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.
AJAY 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 r
esponsible 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.
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.
ISHAQ, A YOUNG MUSLIM 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.”
THE BOMB BLASTS CHANGED BOMBAY. 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.”