On 29 August, she was summoned to identify the badly mutilated body of her brother. The autopsy revealed that not only Javed had been riddled with bullets fired at close range, but he was also run over by a vehicle, as his ribs were crushed under the impact of a car’s wheels. Discoveries like this had put the police back in a difficult spot.
Sharma and Prasad tried desperately to explain to the media and human rights watchers that they had actually killed a criminal and not an innocent peanut vendor, but the worse was yet to come.
Every phone call that Sharma answered and every visitor he met exposed the Crime Branch chief to major embarrassment. The Crime Branch had no defense when questioned by the media about the total failure of intelligence. This Fawda encounter had become a massive fiasco for them.Sharma decided to launch an offensive. Three days after the encounter, while the media was still sharpening their swords, Sharma decided to unmask the dirty underbelly of the film industry, which had allowed for these eruptions of violence.
Sharma had so far managed to piece together various conspiracies of revenge and execution: the scattered pieces of the puzzle that made up a complicated investigation. Abu Salem had organised a musical extravaganza for famous Bollywood composers Nadeem-Shravan in Dubai which was to be attended by top film stars like Shah Rukh Khan, Salman Khan, Jackie Shroff, and Aditya Pancholi. Salem had hosted the party and was seen hobnobbing with prominent business rivals of Gulshan Kumar, which led to the suspicion that the conspiracy to kill Gulshan Kumar was hatched at this party.
That such big names in the industry had any association with Salem had rattled Mumbai’s top cops. Should they initiate action against them and book them for their nexus with the underworld or make them witnesses and strengthen their case? Also, unlike the police top brass in developed countries, the Indian police bosses have to always reckon with a major factor whether the suspect is related to some top politician, film star, or a business baron.
Touching any film star without a watertight case could result in a severe backlash, which might result in these stars using their contacts in Delhi and putting pressure on the Mantralaya mandarins. In a set-up where the chief minister and home minister do not see eye-to-eye, the proverbial Damocles’ sword always hung over the top cop’s head.
The most recent example had been made of Deputy Commissioner of Police, Rakesh Maria. Maria had had a phenomenally successful stint at the Crime Branch when he had cracked the Mumbai serial blasts of 1993. But when his men visited the house of Shiv Sena supremo Bal Thackeray’s estranged son Jaidev on a tip-off that he had some animals of endangered species in his private zoo at Kalina, Maria was unceremoniously shunted out of his office within days of the episode.
Suave and politically smart as he was, Sharma decided to think one step ahead of potential opponents. He would first seek the consent of his political masters in Mantralaya and New Delhi. The idea was that the stars would be questioned, even grilled, but that even if they came clean, they would not be able to pull strings and make life miserable for the harangued cops. What they were asking for was immunity of a kind.
Sharma began working on his campaign, meticulously laying it out. The aim was to slowly provide nuggets of information to whet the curiosity of the powers that be in Delhi while keeping his political bosses in Mumbai appraised of his every move and initiative during the investigation.
Sharma knew very well that this was a huge risk but his stint in Delhi and interactions with wily national-level politicians had honed his skills in taking calculated risks. Sharma took the consent of his political masters in Mantralaya and called for a mega press conference. Each and every member of the press fraternity was called, even if he represented a shady street-side rag.
The orderlies were instructed to call, send pager messages, or even personally inform everyone who had occasion to call the main police control room to be present. The Commissioner of Police, Ronald Mendonca, would be holding a huge press conference after all.
Rarely has the police commissioner’s chamber become so crowded that even policemen find it difficult to move around the room. Normally press conferences are a cacophonous event and crime reporters are at their meanest while posing uncomfortable questions. But to everyone’s chagrin, Sharma was smiling. The man even appeared to have slept well the previous night. When Sharma was ready, he raised his hand to silence the media. Quiet fell over the room; only the whirring of conditioners going at full blast was audible.
Sharma began. ‘During the course of our investigation, we have come across some startling background information on the Gulshan Kumar murder case. The famous music director, Nadeem Saifi, gave the supari for Gulshan’s killing. The plot was hatched at the Empire Hotel, owned by druglord Vicky Goswami, in June this year. It happened in the presence of several Bollywood personalities.’
Even after Sharma stopped talking, there was a full 30-second silence in the room; some of the reporters were busy taking notes while the others looked at Sharma, mouths agape.
Nadeem Saifi of Nadeem-Shravan fame, the flamboyant music director, was involved in the barbaric killing of fellow Bollywood member Gulshan Kumar! Unbelievable. There was a squeal of disbelief. Everyone began to shout questions at the same time.
Sharma answered each and every question patiently and calmly. When asked why they had not arrested Nadeem, he said that the man was abroad as his wife had suffered a miscarriage. But they were in touch with him and he had promised to return the following week.
When asked what about the top film personalities who were present when the conspiracy to kill Gulshan Kumar was hatched, Sharma made it clear that all the stars were to be summoned soon. The press conference made headlines across the globe. It became a hot topic of discussion on all fronts; corridors of power and courtrooms began debating the whole issue. The killing and conspiracy exposed India’s film industry and its murky world and laid the operations of the mafia bare, to some extent.
Everyone wanted to get to the root of the conspiracy. No one wanted to seem like they were taking sides with the tainted lot, and this did not spare the best actors in the country either. Sharma was given carte blanche, with a rider to ‘be discreet and not let the shit hit the fan’.
Thus began the biggest star parade of the world in the high security precincts of the Mumbai police headquarters. No police headquarters in any city has ever witnessed the kind of spectacle Mumbai recorded in its annals of crime history.
The first one to be summoned to the Crime Branch was Shah Rukh Khan. Dressed in a black jacket and denims, he tried hard not to look nervous and tense. Khan was ushered into the small cabin of Assistant Commissioner of Police (ACP), L.R. Rao. For the huge and bulky ACP it was his hour of glory: sitting across King Khan and quizzing him over his indiscreet presence at the wrong party.
Rao was deferential with Khan and questioned him for over an hour as he recorded his statement formally. Shah Rukh, in his two-page statement, admitted that he had gone to Dubai for a Bollywood show organised by Dubai locals, but that he did not know the organisers personally and had no inkling that Salem and Anees Ibrahim were actually managing the whole show from behind the scenes. When he heard of their involvement, he had made an excuse, saying he had slipped and injured his leg, rendering him unable to attend the Nadeem-Shravan party.
Shah Rukh was allowed to leave, but not before he was mobbed by the waiting hordes of media men and camerapersons. Shah Rukh, who was smoking constantly, was sweating when he stepped out of ACP Rao’s cabin. When some reporters accosted him and asked him questions, he got livid and scolded them, in an unlikely display. ‘Can you please at least let me light my cigarette before hounding me with your questions?’ he snapped at me when I asked him. The superstar was visibly trembling though it is not clear whether this was due to rage or nervousness. Somehow he managed to get into his car and vanish from the scene.
Jackie Shroff and Aditya
Pancholi were next to be summoned to the Crime Branch and they had to pass through a similar routine. Unlike Shah Rukh, at least Shroff tried to keep it amiable with the media men and he did not get into an altercation with them.
Salman Khan, who had heard of the media circus, outsmarted the reporters and requested the cops to talk to him in a smaller office to which the media did not have access. He was called to the Bandra unit office where he spent a couple of hours with Crime Branch investigators. But he was let go after making his statement to the cops, and nothing much came of it any more.
Sharma had successfully managed to ward off the raging storm. But this was just a temporary reprieve. Sharma had not forgotten Fawda, and neither had his detractors.
15
Clandestine Coups
The Mumbai police is the most unique law enforcement agency in the world. One of its most fascinating methods of dealing with an escalating crime situation is the ‘encounter’. The media dubs police encounters as ‘extra-judicial killings’ where criminals are purportedly killed in what is reported as encounters.
The Mumbai police has scripted hundreds of encounters since 1982, when Julio Ribeiro was at its helm. The narrative of a police encounter rarely has any variation. The police vaarta patra or a press communiqué generically reads: ‘A police team had gone to arrest criminal X. When the cops asked him to surrender, he opened fire at the police. When the cops fired back in self-defense, X was fatally injured and was rushed to the hospital, where he succumbed to his injuries’.
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.