Commentary/Varsha Bhosle

Swimming with the sharks

Crime is on my mind: terrorists, contract killings, extortion, explosions, shoot-outs, naaka-bandi, encounter deaths... No, the law and order situation in Bombay is not "Excellent" as Mr Bal Thackeray avers in Saamna. Sure, in any megacity murders happen; people are butchered in personal feuds; the murders of Thakkar, Khatau, Desai and Gulshan Kumar were due to gangland feuds. Even so, bloodshed and turmoil did not "keep happening" in Bombay with the rapidity that we have recently witnessed.

Naah, I haven't changed my savage spots. Like Mr Thackeray, I support encounter killings. I believe that Bapuji's avatars cannot tackle insurgency and crime; that hoodlums and terrorists are neither eligible for compassion, nor qualified to demand rights. But there's something I'd like to ask Balasaheb: Why are the encounters with Arun Gawli's men occurring after "Gawli deserted me a few months ago"? Since "people like Aurangzeb don't change even if they adorn the robes of a saint", what do these statements imply: "You can say that we had relations... This man went to prison under the Congress regime and now he is fighting against me. But he should remember that if he is alive today, it is due to Bal Thackeray." Balasaheb, do enlighten us: Why is Gawli alive *till* today?

Then there's the matter of police protection given to scumbags -- despite the government's declared policy of not providing armed security to persons with criminal backgrounds. Why is builder Shabir Patel, against whom the police filed a case of attempted murder in March, given armed escorts to save him from a possible hit by Chhota Rajan? A senior Special Branch-I (CID) official tells The Free Press Journal, "[local political worker] Shakpal, who has been provided armed police escorts, has a series of serious criminal cases currently pending against his name. He is being propped up to counter gangster Arun Gawli's Akhil Bharatiya Sena influence... How does one expect the police to control crime and maintain law and order in the city?" How, indeed.

But who's responsible for the decay in Bombay's civic life? The SS-BJP government? Rot; organised crime is not a new phenomenon. The report of the Vohra Committee, which was set up to investigate the criminalisation of politics, states that politicians, bureaucrats and some members of the media and judiciary have diabolical links with the underworld. And it asserts that Dawood Ibrahim and Iqbal Mirchi rose to prominence due to political patronage. During the ascent of these shining stars, that patronage could have only come from the party in power. Swimming with the sharks is an old Congress tradition.

On December 2, 1995, executive editor A R Kanangi wrote in The Afternoon Despatch & Courier: "The Congress party made the smugglers respectable... I know definitely that smugglers were giving money to the Congress party. A Congress leader in Mumbai took a big part in making smugglers respectable. The party liked him a lot because he was able to collect huge funds... I was a witness to one such shady deal. It took place in an office in the Fort area. The smuggler came with a lot of cash; I was sitting there next to the man to whom the cash was given. Before handing over the cash, the smuggler looked in my direction. On being assured I am okay, the notorious smuggler opened the bag..."

Look at the prevalent culture: The politician could perform such a brazen act in front of a journalist because he was confident that the latter would never divulge the details. Even after Marzban Patrawala wrote to the tabloid demanding that the identity of the politico be revealed, the editor did not oblige. Nor did the media, which makes such capital of the film-mafia nexus, press the issue. Methinks, this incident highlights the ethics of the conscience-keepers of our society. There's no point in blaming politicians alone; you see, every journalist knows who this influential politician was. How accountable is the press?

Last month, after the Election Commission decreed that no convicted person will be allowed to contest elections, the Samajwadi Party announced that it will *continue* to give tickets to criminals unless all parties decide to weed out such elements. Said Kapil Deo Singh, "Today, every political party in the country encourages criminals and we are no different." That the party at last admitted to the co-opting of criminals (Mulayam Singh himself was once charged with a heinous crime in Etwah), is hot-damn amazing. That it refused to be the sole one to sweep up, indicates the outcome: zero. Today, some 700 MLAs are history-sheeters...so, what about the culpability of the voter?

It's rather funny that people should brand film folks as semi-gangsters when no politician or businessman is free of dealings with the mob. But the industry has always been a soft target. For instance, Pritish Nandy writes: "They have made it impossible for quality shows to survive. They have made news uneconomic. They have pushed out educational programming. They have made us into a nation of morons. In the fiftieth year of India's Independence, did we need Doordarshan to perpetuate this hegemony of the filmwallahs?"

My, my, my... As an editor who prospered by nearly turning The Illustrated Weekly of India into a filmi rag, and as a man who basks in the periphery of the limelight drawn by his filmi friends, Mr Nandy should spare us his spiel on the crassness of the industry. To be taken seriously, he should opt for spilling the beans on the Deoras and Pawars; to humiliate a mere Mamta Kulkarni or Deepika is such a cop-out. But that's New Age Journalism for you...

Which brings me to the identifying of Nadeem Akhtar as the mastermind behind the murder of Gulshan Kumar: I find it hard to believe that Nadeem could have had anybody bumped off. But who knows? The more details the police disclose, the murkier seems his future. In truth, everyone who's performed in Dubai has met the goombahs at some time, and familiarity with Abu Salem doesn't necessarily make Nadeem a killer. Nevertheless, not being able to draw the line between politeness and intimacy has plunged him into a well deserved soup. As it did Sanjay Dutt... Now, I just pray that Balasaheb doesn't gain yet another godson, and that the IPC won't be abolished should Nadeem land in Tihar.

Yes, I allude to my bete noire, the abolition of TADA. As things stand, a Draconian law is imperative -- for, conspiracy freak that I am, it seems like there's more to all the upheaval than meets the eye. The recent incidents -- the garlanding of Ambedkar's statue with footwear, the bungled bomb at Jama Masjid, the 54 kgs of explosives found at Kandivili (north-west Bombay) two weeks before Ganesh Chaturthi, the killing of Desai and Gulshan, and the hit list naming VIPs -- seem like bits of a grand plot to destabilise Bombay. Too farfetched, you think? Well, a quick scan of Running Drugs and Secret Wars by David Truong should cure one of the aversion to think up awful things. The destabilising of countries is an art-form conceived by the CIA -- and guess who has been its disciple all through the Afghan-USSR conflict. Right, Pakistan's ISI.

Take these premises: One, in his book Will Pakistan break up?, Muneer Ahmed states that former president Ghulam Ishaq Khan had rebuked the then prime minister Nawaz Sharief for the ISI's involvement in the Bombay blasts of 1993. He maintains that the Memons were state guests in Karachi before being dispatched to Dubai. (ISI chief Javed Qazi has taken sudden leave in protest against the declassification of sensitive information.) Two, reporting on the North-East, The Telegraph of January 3 says: "the ISI was targeting Muslim fundamentalists to disrupt the civil administration in the region... the ISI is cashing in on the situation by singling out the Islamic fundamentalists from among the migrants to launch an anti-India campaign."

Ergo, why is it so impossible for the financial capital of India to, once again, be targeted? Plainly, there is a definite nexus between not just our politicians and mafia, but also the ISI and our mafia! With Bombay's film industry at a standstill, her businessmen looking over their shoulders, finance withdrawn from projects, real estate prices plunging, shares crashing, tourism stemmed -- what suffers the most? India's economy -- and defence. Naturally, I don't expect our open-the-borders-ban-the-bomb liberals to grasp a word of this. They never can separate the external affairs of Pakistan from the supposed pulchritude of its people. Nor can they believe that Islamic terrorists can be at play in India.

In all this, the guys I truly feel sorry for are the police -- they are hammered from all sides. Eg, this is how The Asian Age reported the Jama Masjid incident: "The city police was found napping again when an explosion occurred 400 yards away from the Mumbai police headquarters..." No, I really want to know -- suppose if the police had raided the masjid, what would've been the reaction of all but us Hindu fundies?? So far, just one witness has volunteered for the panchanama, and the police suspect that the villains had sympathisers in the vicinity ("It is unlikely that a person with blood on his face and hands can just disappear unnoticed in a market area?).

Hmmm... know what? This is one of the most unfocussed articles I've read. Balasaheb, ISI, Gawli, Congress, Sanjay Dutt, Kapil Singh, Islamic terrorists, Election Commission, Nawaz Sharief, Kanangi, Nandy... the list of players goes on and on, and so do the different angles to different inter-relationships. Which is precisely the point. It stumbles from one element to another since society itself has become criminalised -- the office worker buying "imported" blades from a stall, the movie-goer empathising with Ravi Hood, voters electing culprits, bureaucrats on the take, journalists with hidden agendas, politicians... Where the devil do I put on the brakes?

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