have the black mafia, Chinese mafia, Russian mafia, Pakistani mafia, Korean mafia, Italian mafia and so on.

  Bombay has always been an amalgamation, a confluence of cultures, a cosmopolitan city that was under the control of some foreign ruler or the other since the fourteenth century, all of whom left their imprint on the seven islands. First, it was the Muslim rulers who annexed the islands way back in 1348 and refused to give them to the Mughal emperor Humayun. Sultan Bahadur Shah of the Gujarat Sultanate thought they were better off with the Portuguese, who ruled from 1534 to 1661. They married local women and established churches led by Portuguese Fransiscans and Jesuits. They called the place ‘Bombaim’.

  The British, who had always had their eye on Bombaim, got it as part of the dowry in 1661 when King Charles II of England married Catherine of Braganza, the daughter of King John IV of Portugal. The king gave Bombaim to the East India Company, who brought in artisans and traders to settle the new town. As early as 1661, the Parsis also migrated to Mumbai; in 1673, the British handed over a piece of land at Malabar Hill to them for the Tower of Silence.

  After the swamps were filled by the 1800s and all the seven islands were linked to become one large island in 1845, more people came to the city and made it their own, thus contributing to its growth.

  The local trains, the first of their kind, brought even more migrants into the city. Initially, it was the mills that attracted the hordes, but post independence, pharmaceutical and engineering companies brought more workers into its fold. Technically the Kolis, who were fisherfolk, were the original inhabitants, but most Marathi-speaking people, even if they come from different parts of Maharashtra, consider non-Maharashtrian Mumbaikars to be the outsiders. This view also stems from the consistently right-wing policies of the Shiv Sena, which believes that the sons of the soil (Maharashtrians from all over Maharashtra who speak Marathi) deserve more.

  Incidentally, all Muslim gangs in the early years had north Indian bhaiyyas in their ranks. Different communities jostled for space in all spheres of life in cosmopolitan Bombay and this applied to the mafia too. North Indian bhaiyyas, predominantly from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, were part of the Kanpuri, Jaunpuri, Rampuri and Illahabadi gangs. These gangs called the shots at Sankli Street and Madanpura in Byculla, which were essentially Muslim pockets. But they also had their fair share of Hindus, and conflicts were few and far between, except when women or wealth were involved.

  The conflict between Arun Gawli, the Marathi-speaking gangster of the BRA gang (its name was taken from the initials of its three leading members, Babu Reshim, Rama Naik and Arun Gawli) and the north Indian bhaiyyas was not based on regional prejudices. It all began with territorial one-upmanship. The BRA gang was first challenged by Mohan Sarmalkar’s gang in Byculla, known as the S-bridge gang – after the serpentine S-shaped bridge that connects Byculla East to Byculla West – and later rechristened as the Bhaiyya gang. Sarmalkar had considerable clout in Byculla West. He dismissed the BRA gang as inconsequential and refused to accept their supremacy. If the BRA gang had its headquarters at Dagdi Chawl and supporters in Peon Chawl, Laxmi Chawl and Cement Chawl, Sarmalkar had his headquarters at S-bridge.

  Sarmalkar did not like the title ‘S-bridge gang’ because it limited his clout and jurisdiction to one location. He wanted a larger canvas and sought to call his bunch of thugs the Byculla gang. But Gawli was opposed to this.

  Though Sarmalkar was a Maharashtrian and the leader of the Byculla gang, many of his top commanders were north Indians. Parasnath Pandey (the matka don of Byculla), Kundan Dubey and Raj Dubey were all north Indians. Sarmalkar also owed allegiance to Virar’s Jayendra Singh Thakur, known as Bhai Thakur, who was a north Indian.

  Gawli’s master stroke was to quietly plant the seeds of mistrust among the Maharashtrian populace. He dubbed the Byculla gang the Bhaiyya gang and quickly usurped their title, rechristening his own gang the ‘Byculla company’. Once he had prejudiced the local boys against the S-bridge gang, new recruits decided to join the BRA gang and scrupulously avoided the S-bridge gang.

  Sarmalkar was aghast. He started proclaiming that Gawli was an Ahir and that he was from Madhya Pradesh, a neighbouring state, and as such, was not a local. The Gawlis are cattle-grazers and milkmen (gwalas) and are spread across Maharashtra’s border with Madhya Pradesh and throughout the state. Sarmalkar, who was a hard-core criminal and boasted gang members like the Pandeys and the Dubeys, tried to claim that Gawli was a mill worker and did not know the ABC of crime.

  Arun Gawli was the son of Gulab Puran Gawli and Laxmibai. Gulab came from Ahmednagar, Maharashtra, while Laxmibai hailed from Khandwa, Madhya Pradesh. They had six children, of whom four were boys. Gulab Gawli had worked at Simplex Mill and had high hopes for his children. He was eager that his children acquire a good education. Arun managed to complete matriculation, which was a big deal in the late sixties and early seventies, but his father left his mill job around this time. The reasons are not known. His mother, too, had worked for over ten years at the cotton mills. In fact, most of the Gawli clan was employed as mill workers or government servants. Arun’s sister Ashalata Gawli was married to Mohan Gangaram Bania alias Ahir, who was employed as a loader with Air India. Another sister, Rekha, was married to Digambar Ahir, who worked in the accounts department of the Central Railway. Vijay Ahir, a relative, worked at Khatau Mills before he became a corporator. One of Arun Gawli’s brothers, Pradeep, who lived with his family at Dagdi Chawl, also worked at Khatau Mills, as did Sachin Ahir, son of Gawli’s sister Ashalata. Gawli’s connection with Khatau Mills ran deep and this later became the cause of a long a
nd violent gangland feud.

  After his father left his job, Arun took up a series of jobs with various companies. He joined Shakti Mills in Mahalaxmi after matriculation and later Godrej Boyce in Vikhroli. In 1977, he joined Crompton Greaves in Kanjurmarg.

  It was at Crompton Greaves that Gawli first shook hands with the burly, well-built Sadashiv Pawle, later known as Sada Pawle or Sada Mama. In the company of Sada, Arun took to anti-social activities.

  It was also here that Rama Naik and Arun Gawli met; they had earlier studied at the same municipal school in Byculla. Though Arun was Rama’s senior, he looked up to him. Rama Naik lived in Lalvitachi Chawl at Cross Gully in Byculla. His penchant for getting into trouble meant he had to leave school before completing matriculation. He dropped out after Class 6 and took with him other troubled and trouble-making youths like Ashok Chaudhary alias Chhota Babu, Bablya Sawant and Vilas Choughule. His exit did not affect his friendship with Arun Gawli. Along with the other boys, they played kabaddi at the local Om Club.

  At the time, Byculla was just making its mark as the Palermo of independent India. The Jaunpuri, Kanpuri and Illahabadi gangs were all big names in the area. Later, gangs headed by Nanhe Khan and Waheb Pehelwan along with the Johnny Brothers, who became active in the Clare Road area (which was essentially a Christian locality and ruled by the Johnny brothers), became prominent in Byculla.

  With its history of gangs for more than fifty years, Byculla was the hunting ground of the Mumbai mafiosi. It was in Byculla that Arun Gawli and Rama Naik entered the lanes of the underworld. Once in, no one ever got out.

  The internecine warfare between the S-bridge gang and the BRA gang escalated. Kundan Dubey was a known acolyte of Parasnath Pandey, and they had both served in the ranks of Sarmalkar’s gang. Ironically, Kundan’s sister Pushpa had fallen in love with Arvind, the elder brother of gangster Rama Naik, who was with the rival BRA gang. As Bollywod has shown us, such romances cannot survive without bloodshed. In 1976, Kundan got into a quarrel with Arvind on the streets and slapped him. Rama Naik’s younger brother, Umakant, could not stand by and watch his brother’s humiliation. He stepped in and soon a fist fight broke out between Kundan and Umakant. Kundan stabbed Umakant, who later succumbed to his injuries. Kundan was arrested by the Agripada police and jailed for a while before eventually being released on bail.