Overlords Of The Underworld Jyotirmoy murder: Motorcycle murders prove a police-criminal-politician nexus rules Mumbai |
A fortnight before motorcycle-borne assailants gunned down Jyotirmoy Dey near his home in Powai, Mumbai, the 56-year-old crime reporter met Maharashtra Home Minister, R.R. Patil. He submitted a detailed report prepared by the Anti-Corruption Bureau (ACB) which chronicled the nexus between a senior Mumbai police officer, Assistant Commissioner of Police (ACP) Anil Mahabole, and Dawood Ibrahim's powerful sister, Haseena Parkar. The report was four years old but still relevant. In May, Mahabole had threatened Dey's colleague at Mid-Day, Tarakant Dwivedi aka Akela. ACP Anil Mahabole is accused of threatening Dey Akela was arrested under the Official Secrets Act, 1923, for exposing how assault rifles belonging to the Government Railway Police (GRP), acquired post 26/11, were placed in a damp room and unlikely to function in an emergency. Akela paid the price for exposing police ineptitude by spending five days in GRP custody and was released only after the intervention of the state government. Dey paid for the truth by losing his life. Mumbai police reacted to the murder with suspicious speed, by immediately transferring Mahabole, though Maharashtra Chief Minister Prithviraj Chavan declared that he had not sanctioned it. Dey's murder and Mahabole's rise are mirror images of Mumbai's netherworld, revealing a toxic system where honesty counts for little and greed is considered fair game. In the Mumbai of 2011, those who speak honestly get shot, those who try to suppress facts, survive. Those who are absconders from justice, like Dawood aide Chhota Shakeel, appear on national TV, denying their role in Dey's murder. Senior Mumbai policemen say the Government knows Chhota Shakeel and Dawood are in Karachi, Pakistan, but are neither willing nor able to bring them back. Patil promised Dey he would take action on the 2007 report which details the network between the police, underworld and builders in the country's financial capital. In January this year, the police-underworld nexus was evident from a conversation recorded by the police between Chhota Shakeel and a deputy commissioner of police (DCP), who was heard pleading a builder's case against extortion. The same officer is believed to have spoken to former cricketer Javed Miandad, whose son is married to Dawood's daughter. The ACB report, and indeed Dey, stand vindicated. With Maharashtra seen as a cash cow for political funding and Mumbai as its priciest specimen, it is unlikely that Patil or any other politician will disrupt Mumbai's well-oiled subterranean machine. It is a vast empire that spans real estate, parts of Bollywood, politicians, hawala, oil adulteration, smuggling, the share market, cricket betting and protection money. Its combined annual turnover is estimated at between Rs 100,000 and 150,000 crore, enough to run the city's Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation for five years |
PROTECTORS AS PREDATORS
Police shield the guilty, innocents are left defenceless
If any proof was needed, it was in two police constables posted at the home of Iqbal Kaskar, Dawood's brother, at Pakhmodia street in the crowded Bhendi Bazaar area in May this year. This was immediately after Kaskar's driver, Arif Sayed, was shot and killed by two bike-borne assailants. But even that, the state of Maharashtra protecting the key aide of India's Most Wanted did not raise eyebrows in the city of the lawless. A city where dreaded criminals like Ajmal Kasab are safe, protected by a police force which has been publicly shamed on several occasions.
In the past decade, half a dozen high-profile Mumbai police officials have been under their scanner for various offenses, ranging from an alleged connection with fake stamp paper scam kingpin Abdul Karim Telgi, to links with offshore underworld dons like Chhota Shakeel and Chhota Rajan. "There is a link between police and the underworld, I have been saying this for long," says Y.C. Pawar, former joint commissioner of police. "Today, Dawood has become so powerful that you cannot even touch him, forget bringing him back," he says.
Nowhere is this complicity between police and underworld more evident than in land deals. Officers were used by the Mumbai police to shoot gangsters in sticky 'encounters' a decade ago after a wave of underworld extortion threats against builders and film people. The squads have since been disbanded after they fell into disrepute.
In 2009, one of the police's encounter specialists, Ravindranath Angre, was arrested and suspended for allegedly firing at a builder in a case of extortion in Thane. He was recently acquitted in the case. In the past three years, two other high-profile 'encounter specialists', Senior Inspector Pradeep Sharma and inspector Aslam Momin, were summarily dismissed from the force for links with the underworld. Sub-Inspector Daya Nayak, the subject of an artfully filmed Ab Tak Chhappan, was suspended for alleged disproportionate assets. Disturbing allegations emerged that some of these policemen may have been working on behalf of underworld gangs to gun down rival gangsters. But again, no specific investigation was conducted into these links.
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