S. Hussain Zaidi, Byculla to Bangkok: Mumbai’s Maharashtrian Mobsters, e-book, HarperCollins, India, 2014, pp. 277.
Husain Zaidi is an investigative reporter who has reported extensively on the Mumbai Mafia. I wrote a review about his book Dongri to Dubai a few months back. In that book he dealt with the exploits of mostly the Muslim mafia in Mumbai. This book can be considered as a sequel of that book. In it he focuses generally on the Hindu or Maharashtrian gangsters from Mumbai, i.e., those whom Bal Thackeray, the supreme head of the Shiv Sena, an influential political party from Maharashtra, had termed “‘amchi muley’ (our boys): sons of the soil”. However unlike how Bal Thackeray liked to portray it there was no vertical division between Hindu and Muslim gangsters till at least the early nineties. Most major gangs had members from both communities. In fact, the major gangsters of the day, Hindu and Muslim both, had come together and formed a gang called the Byculla Company. It however, broke apart in 1987 due to the one-upmanship of Dawood Ibrahim who wanted to be the big boss while some other members wanted it to be run like a cabal, like amongst the Italian mafia. It was only after the 1992 blasts and Thackeray’s ‘our boys’ speech that the mafia firmly got segregated along religious lines. The book gets its name from the fact that many of the Hindu gangsters got their start from the locality of Byculla in Bombay, and Bangkok had become to Hindu gangsters what Dubai had to the Muslim mafia – a safe haven.
Just like the main character of Dongri to Dubai was Dawood Ibrahim, in the same manner the main character of this book is Arun Gawli a.k.a Daddy. Growing up in the vicinity of the textile mills of Mumbai, Gawli’s whole family was linked to the mills in one way or the other. He even worked in a textile mill for some time but later entered the world of crime. It was from his involvement in real estate that Gawli’s gang first entered the big leagues of the mafia in Mumbai. The relation between the mafia and real estate has been infamous in most major cities of the world. So it was in Mumbai. Gawli
“demanded a flat 50 per cent fee for settling financial disputes or a certain number of flats in the newly constructed buildings. He was also the first don to demand 50 per cent of the money recovered in financial disputes. As the police could not intervene in such civil matters and did not get involved in settling financial disputes because of legal constraints, Gawli and other gangsters made a killing. These practices created a link between building contractors and gangsters, and the BRA gang became a force to reckon with.”
One of the best things about the book was the chapter on the history of the textile industry in Mumbai which helped give the background for the later mafia activity for the lands on which the mills stood. By the early nineties, when after liberalisation money started pouring in, the battle lines had been drawn. “The big players like Dawood had aligned with the builders, while Gawli and his ilk aligned with the mill owners. Everybody benefited, except the workers.” The big money involved led to the death of a number of characters. For example, Sunit Chandrakant Khatau, a leading mill owner who was collaborating with Gawli to sell his mill land and was therefore murdered by rival gangsters.
There are also other characters in the book like Amar and Ashwin Naik, whose family were vegetable sellers and got drawn into the world of crime when they protested against the injustice of paying the weekly dole to gangsters. They created a gang for their protection which quickly morphed into predators in their own right. Or Chhota Rajan who was a small time seller of film tickets in the black markets. He really came into the eyes of the mafia when he beat up the constables on duty near the theatre where he sold tickets. Fighting the police was an unheard of phenomenon in the 80s and only lawless Pathans could get away with it. He quickly rose through the ranks and became the right hand man of Dawood Ibrahim until they had a falling out. There are innumerable other characters but these are the big names who had their stranglehold over the Mumbai mafia.
Politics and crime have always been linked in some ways in India but what I found more fascinating in the book is the link between religion, culture and the mafia. The author also shows how some gangsters have tried to link themselves with nationalism! Many of the gangsters are highly religious, living constantly on the run from the law, as well as competitors, they truly believe that they are being protected by the gods. Gawli is a prime example. A highly religious man, his gang is enormously involved in the cultural activities of the city. “Their exuberant celebration of festivals like Ganesh Chaturthi and Navratri extended to several days and included musical performances, visits to the cinema and other group activities.” This type of activities helped increase the popularity of Gawli’s gang and helped propel Gawli into the political arena (He was elected an MLA in 2004). Or Varadaranjan Mudaliar who used to feed “1,000 devotees every year at an annual urs (celebration) at the Bismillah Shah Baba dargah at VT station.” The lighting of his Ganesh Pandal at Matunga Station was also famous to which every year a large number of people came. With the growth of his stature the pandal also grew. When the police decided to cut him down to size they asked him to reduce the size of the pandal and ultimately restricted it to 100 sq. ft. “By then the Ganesh pandal had become a symbol of Varadaranjan’s diminishing clout. He felt humiliated and relocated to Chennai, where he died of a heart attack soon after.”
Then there is Chhota Rajan, the self-professed patriotic don. After Rajan and Dawood’s relationship broke down there ensued a war between their respective gangs. In this mission Rajan was aided by the IB (Intelligence Bureau, India’s premier intelligence agency dealing with internal threats) who gave him support and amnesty in return for exterminating members of Dawood’s gang. They even helped Rajan plan an assassination attempt on Dawood in 1998 which almost succeeded. Rajan helped kill many members of Dawood’s gang involved in the 1993 Mumbai blasts who had eluded the judicial system. Rajan gave regular interviews on national television stating his objective of wiping out Dawood and his men to fulfil his patriotic duties. In the same vein, the members of Dawood’s gang targeted those politicians and officials who were at the forefront of the Mumbai riots but had not been punished.
However, while I have focused on the links between religion, culture, patriotism, this does not mean that Zaidi has not given fascinating examples from politics. A good one involved the Shiv Sena and ‘their boys’ Amar Naik and Arun Gawli. After Thackeray denoted both of them as ‘our boys’ in contrast to Muslim gangsters in 1994 both believed the Sena will give them lucrative patronage. But while Ashwin Naik’s wife was made corporator by the Sena they ignored Gawli’s wife. Also, Gawli was arrested and he got wind of a plan to shift him to a prison far-away from Mumbai where Naik’s people were going to bump him off. On enquiries he found out Jayant Jadhav, Thackeray’s Manasputra or godson, was behind his transfer as he was a good friend of Amar Naik. Therefore, in 1996 Gawli got Jadhav killed while the Sena government was in power. It was soon after this that he started his own political party which helped him win elections and become a MLA.
Like his previous books this one is also filled with many anecdotes and stories from the underworld. There is one particular story I especially liked where sharpshooters had despatched a gangster to kill another who was in police custody. The sharpshooters decided to attack while the police were transporting the gangster by train back to his prison after his presentation in a Mumbai court. When the train stopped at Kalyan station the sharpshooters killed their victim and injured the police present in a gunfight. However, the railway police fought back and caught a few of them. But the best part was when one of the assailants managed to flee but was injured, therefore disoriented he somehow mistook the nearest police station for a hospital and simply waltzed in to be treated!
Zaidi is basically a story teller and he spins a good yarn in this book as well. Thankfully he has rectified some of the problems of the last book. Unlike the last one he did not repeat himself or use the same anecdotes from his earlier books. However, he needs to really get his stories straight before he writes about it. For example, unless he did it deliberately to create some suspense (which I doubt) Zaidi gave two different stories about the same incident involving O.P. Singh, a lieutenant of Chhota Rajan who got him killed in prison. The author states that there was speculation that this was because Singh indulged in financial irregularities or some other reason, but then a few chapters down he states that Singh was an informer for a police inspector. Such editing mistakes take away the pleasure of reading the book to some extent, otherwise it is a very good read if somebody wants to know the broad story of the Mumbai mafia.
Immortal Reader 