Move over airhostesses, cricketers and models. Young people now lie awake dreaming of becoming stylists, saysAastha Atray Banan Sitting pretty Shyamli Arora is climbing the Bollywood ladder of success Photos: Deepak Salvi SHYAMLI ARORA REMEMBERS waiting restlessly every month for the fashion bibles to grace the magazine rack at her father’s modest departmental store in Lucknow ever since she was a little girl. As the Chartered Accountancy student poured over models dressed in high fashion, she had no inkling that her fascination with the glossies would steer her as far away from balance sheets as possible. “When I came to Mumbai, I didn’t know there was a world outside. I chanced upon a job at a fashion magazine, but that I would become a stylist by profession was something unthought-of,” says the young woman who recently dressed Ranbir Kapoor and Katrina Kaif in 2009’s superhit Ajab Prem Ki Ghazab Kahani. Strike a pose Stylist Roli Gupta loves dressing up herself as well Unlike earlier decades when the ticket out of anonymity for young Indians was the Miss India crown, an air hostess uniform, or Sachin Tendulkar’s job, every fashion-conscious youngster today dreams of becoming a stylist. It is being recognised as the career of the Noughties. “It’s because everyone is conscious of how they look,” says the 30 year-old Shyamli as she sprawls across her couch at her Bandra loft, busily typing on her electric pink Macbook. The small town girl is now responsible for choosing the wardrobes of hunk John Abraham and diva Sushmita Sen. “I got chosen for the magazine for a simple reason — I used to dress well. Having personal style is very important,” she says, “You need to keep your client’s personality in mind. When the celeb steps out, their look should make a statement. Directors and producers now know that a stylist is worth their money. But it’s still a growing industry — there are still no set rate cards for us,” says the petite stylist who sets aside one day every week to scout new stores in the city. “But people need to get over the misconception that it’s an easy profession. We are still treated as ‘lesser beings’ compared to the designers.” Internationally, stylists entered the realm of fashion celebrity-hood a long time ago.Sex and the City stylist Patricia Field reinvented style when she dressed Sarah Jessica Parker and her gal pals in off-the-wall outfits, including the pink tutu Carrie Bradshaw sports in the show’s opening sequence. Celeb stylist Rachel Zoe, who has worked with Lindsay Lohan and Keira Knightley, is supposed to be so influential it was rumoured that she was manipulating her clients to be size zeros. Even Lady Gaga, who has been making headlines for her jaw-dropping outfits (she wore a red leather gown to meet the Queen!), has stylist Nicola Formichetti behind her. Camera ready Rick Roy feels stylists should get more credit BACK HOME, stylists swear that some stars won’t even step out of their homes in simple jeans and tee, without getting the look approved from a stylist. But actor John Abraham, who is known for his personal style, says, “A good stylist is one who keeps in mind the personality of the actor, and then value adds to give the look an extra edge.” Stylist Rick Roy agrees, pouting stylishly in his tastefully done-up Bandra apartment – “People don’t regard styling as an art. You don’t get credit when an actress looks good, but do get blamed if her outfit bombed.” The 26- year old Kolkata boy, who garnered headlines in 2008 when B-town starlets Kangana Ranaut and Jiah Khan fought over whom the stylist would work for, moved to Mumbai in 2004. “When I was five, my uncle used to ask me if everything he was wearing matched before he stepped out. I used to say ‘Matching.’ I was destined to become a stylist,” smiles Rick, whose first movie had him styling Kangana Ranaut for Madhur Bhandarkar’s Fashion. The stylist, who often designs clothes for his jobs, is full of disdain for all those “wannabes” who think they can make it in the industry. “If I don’t agree to do a movie because I think I am not getting my worth, the producer can easily get a cheaper stylist whose quality won’t match up. A stylist can make anything from Rs 5,000 a day to Rs 15 lakhs a film.” It’s no wonder then that the fashion brat has signed up with ex-model Lubna Adam’s Mumbai-based firm, Celebutante. “Till a decade ago, styling of movies was a cliché. But now movies are concept driven, and styling forms a big part of that. Can you imagine what would have happened if Dostana was made a few years ago?” Adam laughs, adding, “The aim of my firm is to make sure that the profession of styling gets professional.” Sapna Bhavnani, the owner of trendsetting Mumbai salon, Mad O Wat, feels that wannabe stylists need to get a complete knowledge of the business and will soon open an academy that will teach aspirants how to style clothes, hair and even apply make-up. “Youngsters from small towns also want to style, even if they don’t know what the word means. But they need to understand that they need complete knowledge of the craft.”
Some stars won’t even step out of their homes in simple jeans without getting the look approved from a stylist
Roli Gupta, who has been styling for over six years, came to Mumbai to become a potter but found that clothes meant more to her than mud. The 32 year-old from Lucknow, who loves dressing up herself as well, says, “It’s about selling yourself as well,” and admits that being a part of the growing tribe has changed her life. “I can’t obviously go back to Lucknow, get married and have a family there,” she laughs, “there is still a long way to go in this career.” But Roli needn’t worry, because as the rage of being a stylist spreads like wild fire, her career choice seems to be the perfect one. As British diplomat Lord Chesterfield once said, “If you’re not in fashion, you’re nobody.”
Confessions under duress and random accusations could get you jailed for years without bail.Ajit SahiandRana Ayyubtracked the misuse of the draconian MCOCA in Maharashtra for two months At his best, man is the noblest of all animals; separated from law and justice he is the worst. – Aristotle Pithy and profound, but what animal would Aristotle say man is if he uses law and justice in a manner that’s as deadly as being separated from both? About 11 years ago, on February 24, 1999, the Maharashtra government promulgated an ordinance aimed at combating the ever-expanding spiral of underworld crime. That was the era when the rich and the powerful cowered in dread of extortionists brazenly threatening them on the phone, and then walking into their offices, shops and homes to collect ransoms. Many of those who refused to pay were attacked, even killed. The defining moment came when movie producer Gulshan Kumar was gunned down in broad daylight in 1997. Anyone was game. Already, middle-of-the-street gun battles in Mumbai were spilling blood of rival gangs belonging to absconding dons such as Dawood Ibrahim and Chhota Rajan. About 20 people were killed in mafia violence in 1997. The number more than doubled next year. Yet newer mafia dons were breaking out on the scene, like an expanding family tree. In desperation, the government unofficially adopted the extra-constitutional method of summarily executing suspected gangsters by police inspectors, in what has come to be known as ‘encounters’. But even this regressed, perhaps predictably, into anarchy, as it was alleged that rival gangs began to pay off these ‘encounter specialists’ to kill each other’s boys. Politically, the burgeoning crime graph became a headache for the state government of BJP-Shiv Sena. The public outcry against its failure to curb the mafia threatened to extend all the way to the Assembly elections of 1999. It was in these circumstances that the Maharashtra Control of Organised Crime Ordinance was brought into existence. The government argued that the Indian Penal Code, written in 1860, was incapable of dealing with the mafia crimes, never as brutal in history as now. Later, the state Assembly legislated it into law. Replacing ‘Ordinance’ with ‘Act’, the law came to be known by its acronym, MCOCA, popularly pronounced ‘Makoka’ or even ‘Moka’. The Act said it aimed “to make Special provisions for Prevention and Control of Organised Crime and for coping with Criminal Activity by Organized Crime Syndicates…” A Statement of Objects and Reasons issued with the law gave the following rationale for its enactment: “Organised crime has for quite some years now come up as a very serious threat to our society. It knows no national boundaries and is fueled by illegal wealth generated by contract killing, extortion, smuggling in contrabands, illegal trade in narcotics, kidnappings for ransom, collection of protection money and money laundering, etc. “The illegal wealth and black money generated by the organised crime being very huge, it has had [a] serious adverse effect on our economy. It was seen that the organised criminal syndicates made a common cause with terrorist gangs and foster (sic) terrorism which extend beyond the national boundaries. There was reason to believe that organised criminal gangs have been operating in the State and, thus, there was immediate need to curb their activities. “The existing legal framework, i.e., the penal and procedural laws and the adjudicatory system were found to be rather inadequate to curb or control the menace of organised crime. Government, therefore, decided to enact a special law with stringent and deterrent provisions.” For all the grandstanding in the legalese above, the key phrase is obviously “stringent and deterrent provisions”. Just what were these provisions of MCOCA and how has been the experience of the law over the last nearly 11 years? Of course, the state argues that MCOCA has brought rich dividends. After all, street-side bloodbaths are a thing of the past. At least the reporting of extortions has declined dramatically. Shooters don’t so often storm into people’s homes and offices. Mumbai Police inspectors do not go killing gangsters in ‘encounters’. But few outside the precincts of south Mumbai’s sessions courts, where four special judges toil exclusively over MCOCA cases, know how this law has devastated lives and families because of what clearly appears to be its misuse, if not outright abuse. And unfortunately, it’s the “stringent and deterrent provisions” of the MCOCA that have wholly abetted such abuse. HAVING EXAMINED about 100 cases over two months, in this issue of TEHELKA we bring you the bizarre stories of eight accused, seven of whom lived out the nightmare of MCOCA spending sleepless nights on their jail beds, only to be freed after months or years because, simply, there was no evidence against them. These have included the mighty, such as former Mumbai Police Commissioner RS Sharma – no less. Even the Supreme Court said Sharma seemed to have been wrongly accused. Indeed, the law has proved to be a black hole for hundreds of the accused. Once charged under MCOCA, an accused is presumed guilty until he proves his innocence. It is sweeping in its scope, because under it the prosecution need offer no evidence beyond the confession of the accused to secure his conviction. Even if a judge eventually throws out such a confession, the accused has spent months to years behind bars because securing bail is next to impossible.
MCOCA is harsher than POTA and TADA. It was meant to curb only mafia gangs, but it has been badly subverted
The admissibility of a confession as evidence, given by an accused to a police officer above the rank of the Superintendent of Police or Deputy Commissioner of Police, is the most prominent – and controversial – provision in MCOCA. It is a howler, because it was exactly this provision that was massively misused to frame innocent people in previous anti-terror laws such as the Terrorism and Disruptive Activities Prevention Act (TADA) of 1987 and the Prevention of Terrorist Act (POTA) of 2002. For this reason alone, TADA was allowed to lapse in 1995. POTA was scrapped altogether in 2004. Indeed, MCOCA is more draconian than POTA. POTA allowed confessions to be admissible as evidence against only the confessor. But under MCOCA, the confession of an accused “shall be admissible in the trial of such person or co-accused, abettor or conspirator”. This clause alone has had hellish consequences for hundreds accused under MCOCA. People have languished in jail merely because someone accused in the same case had allegedly named them in his or her confession. Human rights campaigners have long argued that because the Indian Evidence Act of 1872 bars confessions made to the police from being admissible as evidence, laws such as MCOCA should not be allowed to use such confessions. It is widely known that the police routinely use torture to force confessions. Many accused under MCOCA have reported this to the judge, who has then disallowed their confessions. Of course, on the face of it, the law prescribes safeguards to ensure confessions are not made under duress. “Confessions shall be recorded in a free atmosphere in the same language in which the person is examined and as narrated by him,” the law says. “The police officer shall explain to the person making it that he’s not bound to make a confession.” The police officer who has written down the confession of an accused must then send it to a Chief Judicial Magistrate, who, too, must meet the confessor within 24 hours and crosscheck if he made the confession voluntarily. So often the accused have told such a magistrate that he was either not shown the document he signed, or coerced into signing it, or that his signatures were taken on blank papers. ANOTHER DAUNTING aspect of MCOCA is its stringent bail provisions. The law says bail can be given to an accused only if the court “is satisfied that there are reasonable grounds for believing he is not guilty of such offence…” This is staggering. Essentially, this means that regardless of the mildness of an alleged crime, the accused cannot get bail until either a chargesheet is filed, the trial has ended, or it is obvious that the accused has been framed.
Lawyers Say That In 11 Years Of The Law, Not Even One Percent Of The Accused Have Been Given Bail By The Trial Court
Defence lawyers say that in 11 years of the law’s operation, not even one percent of the accused have been given bail by the trial court. Many have even been turned down by the High Court. Many, such as RS Sharma, former Mumbai Police Commissioner, have had to go up to the Supreme Court to secure bail after months or years in jail. In fact, this bail provision seems to have irked the Supreme Court in the case of Sharma. Wrote the apex court: “We are furthermore of the opinion that the restrictions on the power of the Court to grant bail should not be pushed too far.” But the court has been pushed too far for nearly 11 years. The police in Maharashtra arrest people at will under MCOCA knowing full well that it is highly unlikely they will get bail anytime soon. Hence, the police don’t care to ensure that their cases against the accused meet the law’s other requirements. For example, MCOCA stipulates that only those accused of being members of an “organised crime syndicate” and who are part of “continuing unlawful activity” can be tried under it. There have been bizarre cases where the police claimed that a family of 11 people accused of a double murder was a “criminal gang”, just so they could be booked under MCOCA, and thus denied bail. The law also explains what constitutes “continuing unlawful activity”. People can only be charged under MCOCA if there are at least two chargesheets against them for a crime of similar nature in the previous 10 years. It is mandatory for courts to take cognisance of these two chargesheets. But in case after case we found the police had charged people under MCOCA even though there were no previous chargesheets against them. The story of property magnate Mahendra Agarwal is just one such case. In most of these cases, the accused had to languish in jail without bail until they were finally acquitted years later. Another clearly stipulated feature of the law is the motive of the accused. MCOCA says that those accused under it must have undertaken the alleged crime “with the objective of gaining pecuniary benefits, or undue economic or other advantages for himself or any other person or promoting insurgency.” The reference to “pecuniary benefit” is crucial, as the gangs that this law sought to control were obviously working on the principle of making money illegally through, among other means, extortions and money laundering. The framers of the law included this principle so that it was not misused to book those who might have committed a violent crime but not for monetary gain and should, therefore, be tried under the IPC. And yet, in numerous MCOCA cases, the prosecution did not even bother to suggest that the accused had a “pecuniary benefit”. It may surprise the reader to know that in a large number of cases the judge eventually set the accused free, or ordered their trial under IPC, on the ground that the prosecution had failed to establish that the alleged crime was committed for “pecuniary benefit”. But the accused had to serve time in jail without bail till such judgement was passed. Clearly, the Mumbai Police have used this law, often indiscriminately, only to put people behind bars and keep them there as long as possible. Mumbai Police Commissioner D Sivanandan virtually concedes this attitude when he says in an interview that the number of people jailed shot up from 50 in 1998 to 642 in 1999 after MCOCA was written. Many people — including defence lawyers and certainly many of the former accused who were later ruled innocent — have therefore begun to demand that this draconian law must include a more stringent system of checks and balances. The most recurring suggestion is that the police must be made accountable. Radically, the suggestion goes, the policemen who framed the accused, must go to jail themselves. Many, of course, would say, why limit that to MCOCA?
[box] CASE STUDY 1 Deemed Guilty Until Proven Innocent SHAH ALAM, Former recruitment agent Photo: Ambarin Afsar ONE DAY early in July 2001, Mumbai resident Shah Alam’s mobile phone rang. Absconding underworld don Abu Salem was the caller. “I heard your father passed away,” Salem said, offering condolences. Over the next few days, Salem called again, several times in fact. “A few of my boys have been arrested in Mumbai,” he was in a panic. “I fear that the police will kill them in an encounter.” Shah Alam says Salem begged him to find the whereabouts of his ‘boys’. Shah Alam did try and follow up on Salem’s request, if only for old times’ sake. But he ran into a dead-end and soon gave up. Salem, too, stopped calling. Five years went by. Shah Alam put the incident behind him and life went on. As the cliché goes, 48-yearold Shah Alam has come a long way since migrating to Mumbai from his native village in Azamgarh district of Uttar Pradesh 25 years ago. His four daughters, all born here, have always been toppers at school and college. His youngest is studying microbiology. The oldest teaches botany. The third is to finish her MSc in information technology. His second daughter, however, has broken ranks. Once a brilliant student of biotechnology, Naima went haywire when police arrested her father in 2006 and booked him under MCOCA. “She lost two years because each time she took her exams she shook so bad she couldn’t write anything,” rues Shah Alam. Police claimed Shah Alam was Salem’s gangster. They named him a co-accused in the murder of Ajit Diwani, a secretary to several film stars who was shot dead in an upscale north Mumbai suburb on June 30, 2001. That was also the day Shah Alam’s father had died, for which Salem had called him a few days later. While Shah Alam’s arrest came nearly five years after Diwani’s murder, six others had been arrested as conspirators within days of the crime. The police had claimed those were Salem’s goons acting on his orders. They had been booked under MCOCA. The case had dragged on. Four years later, Salem was famously deported from Portugal to India. Shah Alam was arrested barely months after that. The police claimed that Shah Alam had sheltered one of the alleged gang members after the murder and also given him Rs 15,000. This man is alleged to have been hanging around the premises of the building where Diwani was murdered. (Astonishingly, the police never caught the three shooters that had brazenly walked into Diwani’s office and pumped bullets in him.) As is common to nearly all MCOCA cases, the police had no evidence against Shah Alam save his own confession they claimed he voluntarily made to a police officer, which is admissible as evidence under MCOCA. But Shah Alam denied guilt and told a magistrate – who by law must verify if the confession is voluntary – as well as the trial judge that the police tortured him into signing the confession. Still, Shah Alam spent three-and-a-half years in jail. He was lucky, because his coaccused had spent eight years before Special MCOCA Judge RG Avachat, in a voluminous judgment delivered in September 2009, acquitted six of the seven accused. (One accused is still missing since he reportedly absconded in Uttar Pradesh after the police took him there some years ago for another case.) The MCOCA judge found no evidence to link Upendranath, the man Shah Alam is said to have sheltered, with Diwani’s murder. Wrote the judge: “As prosecution has failed to prove the guilt of the accused Upendranath, accused Shah Alam cannot be held guilty of the offence of having harboured [him].” So what is Shah Alam’s connection with Abu Salem? For generations, Shah Alam’s and Salem’s families have lived in neighbouring villages in Azamgarh. “My grandfather and his grandfather were friends. So were his father and mine,” Shah Alam says. “So were he and I.” When Shah Alam moved to Mumbai in the 1980s, he briefly shared office with Salem, who was then trying to set up a trading business. Shah Alam was working as a recruitment agent, sending out semi-skilled workers hungry for better paying jobs in the Middle East. “Once I realised that Salem was getting into hanky-panky, I distanced myself from him.” When Alam was taken to a senior police officer after his arrest, Salem, too, was there. “I was so angry with Salem,” he says. To his credit, says Alam, Salem told the police to let Shah Alam go because he was uninvolved. It is ironic that Salem himself wasn’t tried under MCOCA. The reason? Before he was deported from Portugal, the Indian government gave a Portuguese judge a list of laws under which Salem would be tried. It forgot to include MCOCA in the list. When charges under MCOCA were raised, Salem indignantly wrote to the Portuguese judge. The Indian government backed off quickly.
While Abu Salem Was Not Charged Under MCOCA, Shah Alam Spent Three Years In Jail Before Being Acquitted
It is to comprehend intricacies of the law so as to save the innocent from becoming its victims that Shah Alam’s second daughter, Naima, has given up her cherished dream to be a biotechnologist and taken up the study of law. She is now in her second year. She had regularly attended her father’s trial. What irks Shah Alam is that after all’s said and done, Salem still owes him about a lakh rupees he borrowed before he turned a gangster. “In jail, I would tell him, ‘Man, you haven’t paid me back,’” says Shah Alam. “And Salem would say, ‘Yes bhai, I will, bhai, let me get out, bhai.’” FACT FILE • Co-accused in the murder of Ajit Diwani, who was shot and killed in an upscale Mumbai suburb on June 30, 2001 • Police claimed Alam, along with six others arrested years earlier, was a gangster working for Abu Salem • Charged with harbouring one of the alleged gang members after the murder and giving him Rs 15,000
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[box] CASE STUDY 2 Businessman, Squash Fan, MCOCA Survivor MAHENDRA AGARWAL, Property developer Photo: Ambarin Afsar BUILDER AND developer Mahendra Agarwal is also a keen squash enthusiast. On back-slapping terms with Mumbai’s Who’s Who, Agarwal helped build the squash courts in the Mumbai Police Gymkhana. His business card reflects most of his varied endeavours. It also lists a unique descriptor: “Ex-MCOCA”. Three-and-a-half years ago, on July 5, 2006, police arrived at Agarwal’s bungalow in the middle of one night and hauled him out the bed. They interrogated him for five hours, and then promptly arrested him on the charge that he was operating on behalf of one of Mumbai’s absconding underworld dons, Ravi Pujari. Along with Agarwal, his business partner was also arrested, as were four other associates. Eventually, they were all booked under MCOCA and packed off to jail. “It was totally unbelievable,” says Agarwal, with a hearty laugh, sitting in his compact but plush office. “I mean here I was, someone who regularly partied with the top IAS and police officers in the state. Who dared to arrest me?” But despite moving heaven and earth and hiring the best lawyers, Agarwal cooled his heels in the cell for 65 days. After that period, Mumbai’s Special MCOCA Judge Abhay Thipsay freed him and his associates on bail. Actually, they were very lucky. It is not easy to find another example of a MCOCA accused who was given bail within two months of arrest. Agarwal and the other accused were charged with using the name of Pujari to threaten Brijlal Tiwari. Tiwari was a resident of an 8,000 sq metre shantytown that Agarwal had acquired in the north Mumbai suburb of Andheri East by paying off its residents with a view to pulling it down and replacing it with a modern building. IT WAS Tiwari’s case that not everyone wanted to move out of that shantytown. Not true, said Agarwal, who claimed that Tiwari was fronting for a rival builder who wanted a piece of the cake. Agarwal had repeatedly obtained orders from the court in his favour, including permission to put up a board of his proposed construction work on the site. Agarwal says he had filed two cases against Tiwari and the rival builder during March 23-29, 2006. The prosecution claimed before the MCOCA judge that Agarwal had called up Tiwari and threatened him from the landline in his Mumbai office on a particular day. But Agarwal submitted documents such as his passport and airline tickets proving that on the date he is alleged to have threatened Tiwari, he was holidaying in Europe with his wife, daughter, the daughter’s fiancé and his parents. In his judgement, the special MCOCA judge would find that there was no evidence against Agarwal, not even phone intercepts or records of Agarwal’s alleged calls. Besides, MCOCA can only be slapped on an accused against whom courts had taken cognisance of in at least two criminal cases in the past 10 years. But none of the six accused, including Agarwal, had ever faced a single criminal charge. Too clever by half, the Mumbai Police tried to get around this shortcoming by making mafia don Pujari an accused in the case. The police said the fact that there were more than two criminal cases against Pujari in the past 10 years was enough to incriminate Agarwal and the other five. But the prosecution could not even produce any phone records or transcripts of phone conversations linking Agarwal and the other accused with Pujari. The police could also not explain why Agarwal’s phone was not tapped, even after receiving Tiwari’s complaint that the builder was allegedly threatening him. Surely, if the police had wiretapped his phone, they would have found all the evidence they needed to connect Agarwal with the underworld. On March 5, 2009, Agarwal and his fellow accused were predictably acquitted of the MCOCA charges. After he was arrested, Agarwal and his family went through testing times. Many of his friends and relatives deserted him. But this has only stoked his hunger for justice. Agarwal says the entire jail experience taught him the harsh realities of life. He is now a man with a mission: taking the system head on for misusing MCOCA. Today, he is an unlikely facsimile of a Bollywood hero, a man who, after having suffered under the system, is not content with his mere freedom. He wants the officials to own up for the mistake they made in arresting him.
Agarwal was overseas on the day police say he called the complainant from his office. He still spent 65 days in jail
“I have written to each and every official, bureaucrat and minister telling them how the law is being grossly misused and asking them why I was arrested,” he says. He has written to the Prime Minister, too. “MCOCA could be useful but it is being misused,” he says. “It is being used to implicate innocent people like me for personal enmities.” Agarwal says he has now lost interest in the plot of land that landed him in trouble. “I think I will sell it off and move on to another project.” FACT FILE • Arrested on charges of operating on behalf of gangster Ravi Pujari. Spent 65 days in jail • Proved he was in Europe on the day he allegedly made calls from his landline in Mumbai
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[box] CASE STUDY 3 Done In By The Don Link, Saved By Bungling Cops FAREED TANASHAH, Alleged Chhota Rajan aide Photo: Ambarin Afsar AS FAREED Tanashah enters the housing society in the north Mumbai suburb of Tilak Nagar and reaches his ground floor flat, his pet dogs, tied to a window grill by chains, jump up frantically and bark to catch their master’s attention. A goateed man Tanashah calls Chacha follows him like a shadow. Six men in their twenties, their firearms hidden from the casual gaze, line the outer precincts of the society looking out to snip trouble. Tanashah, 37, has been accused of being a hitman for mobster Chhota Rajan. He has been booked under MCOCA for extortion. He, however, denies the charge. This isn’t the first time such charges have come his way. Understandably, Tanashah does not feel safe even at home. “Only they are the most loyal,” he says, pointing at his Labradors. The events of Tanashah’s life could make for a bestselling thriller. Although he studied to be a software engineer, Tanashah has faced criminal charges for more than a decade for allegedly being a gangster. In July 2005, a crime branch team of the Mumbai Police arrested him in New Delhi on charges of threatening Mumbai-based businessmen with the purpose of extorting money from them. However, there were reports that Tanashah’s arrest was an embarrassment for Indian intelligence agencies, which had reportedly trained him for an undercover operation aimed at taking out Indian government’s long-time nemesis, the Pakistan- based underworld don Dawood Ibrahim. It was also reported that at the time of his arrest, Tanashah was in constant touch with a former director of the Intelligence Bureau (IB). He was brought to Mumbai and booked under MCOCA. It should seem extremely lucky that despite the past that he has, he managed to secure bail three years after his arrest. Actually, the events preceding and following his arrest ensured that this onetime alleged gangland shooter got bail. One of the reasons Special MCOCA Judge RC Avachat gave Tanashah bail is that his arrest preceded the complaint that was lodged against him with the Mumbai police that year. While both Tanashah and his alleged accomplice Vicky Malhotra were arrested on July 10, 2005, the complaint against them is dated July 11, 2005. Prakash Shetty, Tanashah’s lawyer, says this fact clearly indicates an attempt to falsely implicate him in the case. According to Shetty, Tanashah was not convicted in any of the five MCOCA cases that had been brought against him before this particular case. Police work has certainly been shoddy in his arrest. The prosecution claims that the police found seven mobile phones in the possession of Tanashah as well as with Malhotra, when the duo were arrested in New Delhi. But the defence successfully argued before the judge that this fact is not reflected in the panchnama — the list of seizures prepared in front of witnesses — filed at the time of the arrests. Two complaints were filed on July 11 and 12, 2005 alleging that Tanashah had phoned the complainants and given them an international number to call Chhota Rajan. But the police now say those calls were made between May 31 and July 5, 2005, nearly two months before they were arrested. The police could not furnish any call log or transcripts of phone taps to back its claims. The absence of evidence led the judge to grant Tanashah bail. Also, a co-accused named John D’Souza, who police said had named Tanashah in his confession, turned hostile. Judge Avachat also dismissed the confession because there was nothing in it to even suggest that D’Souza and Tanashah had ever committed any offence together. “There is no such material to indicate direct involvement of [Tanashah] in any of the crime much less the crime in question,” the judge said. Last month, Tanashah found himself battling yet another controversy. Television news ran a shocking video that purportedly showed a senior officer of Mumbai Police dancing away at a Christmas party allegedly hosted by DK Rao, a man police say is a top lieutenant of Chhota Rajan. Rao was acquitted in a MCOCA case this year after being in jail for 11 years. Tanashah, too, was found making merry at that all-night party. FACT FILE • Alleged to be mobster Chhota Rajan’s hitman and close associate. Arrested in July 2005 on charges of extorting businessmen • But MCOCA judge gave him bail three years later because the complaint was filed after his arrest in New Delhi • Tanashah was back in controversy after videos emerged showing him and police officers dancing at a Christmas partry thrown by an alleged Rajan aide in Mumbai
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[box] CASE STUDY 4 Top Cop At The Receiving End Of The Law Photo: Ajit Sahi RANJIT SINGH SHARMA, Former Mumbai police chief RANJIT SINGH Sharma had never seen a better day than the one in 1967 when he was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Indian Army. Six years later, he cleared the civil services examination to join the prestigious Indian Police Service (IPS). Service norms allowed his time in the army to count for seniority. So although he joined the IPS in 1973, he came to belong to the 1968 batch. “This caused heartburn among many officers who had joined the IPS before me,” grins Sharma, looking out at the vast Arabian Sea from his fifth-floor flat in Mumbai’s posh suburb of Worli Seaface. Sharma would notice such heartburn again towards the end of his long career, when, on January 1, 2003, he became Commissioner of Police in Mumbai ahead of several other officers. In the bizarre ways that the government works, one of them would soon become Sharma’s boss upon being appointed Maharashtra’s Director General of Police. In Sharma’s view, this heartburn is the key to understanding why the Maharashtra Police arrested him on December 1, 2003, less than 24 hours after he retired from the IPS. It booked him under MCOCA as an accused in the widely publicised case of what the news media dubbed the ‘Telgi fake stamp paper scam’. Abdul Karim Telgi, a native of Karnataka, was arrested in 2001. He was found to be the kingpin of an audacious illegal scheme in which he installed presses to print fake government stamp papers worth tens of thousands of crores of rupees and sold them liberally across India for over a decade before being busted. As Police Commissioner in Pune in 2002 and as Police Commissioner in Mumbai in 2003, Sharma allegedly abetted Telgi’s scam by favouring two policemen investigating the case and who, in turn, were found favouring Telgi. Also, an IAS officer said he had seen Telgi and Sharma having tea in Sharma’s room in 1995. Police also claimed that Telgi had admitted in a narco analysis test that he had paid Sharma off. Sharma contended that the case against him was cooked up. But the special MCOCA court rejected his bail plea, as did the Bombay High Court. Sharma was to stay in jail for 11 months, until the Supreme Court granted him bail. “Unless a nexus with an accused, who is a member of the organised crime syndicate or an offence in the nature of organised crime is established,” the Supreme Court said, “… the appellant [Sharma] cannot be said to have conspired or abetted commission of an organised crime.” It also rejected Telgi’s narco analysis test. In June 2007, Chitra Kiran Bhedi, special MCOCA judge in Pune, discharged Sharma without sending him for trial. The judge slammed the prosecution and instead raised questions at the investigation. “The fact,” wrote the judge, “that he [Sharma] was instrumental in unearthing this scam cannot be lost sight of.” Bizarre as it may seem, it was Sharma as Pune’s Police Commissioner who had triggered the investigation into Telgi’s illegal empire after receiving, rather dramatically, an anonymous phone call at his home one night in June 2002. The caller claimed that some policemen had first stopped a carload of fake stamp papers but had inexplicably let it go. “I acted immediately,” says Sharma. Two men travelling in that car were arrested. They became Accused number 1 and Accused number 2 in the MCOCA case that would grow around the Telgi scam. (In time, Telgi would become Accused number 23. Sharma would become Accused number 60.) Soon, Sharma’s probe teams raided godowns and found fake stamp papers worth a whopping Rs 2,000 crore. On Sharma’s recommendation, the state government set up a Special Investigative Team (SIT), led by another IPS officer named Subodh Kumar Jaiswal. Ironically, it was Jaiswal who arrested Sharma in December 2003. The SIT claimed Sharma appointed a police officer, MC Mulani, to the probe and sent him to Bengaluru all by himself to meet Telgi in jail. It said Sharma did not move Mulani out of the investigation despite receiving complaints against him. But the judge found the charges to be bogus. It wasn’t Sharma but his deputy — a controversial police officer, SM Mushrif — who brought Mulani into the probe. Mulani had indeed gone to Bengaluru thrice but each time he was accompanied by seniors. In fact, the judge slammed the SIT for not moving against Mushrif, who had opposed naming Telgi’s wife and son as accused in the case: “It appears that [the] prosecution is deliberately indulging in choose and pick policy. Mr. Mushrif against whom serious allegations are made by his colleagues and even superiors is left untouched.” (After the investigation was shifted to the CBI, Telgi’s wife was made an accused.) In October 2002, Telgi was transferred to Mumbai to assist in the investigations. On January 10, 2003, Jaiswal raided a flat of Telgi’s in the posh Cuffe Parade area – and found the kingpin there, instead of in jail. The SIT claimed that Sharma was responsible for illegally letting Telgi out of jail. But the judge said Telgi “enjoyed comforts” in Mumbai even before Sharma became Police Commissioner on January 1, 2003. “MN Singh was Commissioner of Police, Mumbai when Telgi was in custody of Mumbai Police from 28.10.2002… No questions are asked about any commission or omission in this substantive period. On the contrary, the applicant [Sharma] is dragged [in] for alleged minor acts.” WHEN THE SIT raided Telgi’s flat, two brothers were found there. Shockingly, Jaiswal had let them go. He hadn’t even mentioned them in his official report. Weeks later, the two brothers were arrested by Delhi Police with fake stamp papers. Jaiswal then rushed to get their custody. The judge unequivocally slammed Jaiswal: “Jaiswal in his 1½ years of investigation has not done anything against Telgi. No significant recovery of stamps, no recovery of printing machines was made… He had not arrested the brothers [when he found them with Telgi at his flat].”
Ironically It Was Sharma Who, As Pune’s Police Chief, Triggered The Investigation Into Telgi’s Illegal Empire
The judge further wrote: “It is [an] irony of fate, that [Sharma] is facing trial in an offence unearthed by him and the prosecuting agency has to rely on the material seized during his regime.” The IAS officer who claimed to have seen Telgi in Sharma’s room in 1995 is now embroiled in a case arising out of the scam. He had been Superintendent of Stamps for Maharashtra during the time Telgi operated his illegal business. A court has ordered that the IAS officer be investigated for complicity. The nightmare is over, but Sharma isn’t letting go. “I will not rest until those who framed me are themselves prosecuted,” he says. “I will see them off to jail.” FACT FILE • Accused of abetting the multi-thousand crore-rupee Telgi fake stamp paper racket • Allegedly favoured two police officers who helped Telgi while probing the scam • Special MCOCA court and Bombay High Court denied him bail • Jailed for 11 months before the Supreme Court gave him bail. Finally discharged by MCOCA court
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[box] CASE STUDY 5 The Man Who Was Jailed By His Beard Photo: Deepak Salvi ASIF KHAN, Businessman THOUGH A pious Muslim, Asif Khan is unlikely to ever sport a beard. After growing one to mark his Haj in 1988, Asif Khan came to be known by the nickname ‘Asif Dadhi’ after the Hindi word for beard. Trouble came years later when the Mumbai Police began hunting for a realtor, also nicknamed Asif Dadhi, who they claimed was involved in deals with absconding mafia don Chhota Shakeel. But this story is about Asif Dadhi, the former pilgrim. He loathes being known by that nickname, so we will call him Asif Khan. Perhaps it was inevitable that in the year 2000 the police arrested Khan — who then owned a shop in an upscale market — mistaking him for the realtor. Khan was doomed by association, born and raised as he was in the central Mumbai district of Dongri. Dongri sits cheek by jowl with Bhendi Bazaar, the bustling Muslim sprawl that is sadly infamous for being the former home of Dawood Ibrahim, India’s most wanted underworld don, and his string of followers, including Shakeel. “Chhota Shakeel lived in a nearby lane, but that was years ago,” says Khan, regretting that he ever knew the gangster. “But if I wasn’t his partner in crime, how was I a criminal?” After arresting him, the police claimed Khan had paid shooters in a murder case. He was charged under MCOCA. Under the law, only those with two previous criminal cases against them can be charged. Khan had never seen the inside of a police station. He thought he would at least get bail. But when his lawyer stood up in court, the judge said he was wasting his time. Bail was denied. One day, shortly after his arrest, Khan’s mother came to see him. He sat quietly by her, head hung low in humiliation. The next morning, the police took him to a graveyard. “I begged a passerby to phone my family to ask why I was brought here,” he says. He found that after reaching home from the police station the previous day, his mother died of a heart attack. After 17 months, Khan pushed his lawyer to urge the court for a speedier trial. The judge accepted his plea. The police failed to provide any evidence, not even the SIM cards the accused had allegedly used, though the police claimed they had arrested the gangsters “redhanded” while talking on mobile phones. The judge threw out the case. “After twentyfour days of trial,” he says, “I was free.” By then, Khan had spent 18 months in jail. “I swore to myself I will never ever be seen anywhere near anyone even remotely connected with the underworld,” he recalls. After being released, Khan sold his shop and set up two drugstores near Mumbai’s JJ Hospital. He shaved off his beard and vowed to stay clean-shaven forever. Three years passed. In 2003, police claimed they had intercepted a phone conversation between Dubaibased Iqbal Kaskar, brother of Dawood Ibrahim, and one of Kaskar’s affiliates in Mumbai. In this chat, Kaskar asked the aide to transfer some property to Asif Dadhi. The police sent for Khan and interrogated him. He swore that he wasn’t their man. They let him go. But Khan wasn’t spared for long. A few months later, in 2004, the police claimed that funds that Shakeel was sending from Pakistan to pay the legal fees of several of his gang members arrested in Mumbai were being disbursed by Khan. Flustered, Asif Khan went underground. “My mind was screaming that this can’t be happening to me again,” he says. When he learnt he could be declared an absconder, he surrendered after three months. The media went to town, pitching him as a dreaded gangster. Newspapers said he was arrested while extorting money. As television news identified his drugstores, patients stopped buying medicines from them. As per the law, the police must file charges in the court against an accused within 90 days of his arrest. When they did not do so in Khan’s case, the judge granted him bail. A year went by since his arrest. In September 2005, Mumbai Police submitted a five-page application before the MCOCA judge saying they had found no evidence against “Mohammad Asif Mohammed Rafiq Khan alias Asif Dadhi”. Khan’s name had come up after an accused reportedly told the police during interrogation that Khan gave him slush money to distribute further. In the September 2005 application, the police, however, said that the confession of that accused, “did not reveal any role played by Asif Dadhi”. When a police team met this accused for verification, he denied ever saying that Asif gave him money.
After Picking Him Up For The Second Time Under MCOCA, The Police Admitted That They Had No Evidence Against Khan
THE POLICE also took printouts of the call records of Khan’s two landline phones and mobile phone. “A study of these printouts shows the accused [Khan] had neither made nor received calls to/from gangsters of Chhota Shakeel,” they told the judge. Sales tax records of his medical shop were scrutinised and “nothing adverse [was] noticed.” “There [were] no major deposits or withdrawals” in his and or his wife’s bank accounts. “Nothing incriminating was found” in his house. His employees and partners were interrogated. “Nothing incriminating [was] noticed.” “There is no evidence to send him on charge sheet in the present case,” the police application concluded. It asked the judge to discharge Asif Khan. After he was released, Khan sold off his two drugstores near JJ hospital. When, during the 2009 Lok Sabha elections, he tried to organise political meetings as a small-time Congress leader, television news channels screamed that the Congress was relying on gangsters to win the elections. He backed out hurriedly. “If you leave nothing for me,” he says, dejected, “won’t I become Asif Dadhi?” FACT FILE • Asif Khan, also known as Asif Dadhi (he grew a beard after performing Haj) was mistaken for another Asif Dadhi – a realtor allegedly involved in deals with gangster Chhota Shakeel • Khan was arrested for allegedly ordering a murder and jailed for 18 months before a judge threw out the case • Three years later, arrested again for alleged ties to Chhota Shakeel but the police withdrew the case
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[box] CASE STUDY 6 ‘How Does A Poor Man Fight MCOCA?’ Photo: Ambarin Afsar SAJID SYED, Jobless drifter IF A class were to be taught on how not to prosecute a case under MCOCA, 37-year-old Sajid Syed’s story would be the perfect lesson. Like Kafka’s Joseph K, Sajid never got to know why he was implicated under MCOCA in a case of alleged extortion, or what was the evidence that kept him in jail for three years. What adds insult to injury is that the extortion case was clearly added as afterthought to the original case of a violent attack on a jeweller at his shop, and Sajid was simply lumped in with two other accused charged for that attack. A man of no fixed work life, Sajid was arrested in October 2006 by a wing of Mumbai Police known as the Anti- Extortion Cell. The police claimed he had made phone calls to one of the two accused who had attacked the jeweller. All three were arrested seven months after the attack on the jeweller in March that year. Police claimed they were henchmen of gangster Faheem Machmach, who reportedly absconded from Mumbai in the 1980s and is said to live in Dubai. Police say Machmach is the right-hand man of the dreaded don, Chhota Shakeel. Like the other two men accused of attacking the jeweller, Sajid, too, was booked under MCOCA. Police claimed he voluntarily confessed his guilt. Sajid is a seasoned player, having done two spells of several months each in the jail in the previous decade. When he was brought before a magistrate, Sajid denied having made any confession. With absolutely no other evidence against him, Sajid should have logically been let go right then. “But,” he says, “The judge sent me back to jail.” Shockingly, the police did not take samples of Sajid’s voice and send it for confirmation to build evidence against him. The police also did not offer any evidence to link him with Machmach. Indeed, the prosecution hardly focused on Sajid, being obsessed with proving the attack on the jeweller. The 28-page judgment of Special MCOCA Judge MR Puranik, delivered on November 3, 2009, barely refers to Sajid, dealing mostly with the case of the other two accused. And what a bumbling case that turned out to be. The two alleged assailants of the jeweller are named Jay and Rahul. At the time of the crime, police said there were three people in the shop: the jeweller, a shop assistant and a female customer. It was the prosecution’s case that the two alleged attackers entered the jeweller’s shop and, after asking to be shown earrings, one attacked and wounded the jeweller. As those inside the shop raised an alarm, the duo fled. The shop assistant gave them chase but failed to nab them. BUT IN court, the jeweller and his shop assistant contradicted each other. The assistant said Jay attacked the jeweller. The jeweller said Rahul attacked him. Earlier, after the men were arrested, the jeweller had been taken to the jail to identify the attackers in what is called a ‘test identification parade’. A jail nominee conducted that entire exercise. This man’s testimony, too, was contradictory. Having witnessed that identification parade, he claimed in the court that the jeweller identified Jay as his attacker. A written report of the same parade, however, said that the jeweller had identified Rahul as his attacker. The female customer who had allegedly been present in the shop when the attack occurred was taken to the jail to identify the accused. She could identify neither. Confused, are you? Read on. The jeweller claimed he was attacked with a knife. The assistant claimed the jeweller was attacked with a chopper, which is a sort of machete. A chopper had been found in the shop after the alleged attackers had fled. The prosecution said that the chopper had been in a bag that was found lying at the door of the shop. But the shop assistant said that he found after returning from his failed chase of the assailants “one bag containing [a] chopper was placed by somebody else in front of the shop”. The police, of course, never found any knife. That’s because they never looked for it. The jeweller was hospitalised after the attack. The police never asked the doctor that operated him if the wound was from a chopper or a knife. The police didn’t even take the chopper to the doctor to ask if it could have been the instrument of the attack. By the way, in all this, there was a fourth accused. Mysteriously, the prosecution let him be discharged before the trial. There is no mention in the judgment who he was, why was he arrested and why he was discharged. The jeweller reportedly received phone calls while still at the hospital, threatening him for ransom. His brother, wife and daughter, too, received such calls. The police never examined his three relatives; nor did it offer them as prosecution witnesses. As already mentioned, the police did not take voice samples of Sajid or Rahul, so there was no way to know if they made those calls. Let’s get back to the confessions. Police claimed both Sajid and Rahul gave voluntary confessions. Both the accused later denied that they had made them voluntarily. “It is specifically stated by the accused no. 3 [Sajid] that he did not commit any offence and he signed [the] confession due to the pressure of the police officers,” the judge wrote in his order. “Accused nos. 1 [Rahul] and 3 have retracted their confessions at the earliest opportunity before the CMM [Chief Metropolitan Magistrate].” Actually, such denial would be unnecessary, for the judge found that the police officer that had recorded Sajid’s confession failed to give him the “statutory warning” that he was “not bound to make the confession and if he did so, such confession may be used as evidence against him”. Wrote the judge: “Thus there are procedural lapses in the matter of recording confessions.” Sajid is both cynical and dismissive of the law. “My denial before the magistrate that I had made a confession is a matter of record,” he says. “But it was worthless. I was still in jail for three years.” It shouldn’t surprise the reader, then, that the judge threw the case out the window, acquitting all three of the accused. He said the prosecution had even failed to prove that a violent attack on the jeweller took place in the first instance.
‘I asked the prosecution several times to show the corroborative evidence against me. They had none’
Sajid met TEHELKA barely 24 hours after he was freed on November 8, 2009, which was six days after the judge acquitted him. His son, who was just six months old when Sajid was arrested three years earlier, hung tentatively on his arm as he talked. “The police claimed that I belonged to the Chhota Shakeel gang,” Sajid says. “I asked the prosecution several times to show corroborative evidence against me. They had none.” Sajid strongly argues that a review committee should be set up to conduct a random check on most litigation under MCOCA to weed out blatantly false cases. Such a committee is indeed envisaged under MCOCA but doesn’t exist. Yes, Sajid knows the law by heart now. Although he has only studied up to the eighth standard, he procured a copy of the law and read it back-toback several times. To be honest, Sajid didn’t quite think he’d get out so quickly: “I had told my wife she should be ready for the long haul.” “My trial lasted only seven days,” Sajid shakes his head in disbelief. “But I was in jail for three years.” He still doesn’t know why. FACT FILE • Arrested for alleged ties with gangster Faheem Machmach. Accused of extortion • Prosecution provided no evidence of his phone calls for extortion, nor of links to Machmach • He denied that he had confessed to his guilt. But he stayed in jail for three years, until his acquittal in November
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[box] CASE STUDY 7 The Grim Tale Of The Azmi Brothers ABRAR AZMI, Perfume mixer ANWAAR AZMI, Construction site supervisor Photo: Ambarin Afsar ABRAR AZMI mixes scents in a backyard perfume factory for five thousand rupees a month. He was born and raised in central Mumbai’s dense Muslim neighbourhood of Bhendi Bazaar, where he lives with his wife and three sons. In the back alleys here, Abrar and the local lads played cricket as children. One of them was Faheem. Almost 20 years ago, Faheem ran away and no one claims to have seen him since. He is now known as Faheem Machmach, the right-hand man of underworld don Chhota Shakeel. “I can’t believe Faheem became a gangster,” chuckles Abrar, rolling his eyes. “Back then, he always got beaten up by everyone else.” On February 10, 2005, Mumbai Police arrested Abrar and a younger brother, Anwaar. Their alleged crime: being gangsters of Faheem Machmach, threatening and extorting money in his name. On February 1, 2005, nine days before their arrest, a local woman had complained to the police that the brothers had accosted her and her daughter in broad daylight on a busy street. She said the brothers threatened they would have Machmach order her and her family killed. The police also arrested a cousin of the Azmi brothers, claiming they had taped a telephone chat between this cousin in Mumbai and Machmach in Dubai. They sent this intercept along with the cousin’s voice sample to the government’s Central Forensic Science Laboratory (CFSL), which subsequently confirmed that the voice on the tape was indeed the cousin’s. IT ALL seemed pat. A special MCOCA judge agreed there was enough evidence to try the brothers for being members of what MCOCA defines as an “organised crime syndicate”. Three months after their arrest, the Azmi brothers were charged under MCOCA. This draconian law makes it virtually impossible for the accused to secure bail. Still, Abrar tried. His plea was, however, turned down, first by the trial judge and then by the High Court. Abrar didn’t have the money to move the Supreme Court. Photo: Ajit Sahi But once the trial began, the case began to unravel. Admittedly, the complainant was a controversial local leader known as a troublemaker. (She passed away before the trial concluded.) In cross-examination, her daughter and son — who claimed to have witnessed the alleged crime — admitted that their family and Faheem Machmach’s had long been hostile neighbours, “not on good terms, [with] constant quibbling and hot exchanges of words”. The siblings also admitted that their family and the Azmis had been friends for years until 2003, when some violence between them turned them into foes. In fact, Abrar’s father, Gulzar Azmi, once arbitrated in a property dispute involving the complainant woman. Gulzar Azmi is a well-known leader among Indian Muslims and currently heads the Maharashtra wing of the Jamiat Ulema-e-Hind. The complainant’s children admitted that their mother had had a long association with the police. On February 1, 2005, the day of the alleged crime, she had met the local DCP, who had asked his subordinates to act on her complaint. The question arose, if the Azmi brothers were indeed gangsters of Machmach, shouldn’t the police have registered a criminal case against them the day the complaint was made? Instead, the police took eight days to register the case. “There is substance in the submission by the defence that this delay might have been used for shaping up the case against the accused and Faheem Machmach,” wrote Special MCOCA Judge MR Bhatkar in her order of November 2007, acquitting all the accused. The judge noted that not once in those eight days did the police meet the complainant to investigate her complaint. In those eight days, not once did the complainant go back to the police to follow up on her complaint.
The Prosecution Could Not Even Offer Such Basic Facts As The Names Of People The Brothers Allegedly Extorted
Of gaping holes, there were more. Allegedly, the Azmi brothers accosted the complainant and her daughter in a busy lane around noon in the heart of their neighbourhood. “The entire incident took place for 12 to 13 minutes,” wrote the judge. “How could the police not get any independent witnesses?” The prosecution claimed the Azmi duo were involved in “criminal activities such as threatening, abusing, assaulting people and recovering money for Faheem Machmach”. But when asked for evidence, it offered the oral claims of none other than the complainant’s son and daughter. When the court asked for specifics of the Azmi brothers’ alleged activities — such as the names of people extorted from and dates — they could offer none. Both admitted they had never received any calls from Faheem Machmach. The prosecution lined up a paan-seller, a public phone booth operator and a barber as witnesses to the alleged activities of the brothers. They, too, failed to give specific instances. “These general submissions cannot prove the offence,” the judge wrote. Most damaging to the case, however, was the matter of the forensic report from the CFSL which supposedly confirmed that Abrar’s cousin had spoken to Machmach. For the report to be admissible as evidence, the law says, it should have been signed by the CFSL’s Director or Deputy Director or Assistant Director. But it was a mere ‘Junior Scientific Officer’ who signed the report. Predictably, the judge threw it out. Why would the CFSL, which routinely sends reports to courts, make this basic mistake, especially in a case involving a mafia don? SO AFTER 33 months and 15 days in jail, the Azmi brothers walked free. Even the state knew that the case against them was indefensibly weak, if not outright fabricated: It did not appeal the trial judge’s order. There is little doubt that had the case been tried under the Indian Penal Code, the Azmis would have had a shot at bail, perhaps right in the first few days after arrest. But MCOCA kept them jailed for three summers. Anwaar is now back in his job as a site manager for a construction contractor. On December 22, 2009, his wife delivered their first child, a son, who Anwaar’s father named Kaab, after the Companion of the Prophet. “I always knew I would be freed because I was innocent,” says Anwaar. “But I was worried, because there were so many MCOCA accused who had been in jail for far longer than us, waiting for their trial.” He pauses, then adds, “We were lucky to get out early.” FACT FILE • The Azmi brothers grew up in the same Mumbai locality where gangster Faheem Machmach was their neighbour and playmate • The brothers were arrested for allegedly threatening a local female leader in the name of Machmach • After nearly three years in jail, the case was thrown out for lack of evidence and unreliable witness statements
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[box] CASE STUDY 8 Married To The Mob And Paying The Price For It GANGUBAI, Housewife Photo: Ambarin Afsar THE THINGS that love can make one do. Gangubai met her future husband when still in her teens. That he was a Muslim and already married didn’t faze her. She converted to Islam and became his wife in 1982. In time, she bore him a son. He kept his promise to give her a separate household. Her husband’s older brother, Sher Bahadur Akram Khan, was a patriarch of the extended family that lived around a shantytown on the picturesque hills of Powai in north Mumbai. On March 20, 2004, the peace of the family was destroyed. Around twilight that day, two activists of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) were attacked and killed in the shantytown with swords and sharp weapons. For this crime, police arrested Khan, three of his sons, a son-in-law, a younger brother, two brothers-in-law and two nephews. They were charged with conspiring to commit and carry out the murders. Three months later, police also arrested Gangubai. They said she gave money to three of the accused, including her son, Amin, after the murders and sent them off to hide at her brother’s. Police said Amin led them to her house where his bloodstained clothes were found. Under the Indian Penal Code (IPC), this crime would attract Section 302, which covers the offence of murder, besides sundry other laws dealing with, among others, unlawful assembly, conspiracy and bearing arms. But the Mumbai Police booked the family under MCOCA. Only members of an organised crime syndicate can be tried under this law. Well, then, said the prosecution, the family was actually a gang: the “Sher Bahadur Akram Khan gang”. All 11 accused moved the Bombay High Court arguing that MCOCA could not be applied to them because they were a family, not an organised crime syndicate. The High Court told them to go back to the Special MCOCA Court. A year and a half later, the MCOCA judge denied their plea, accepting the argument that the Khans were indeed a gang. So the family moved the Bombay High Court again. In December 2006, more than two and a half years after the family members’ arrests, the High Court struck down the charges under MCOCA and ruled that the family be tried under the IPC. Said the High Court: “The mere fact that the accused are related to each other and have committed offences either individually or jointly, would not, in our opinion, lead to the inference that the accused formed an organised crime syndicate.” Once the double murder case went to trial under the IPC, as should have been done in the first place, bail was given to Gangubai because she was not accused of murder but only of being an accessory after the crime. She walked free in February 2007, having spent more than thirty-one months behind bars. IN MAY 2009, a Mumbai sessions Judge who tried the family under the IPC found ten of the 11 accused guilty of the murders and sentenced them to life imprisonment. Gangubai, however, was acquitted. The judge said there was “absolutely no evidence” to show that on the day of the murders of the VHP activists, Gangubai had given Rs 2,000, as alleged, to three of the accused and sent them to her brother’s. “None of the witnesses examined has deposed about this fact,” the judge wrote, adding that there was “no evidence” to prove that she knew that they were offenders or that she wanted to protect them from punishment. Of course, Gangubai’s version of what happened differs vastly from the police’s. According to her, she was visiting her father in Karnataka with her daughter- in-law when the police suddenly arrived there on March 23, 2004, three days after the murders. The police forced her and her daughterin- law into a vehicle and drove them non-stop for a full day, bringing them to Mumbai. “They called me to the police station everyday and said that if Amin doesn’t surrender, they’ll arrest me,” she says. Amin surrendered. Three months later, they arrested her anyway. The only person left behind, Gangubai’s daughter-in-law, Amin’s wife, shifted to her father’s with their little daughter. There is little doubt that Gangubai would never have had to spent two and a half years in jail without bail had she been booked under the IPC and not MCOCA to begin with. The Khan family has now moved the Bombay High Court against their conviction and sought a reversal of that order. “Amin had nothing to do with the murders,” Gangubai says forcefully. “I am sure he, too, will be freed one day.” FACT FILE • Several of Gangubai’s family members, including her son, were arrested by police for allegedly murdering two VHP activists in their shantytown • Three months later, she was also arrested for giving money to three of the accused and sending them to hide at her brother’s place • Gangubai was given bail after the MCOCA charge was dropped. She was eventually acquitted
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[box] ‘MCOCA Has Never Been Misused By Anyone’ Despite the courts throwing out case after case under the draconian law, Mumbai Police Commissioner D Sivanandan defends MCOCA, saying it has succeeded in curbing organised crime. Photo: Deepak Salvi MCOCA was enacted a decade ago to control organised crime in Maharashtra. Has the law made any difference? MCOCA is excellent. It’s been very successful. As far as tackling crime is concerned, it’s the only law in the country with some kind of teeth. It’s the only law that allows police officers of DCP rank and above to record confessions of an accused [as evidence]. TADA and POTA [which also did so] have been scrapped. What is the conviction rate under MCOCA?
Fifty-six percent. What is the reason behind this high conviction rate?
Criminal gangs have been controlled due to several factors. MCOCA is one of them. Earlier, we had the Maharashtra Preventive Detention Act under which about 50 people would be jailed every year. In 1999, [when MCOCA was enacted] we jailed 642. Detention and seizures were used. The gun culture was controlled. Extortionists were arrested and convicted. Encounter [killings] also had a role. Defence lawyers who specialise in MCOCA cases say that the conviction rate is not even 10 percent and that even of those few, about half are overturned by the High Court.
Rubbish. That’s ridiculous. Critics say the police have misused MCOCA a lot.
I don’t agree. Former Mumbai police commissioner RS Sharma was accused under MCOCA in the fake stamp paper scam but the trial court discharged him. Sharma says MCOCA was misused to frame him.
I will not comment about Sharma’s case. You have come to me with a preconceived notion. But even the Supreme Court spoke strongly against the police in Sharma’s case. And so did the trial judge while discharging him.
MCOCA has never been misused by anyone. A law isn’t misused if it’s applied in good faith and enough evidence is collected. But so many of the accused have been acquitted. Just because the judge acquits someone doesn’t mean the acquittal is correct. How many big gangsters have been convicted under MCOCA?
None. Many of the top chaps are abroad. Dawood Ibrahim’s brother Iqbal Kaskar was acquitted.
I will not comment on Iqbal Kaskar’s case. Under MCOCA one can’t get bail easily, so even innocent people spend years in jail. Defence lawyers say a committee should review such cases.
The law is very tight. There’s no need for a review committee. The law has had a serious impact on the underworld. We are subject to the political process. The Supreme Court and High Court are breathing down our necks. Most MCOCA cases are based on confessions given to police officers. Many accused later say the police tortured them into signing fake confessions.
There has been no misuse of confessions in the last 10 years. If a jail inmate confesses to another, it’s admissible as evidence. What’s wrong if confessions are given to police? The Indian Evidence Act says that confessions to police officers cannot be admitted in a trial. TADA and POTA were scrapped because confessions to police were being misused.
We have been demanding for the last 100 years that the [Indian] Evidence Act be amended and police officers above a certain rank be given the right to record confessions. Are you saying that there is no misuse of MCOCA?
Should we do away with electricity because some people get electrocuted? But POTA was scrapped because it was being misused.
[A law like] POTA is needed for India. A law with death penalty should be enacted. That will deter criminals.
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ajit@tehelka.com rana@tehelka.com
What happens to children when their parents are still in the grip of rebellion, asksAastha Atray Banan No lines of control Akash Premson and mother Bandana Photo: Shailendra Pandey ADITYA ROY REMEMBERS a question he asked his parents when he was seven. They had returned home past midnight after attending one of the many soirées they were invited to. He had asked them indignantly, “Why can’t you stay home like other parents?” The 22 year-old musician and martial arts teacher says, “I wanted them to be like other parents. My parents had big parties in the house both before my Xth and XIIth boards! I am the complete opposite. I hate socialising.” His father Sanjoy Roy, the hardworking man behind Teamwork Productions, engine of major cultural events such as the Jaipur lit-fest, while respectful of Aditya’s choices, is completely comfortable with being too cool for his son. “Aditya once told me that if I was going to grow my hair, he didn’t want me coming to his school. And I was like, “Yippee! Let’s grow the hair!’” laughs the 43-yearold. “In our case, it’s more about the parents rebelling against the children,” he says, as he drives off to yet another party. It’s 9.45 pm in a cold January Delhi. Gauri Arora is definitely not at a party. She taps her impeccably manicured nails as she makes a list for the next day: take Gayatri for her Bharatnatyam class at 3, make sure Rajveer takes a nap at 2 pm so he’s fresh for his evening cricket at the park, homework at 6, dinner at 8, television at 9, lights out at 10. She describes memories of nights like these while growing up. “At 10 pm, instead of putting me to sleep, my mother would urge me to accompany her to the new disco. It made me crave the opposite. I need order, a sense of achievement, and above all else, I need convention. I was not her. I am me.” Gauri Arora with her children Photo: Tarun Kumar Sehrawat Gauri has rejected her parents ultracoolness. “You always want what you don’t have. When my mother, dressed in tight corduroys and perched proudly on an Enfield, used to pick me up from school, I cringed as I wanted her to be fat and sari-clad. My schoolmates crowded around her as if she was Amitabh Bachchan! No wonder I am so straightlaced,” says Gauri. In her 1998 book, Promiscuities, author Naomi Wolf tells droll stories of growing up in the 1960s and coming home to pale young men and women draped over her parents’ living room. Her hippie father had advertised seeking interviews with vampires. What boundaries were available for her to transgress, Wolf asked, only half-jokingly. In Promiscuities and her iconic Beauty Myth, Wolf offers glimpses of a girl growing up with straight expectations of herself and the world, saddled with freethinking parents. Her struggles with anorexia and abusive boyfriends came from a desire to be that most boring of creatures: a pretty, thin and nice girl. Gauri’s expectations from her children are not very different: straight-As, clean rooms and good behaviour. “I want them to remain kids as long as they can, because I grew up faster than my years,” she says. After her parents separated, she and her sister, Radha Khopkar (25), continued living with her father, Satish, while their mother, Meena, flitted in and out. “We had no rules. We could be out late or have 10 boyfriends. It was all okay.” Rohini Bahl rejected her maverick upbringing for order. Seen here in red T-shirt with her parents Photo: Shailendra Pandey Her younger sister Radha pipes up, “I had my first joint with my mum, but was scared that if Gauri found out, I’d be done for.” Gauri agrees smilingly. “I started behaving like a 40 yearold when I was only 13 as Radha was my responsibility — seeing that she ate well, did well at school.” She shows no resentment at the unseasonal growing up she did to compensate for her parents’ eternal youth. But it meant a grim decision: “I made up my mind that my children would never face such a predicament. Little people need direction.” In her ultra-nostalgic song, ‘I Wish I Was a Punk Rocker’, British singer Sandi Thom wishes that she had been around in ’77 or ’69 when ‘revolution was in the air’. Though Akash Premson respects his parents’ high ideals, he deplores their disinterest in money. “It’s hard not to romanticise the way they let me grow up. By the age of 12, I had seen more of India by car than my teachers had seen in their lifetimes. My parents did not expect me to be a doctor or an engineer,” says 28-year-old Premson. His first crush was at age six. He remembers his mom making friends with the girl’s family so that he could have play dates! In high school, he began to date Himani (who was accepted by his family without fuss), who is now his fiancée. “I would like to give my children the same kind of freedom but I will make sure they know how to manage money. My mother and I are still living in a rented house,” he says. His mother, Bandana, defends herself and her husband. “My husband and I believed in fun. We travelled. We bought expensive art. It gave us more satisfaction than a fat bank balance. We lived the way we thought right.” To those of us who fetishise the 1960s, convinced we are flower children born too late – and, of course, to those who are apostles of conventional parenting – these may sound like cautionary tales. But look closer. Even these stories are those of success in the ‘real’ world. A 12-year UCLA study indicated that the children of unconventional families do as well in school as children of traditional families. Some research suggests that it is the quality of a lifestyle, not the choice of a particular lifestyle, that is important to children. Unconventional parenting may bring home truths earlier than is considered ‘normal’. A childhood devoid of rules can be a brush with the anarchic and unfair nature of the world, or a fairytale, or a dizzying mixture of both. Like any other kind of childhood. As Philip Larkin said comfortingly, ‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad./They may not mean to, but they do.’
Shahid Siddiqui, 58, Editor of Urdu daily Nai Duniya, is better known for his political avatar. A former close aide of Mulayam Singh Yadav and Amar Singh, Siddiqui surprised many when he left the Samajwadi Party after it bailed out the UPA on the nuclear deal. He switched to Mayawati’s Bahujan Samaj Party, from which he was expelled without any notice. A relaxed Siddiqui shared rare insights on the woman who runs Uttar Pradesh, saying, “I never wanted to be part of her coterie because to be in it, you also have to be sleazy.” An edited version of an hour-long interview withHarinder Baweja Photo: Vijay Pandey Any regrets on being expelled?
Joining the BSP was the biggest mistake of my life. I thought I would be working for Dalits, the backward, poor and for the minorities. Minorities are like orphans in Indian politics, especially the Muslims. Muslims cannot form their own party because that will communalise Indian politics. They are taken for granted by most of the political parties. I thought that with the Dalit-Muslim combination, we can create a new politics in India. That did not happen because there is no discussion on policies in the BSP. You are just dictated because Mayawati is so insecure. She is terrified of the slightest dissent or criticism. Why is Mayawati insecure?
I think she is insecure as a woman and as a Dalit. Whether it was Indira Gandhi or Jayalalitha, most women leaders at the top are insecure. They think society is working against them. They become aggressive and insecure. Another reason is that being a Dalit she may be feeling that she is not accepted. It is a psychological thing. You seem to suggest that insecurity and women go together.
No. They are targeted for their gender because politics is male dominated. Indira Gandhi was targeted because she was a woman. Women who have come into politics have come because of their male counterparts, whether a father or a brother or a husband. Are you hinting at Kanshi Ram being…
(Interrupts) No I’m not hinting at anything. Don’t put words into my mouth. In Tamil Nadu and elsewhere we might have had cases but I’m also not against that. Any relationship that is open and honest is wonderful. Describe Mayawati’s functioning style
I know Maywaitji since 1984 and knew Kanshi Ramji since 1982 when I went to interview him at Regarpura, where he then lived in a small room. And I have seen how hardworking he was. He was one of the great Indian politicians who had understanding of Indian society. He was a great sociologist. He knew the caste system and how it functions better than most sociologists in this country. His mind worked like a computer. I have seen him growing and I have seen Mayawatiji growing in his shadow.
But I will give it to her that she built the party in UP, not Kashi Ramji. That is her contribution. And I also respect her because she came up, unlike so many alone. Kashi Ramji helped of course, but in UP it was she who was building the party not Kashi Ramji. So at one point she was extremely open with her workers. She used to mix with them. But once power came, as she became important, she started distancing herself from them, cut them off mentally. I have seen her erecting walls around her. That I have seen. Today she doesn’t want anybody to tell her anything. Even small things like why the towel was not placed on the chair properly. Because every chair, every podium is covered with a towel. She is afraid of touching the bare ground with her bare hands.
For little things she scolds her workers, yet I don’t see anybody really raising their voice. There was a time when people from different Dalit organisations interacted and gave her feedback, but not any more. Nobody in the party knows just who her advisers are… mainly a few bureaucrats. And she has her own mind of course.
Today they ask me why I’m going to the media. Well it was Mayawati who said you can to the media. You are only person who will be allowed to go to the media and participate in the discussions. Is she afraid of the media or does she think she can do without the media?
Both. She is afraid of the media and believes that it is dominated by the upper caste who are anti-Dalits. She would also say, “I have always won despite opposition from the media, so I don’t need them at all.” What I had been telling her was that if you want to expand the party you will need the media. With the Dalits you may be able to do without the media, but today there’s a growing middle class and even people in rural areas have middle class aspirations. So I told her she should try cultivate the media, even set up a media centre. But she totally refuses to do that. The reason, I’m sorry to say, is that her style of functioning is totally undemocratic, and the media asks critical questions. And she cannot take that. She is unable to take that. So that’s her psyche. This could be because Dalits have been oppressed for thousand of years and they think any hint of criticism is an attack on their Dalit identity. And in the party of course nobody speaks.
‘Mayawati is building statues like Hitler or Saddam Hussein would. She is a dictator not a democrat’
For public meetings people are brought from all around the state. She herself comes at the last moment like a queen, speaks and goes away. The point is this is happening with most of the regional parties, and not just to BSP. This is because we have given the handle of the anti-defection law to regional satraps as a result these parties, many of them which were movements, like Lalu’s party or the Akali Dal, have turned into family enterprises. The family now has the power to throw out anybody who disagrees with its functioning. So you have this contradiction, where you have a democracy but political parties are autocratic. Once in five years you have elections and for five years you have autocratic rule by individuals – the chief minister or his family or those who are financing them. I’m not speaking against Mayawatiji or the BSP, but generally. I am making an academic point. But it was not taken by them and I am not sorry for that. Mayawati made an announcement, saying she was grooming somebody to take over. Now who is this person? You can call Mayawati despotic; you can call her arrogant, but you have to concede that she is a grassrooots politician.
Yes, she is… she is… in fact she was. She was a grassroots worker for nearly 20 years. But after she became chief minister three-four times she grew so fond of these trappings of power that she gradually got cut off from the grassroots. No party worker can meet her anymore. Even as general secretary, I could not meet her. I made hundreds of calls to Lucknow but still could not talk to her. You just talk to Babu Singh Kushwa she says, and he says “OK, karenge karenge, baat karenge”. You cannot talk to her. Even in the Samajwadi Party and the Congress you have meetings. The decision may be taken elsewhere, but there is at least a pretense of democratic functioning. Here you don’t even have that much. She says, “Hamare samaj mein aise hi chalta hai.” Thing is each time she came to power lots of her partymen defected, and this has made her extremely wary. This is why she keeps such an iron grip on the party. Her reasoning is: “If I permit the slightest dissent today, tomorrow a hundred more will be dissenting. So nip the trouble in the bud.” You said that in the BSP one gets orders from the top and no discussion takes place. What kind of orders did you receive? Say I’d be told to go and campaign in some area or support somebody or… that’s it, and it happens very suddenly: “You have to be in Lucknow at 9 am tomorrow.” Now come what may, wherever you are in the world, you’ve got to be there. You wait there, she comes, she makes her speech and goes away. Most of the information comes through the party coordinators who are briefed by people like Nasimuddin Siddiqui or Kushwaha. There is no system.
The thaw in Indo-Russian ties on the back of the Obama invite to Manmohan Singh is a double whammy for India.Harinder Bawejafelt the warmth in Moscow Photo: PIB
EVEN AFTER the Prime Minister’s flight, AI-1 landed in Moscow on December 6, the high-level delegation accompanying Manmohan Singh was not sure if the welcome would extend beyond the ceremonial guard of honour, where Russian soldiers feted the PM in sub-zero temperatures. The minus five degree Celsius temperature was reflective of the chill that has marked Indo-Russia ties of late . The relationship has travelled a fair distance since Indira’s India and Brezhnev’s Soviet Russia; and in the last decade, Moscow has been watching the expanding relationship between India and the US. Manmohan Singh landed in Moscow within a few days of his return from the US, where he was the first state guest to be hosted by President Barack Obama. Moscow was watching once again, and a senior official on board the aircraft said, “We had touted the signing of the nuclear deal between India and Russia as being better than the 123 agreement but had no clarity on whether the deal would indeed go through. The disarmament lobby within Russia’s foreign ministry was opposing the deal. It was finally rescued by the President-Prime Minister combine.” Much of the thaw took place at the informal dinner hosted by the Russian President Dmitry Medvedev at his dacha, his home on the outskirts of Moscow. “There was a lot of warmth inside,” Foreign Secretary Nirupama Rao told the media team accompanying the PM. The warmth between Medvedev and Manmohan Singh was visible when they sat down in a gold-gilded room in the Kremlin, to announce an ‘agreement on cooperation in the use of atomic energy for development purposes’. Put simply, Russia will help India build nuclear reactors. Fuel supply guarantees also ensure that the contracts will remain valid even in the event of another nuclear test by India. The fuel supply agreements help allay the fear that India’s strategic options are sharply curtailed after its nuclear deal with US. While the pact with the US makes it amply clear that all cooperation would be off in case India tested, the one with Russia goes many steps further — it will complete work already in process.
The Indo-Russian nuke deal will remain valid even if India conducts another nuclear test
The importance of the trip lies in the fact that India has signalled that if it can dine with the Obamas one day, it can also break bread at a snow-lined dacha, the next. Russia, on its part, made its point through the near finalisation of the Admiral Gorshkov aircraft carrier deal. It was no coincidence that while Singh was winging his way to Moscow, a Russian team was hard at bargain on Gorshkov’s final price in New Delhi. Russia has been India’s main military supplier and the frosty relations between them on account of its slipping market share. Russia had sent more than a subtle message when Pranab Mukherjee was frisked in Moscow on a trip during the previous UPA tenure. The thaw in the relationship was displayed by the fact that the Prime Minster came to the media enclosure of the special aircraft only on the return journey. The agreements had been inked by then.
Amar Singh has alleged that you have grown bigger than Mulayam Singh Yadav in the SP, that you are Mulayam’s weakness. I am a poor man. After 34 years in politics, I don’t have a car or a big bank balance. I live within my means. But I have tremendous goodwill. The rich and their fixers attack me because I am pro-people and hugely popular. The gentleman you name is widely described in politics by a word that I will not speak. He conspired to force the entry of Kalyan Singh, the murderer of the Babri Masjid, into the SP. It is critical to expose such people. Amar Singh’s supporters say that you oppose the candidature of Jayaprada for the Rampur Lok Sabha seat. Is that true? It is amazing how a private relationship can so influence a man that he is willing to put the entire party at stake for it. It compromises your dignity when your private relationship becomes a talking point. Why should he anyway want this so desperately? What is his interest in her? But aren’t you holding the party to ransom by opposing Jayaprada’s candidature, dividing it deeply at the time of Lok Sabha elections?
There is no Jayaprada issue. The real issue is the entry of Kalyan Singh into the SP. I have deep respect for Mulayam Singh Yadavji, but I despair at what has happened to him.
The real issue is Kalyan Singh’s entry. I respect Mulayamji but I despair at what has happened to him
We must remember that even though Mulayamji saved the Babri Masjid in October 1990 by ordering police to fire [on the Kar Sevaks], the Muslims didn’t vote for the SP. The Muslims voted SP only after the mosque was demolished [in 1992]. Don’t you understand that the Muslims won’t vote for the SP if you keep Kalyan Singh in your party? It is said that Kalyan Singh is forgiven. How can the Muslims forgive him? Will the Muslims then desert the SP?
Tragically, the Muslims see themselves as third-rate citizens. Who will speak for them if we won’t? Have the Congress and the BSP made overtures to you to join them?
I am a useful man so obviously others think I’ll bring them benefits. But I have great personal regards for Netaji [Yadav]. I have toiled 18 years to consolidate the SP, and not as a wheelerdealer but as a grassroots politician. I have worked harder than Mulayamji to make the party what it is today.
Kashmir: 20 Years Later Normalcy is a dangerous smokescreen. Beneath it, the valley is in the grip 0f a psychological siege. It needs political balm, not military might, saysHarinder Baweja. Photographs byAbid Bhat Cordoned off Armed forces guard the street during a shutdown in Srinagar SOON, DECEMBER 8, 2009, will be a date in the past — another reminder of Kashmir’s long history of violence. For the record, it marks 20 years of insurgency. It was on this day, two decades ago, that Rubaiya Sayeed — daughter of the then home minister Mufti Mohammad Sayeed – was kidnapped. It was also the day when tens of thousands of ordinary Kashmiris took to the streets, shouting azadi. A day when the youth openly brandished their Kalashnikovs and mothers took pride in putting mehendi (henna) on their sons’ hands, kissing them on their foreheads and sending them paar (across the border into Pakistan) for training. Twenty years ago, young Kashmiri boys were garlanded and feted when they returned as trained warriors; warriors who everyone thought would help ‘liberate’ them from India, then seen only as a brutal occupational force. In those heady, romantic days, Jawaharlal Nehru’s unkept promise of a plebiscite took centrestage and the Valley began its long tryst with violence; mass-backed violence that took the state government headed by Farooq Abdullah and the Central government by VP Singh by total surprise. But this piece is not about the past. It is about the present. It is about the deep psychological siege that envelopes the Valley like a shroud. Death, destruction, unending periods of curfew and hartals have transformed what was once jannat into a place that now boasts of a vocabulary unknown to other parts of the country. The administration and the large security apparatus describe it variously as having “surface normalcy” and a conflict zone that has been “contained”. On the surface – 20 years later – Srinagar can well pass off for any other city. Fortified bunkers still dot the landscape and armed jawans, their fingers always on the trigger, are a common sight. But the state capital appears to have fought its way out of its cold and bare look. A new visitor or a first-time tourist can well be taken in by the traffic snarls, the stark beauty of multi-coloured chinar leaves that are so a part of Kashmir’s early winter and the busy look that the boulevard facing the weed-laden Dal lake wears – but it all fits into the ‘containment’ that the babus in North Block pat themselves for. Scratch the surface and, for a moment, forget the images of the saffron fields, the majestic mountains that ring the Dal lake, the early snowfall over Gulmarg’s meadow, and a whole new reality will stare you in the face. Try and make sense of this reality and you will see what 20 years of violence have done to an entire population of five million. Every family in this large conflict zone is an example of collateral damage. Every member carries scars of being an endless prisoner of war. Everyone’s speech is littered with words like mujahid, bandook (gun), graves, yateem (orphan) and bloodshed.
On the surface, Srinagar can pass off for any other city. But this fits into the ‘containment’ policy that North Block babus now pat themselves for
The words come easy. They are a part of the local vocabulary. Meet young Ashfaq Mir. He is only 11 years old and now lives in Raahat Manzil, an orphanage on the outskirts of Srinagar. Most part of his day is now spent in the company of 460 boys — all orphans of violence; all bound by a common sense of fear and grief. And listen to Ashfaq talk: “They came through the forest holding Kalashnikovs. They stood in the street near our home and asked my father for directions. Abbu didn’t want to go with them but they forced him. You can’t argue with them, not when they are wielding Kalashnikovs. There is an army camp around our house because it is not far from the border with Pakistan. The mujahideen were not scared that an army camp was nearby.Mujahideen ne fire mara (the militants opened fire) and killed my abbu. I don’t know why he was killed but others near my house said he was killed because the mujahid said he was a mukhbir (informer). My mother goes to his grave and cries. She has now started teaching drawing. She comes here sometimes to meet me and says I am better off here because she also has a sister and brother to look after. I get free education and food here. The day passes easily but at night I feel scared and have bad dreams. A djinn kills a man and I can see blood all over this man. I have spoken to a doctor and he has given me some medicines but the dream persists…” Wailing wall A mother breaks down as she looks at the photograph of her son among the missing Notice the choice of words. It is not just that the vocabulary of young Ashfaq is striking or that it is littered with words like guns, firing, crackdown, death and graves. It is the ease, the matter-of-fact manner in which these words are delivered that is stunning. Ashfaq was only seven when his father was killed. He hails from Karna in Tangdhar, a 90-minute drive from Srinagar, but he could have been from anywhere in the Valley. From a remote village in Kupwara, four hours from Srinagar, or from Anantnag, 50 km from the state capital. There is no town or village in Kashmir that hasn’t been touched by violence; no child whose young mind has not been scarred. Ashfaq is not the only midnight’s child. Nor the only one who has dropped out of childhood and grown up in quick time, mostly to personal brushes with violence and its consequences. Shakib Dar, a friend of Ashfaq’s, speaks in a language that breaks your heart. He is only six and when asked about his father, he says, “They have kept a big stone, a very big stone slab on top of my father so he can’t come home from the Idgah. I keep telling my mother to remove that slab but she doesn’t listen. She just cries.” His mother lives in one of Srinagar’s downtown localities, which was home to scores of Kashmiri Pandit families. When Ashfaq goes to visit his mother, he plays in the ruins of homes that once belonged to these Pandit families, but he is unaware about the original occupants of these homes. Once it was impossible to think of a Kashmir without Pandits. Today, it is difficult to find one there.
Would a blanket ban on prepaid mobile phones in any other state of India be acceptable? Harinder Baweja Illustration: Anand Naorem FIRST THINGS first – the powerful government of India and its agencies do not sewem to consider Kashmiris as their own citizens. Too strong a statement, some would say, but here are some choice examples of insensitivity: a Kashmiri model incarcerated for months before being let off for lack of evidence, the Services team refusing to go to Srinagar to play a match and now, 39 lakh innocent Kashmiris — Indians, we keep repeating — without mobile connectivity, only because Home Minister P Chidambaram has decided that pre-paid SIM cards are a security risk. This is not the first time communications in the Valley have been curtailed. For some years now, phone lines between Kashmir and Pakistan have been jammed and families divided by the Line of Control for no fault of theirs have no means of talking with each other. Every now and then, when troops are being moved in and out of the Valley, Internet connectivity is frozen. But this summary ban of pre-paid connections has literally left Kashmiris speechless. Consider the timing too — the ban was imposed immediately after Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Congress president Sonia Gandhi returned from the state where the Prime Minister offered a dialogue for peace. That they also inaugurated a railway line between Qazigund and Anantnag for better connectivity is irony that has not escaped the Kashmiris and Kashmiri youth, the constituency that the Prime Minister tried to reach out to. Sensitivity and compassion apart, the Home Ministry’s order lacks common logic – supposedly, the standards of proof of identity required for pre-paid connections are not stringent enough. How come all the babus in North Block could come up with no plan to strengthen these standards short of a blanket ban? And if post-paid numbers can be monitored, why does the same principle not apply across the board? The problem is that we are either a wimp state or a plain paranoid one Either way, it shows us up as an unthinking lot. Some years ago, when the bus service between Srinagar and Muzaffarabad was still on the table, the Home and External Affairs ministries were concerned that terrorists would be its main passengers. Perhaps Ajmal Kasab and his nine accomplices could have saved themselves the trouble of going through marine training – if they had bothered merely to purchase a bus timetable.
The SIM cards used in the 26/11 attacks were procured not from Srinagar, but from Delhi and Kolkata
If Manmohan Singh’s recent trip to the Valley was aimed at addressing the deep-seated alienation that every Kashmiri feels, his advisors should be letting him know that the Home Ministry’s move has touched a raw nerve. If mobile connectivity is important to each one of us — no matter which part of the country we live in — it is of that much more importance in Kashmir. In all the years of the insurgency, when cellular phone towers had not scaled the Valley, men would not leave home without tucking a scrap of paper with their address on it into their pockets. Unsure of returning home safely, they carried those pieces of paper with them so that if they were killed, at least their bodies could reach home. In today’s smothering atmosphere of insecurity that still surrounds Kashmiri families, the mobile phone has replaced that piece of paper. But this is not something that will strike the bureaucrats occupying the corridors or power. For them – Kashmir remains a piece of prime real estate; the crown on India’s head; an unalienable part that has to be kept at any cost. Surely Chidambaram knows that the 10 terrorists of 26/11 carried Indian SIM cards that they activated as soon as they reached Mumbai. Those cards had not been procured from Srinagar but from Delhi and Kolkata. Does the solution lie in banning mobile connectivity for 39 lakh people or in improving intelligence? The answer is a no brainer.
The struggle in the sprawling forests of Chhattisgarh tells the bloody story of the state, the naxals and the people caught in the crossfire Ajit Sahi, Editor-at-Large Cockfight Op Green Hunt is bound to create uncertainty for tribals Photo: Vijay Pandey FIRST, A DISCLAIMER: I do not support, justify or approve of the Naxals’ creed of violence. I don’t even believe that they can secure for their peoples the lofty goals of liberty, justice and equity by the means of violence. As Mahatma Gandhi powerfully argued through his public actions and in his copious writings on human history, no one — not even a State — can sustain a moral order using the immoral means of violence. Indeed, Gandhi’s refusal to seek from the British a pardon for Bhagat Singh, Rajguru and Sukhdeo brought him ridicule at the time, and is still unforgiven by millions of followers of the Shaheed-e-Azam. But Gandhi — pardon the expression — stuck to his guns in opposing the creed of violence, irrespective of the practitioner. On March 23, 1931, after the British hanged the trio, Gandhi wrote: “These heroes had conquered the fear of death. Let us bow to them a thousand times for their heroism. But we should not imitate their act. In our land of millions of destitute and crippled people, if we take to the practice of seeking justice through murder, there will be a terrifying situation. Our poor people will become victims of our atrocities. By making a dharma of violence, we shall be reaping the fruit of our own actions.” Gandhi could well be speaking for the millions of Chhattisgarh’s tribals, who today face a terrible fate as both the Naxals and the State have adopted the dharma of violence and arguably stare at the worst face-off in the Naxals’ 40-year insurgency. It would be futile to indulge in crystal ball gazing on the likely outcome of Operation Green Hunt, the all-out paramilitary offensive against the Naxals that’s already dug in heels in south Chhattisgarh and is expected to turn full-blown in November. Watchers fear that the State will end up killing far more non-Naxal innocent tribal people than the Naxals, who have been entrenched in the deep forests for over four decades. But this is not about condemning the Naxals’ or the State’s violence. This is about asking hard questions about why the Naxal violence exists. Again, Gandhi’s writing on the day of Bhagat Singh’s martyrdom could well describe both the Naxal and her supporters among the tribal populations. Wrote Gandhi: “Bhagat Singh was not a devotee of non-violence, but he did not subscribe to the religion of violence. He took to violence due to helplessness and to defend his homeland”(italics mine). Gandhi could be speaking of the “helplessness” of thousands of Chhattisgarh tribals who’ve been driven into the arms of the Naxals due to the terrorist violence let loose since 2005 by the controversial police-backed tribal militia Salwa Judum (literally: Peace March), who have killed, maimed, burnt, hacked, raped the tribals and continue to do so. This is news that you are never likely to hear from PM Manmohan Singh or Home Minister P Chidambaram, who only tell you that the Naxals are the biggest terrorist threat to India. They and their echo chambers in the media resonate with a singular narrative, crassly distilled by our learned home minister as “you-are-either-with-‘us’-orwith- the-Naxals”. Anyone who so much as questions the justness or even the efficacy of Operation Green Hunt is decried as a double-faced ‘Leftist intellectual’ who must be condemned for supporting the insane violence of “India’s worst enemies”. This narrative goes like this: the Naxals are gun-toting, crazed ideologues who reject the State and have vowed to replace it with a non-democratic Maoist-Communist State. (“I would not like to live in a Naxal State,” said filmmaker Sudhir Mishra — who’s made a movie on the Naxal quagmire — on a CNN-IBN show last week. Ergo, he seemed to suggest, the take-no-prisoners Operation Green Hunt is justified.)
Anyone who so much as questions the justness or even the efficacy of Operation Green Hunt is decried as a double-faced‘Leftist intellectual’
The narrative further says that these terrorist Naxals are hardened beasts that kill our policemen with utter brutality, ambushing them, beheading them. Who in their right minds could ever even appear soft on such hateful beings? After 9/11, when US President George Bush facetiously argued that the terrorists attacked his country because “they hate our freedoms”, veteran British reporter of the Middle East war theatre, Robert Fisk — the world’s only journalist to have interviewed Osama bin Laden thrice — said that if the inquiry into a robbery must begin with the motive, the question to ask is: why did the 9/11 perpetrators carry out these heinous acts? Similarly, India deserves to know: what is the Naxals’ motive in relentlessly killing the police and security agencies like beasts? Here’s why.
The villagers who had found an answer in Gandhian methods of resistance are now being pushed towards the Naxals due to State oppression
On October 12, 2009, police swarmed the district collector’s office in Jagdalpur, a small town in south Chhattisgarh. They were there to prevent thousands of villagers from storming a jan sunwai (public hearing) called to debate the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) report for a proposed Tata steel plant in the district. Legally, this meeting should have been open to all, especially to the 6,000-odd people of the 10 villages near Jagdalpur that the steel plant will gobble up. THERE IS strong resistance in at least six of these 10 villages to be displaced from their lands for the project. Most people have refused to accept compensation for land. Four of these six villages (Kumbli, Dhuragaon, Takaraguda and Sirisguda) passed resolutions in gram sabhas during October 2-6 asking the district administration to postpone the public hearing due to the climate of uncertainty created by Operation Green Hunt. About 1,000 letters on these resolutions were sent to the district collector. The helpless A tribal woman whose husband was killed by the SPOs Photo: Himanshu Kumar Of course, the district collector didn’t postpone the hearing. Instead, the police set up barricades along the 30-km stretch from the villages to Jagdalpur, and stopped all buses so that villagers who might protest the Tatas’ project don’t reach the public hearing. About 25 villagers, led by former CPI MLA Manish Kunjam, did reach the public hearing. “We asked them, where would the effluence from the steel plant be dumped?” Kunjam told me over the phone. “They had no answer.” Kunjam says the Tatas’ EIA report (prepared by Dastur & Co) has failed to meet the standards set by two crucial policies that govern the displacement of tribals for industrial projects: the National Rehabilitation Policy and the Panchayat Extension to the Scheduled Areas Act. According to both, the EIA report for an industrial project that would displace tribal people must also look into the “social impact” besides the environmental impact. “There is no mention of the ‘social impact’ in the report,” says Kunjam. The Indian Constitution, through Schedules 5 and 6, gives special status to the tribal people. Further, by signing a UN treaty in 1957, India had promised that displaced tribals would be given good land in lieu of that acquired. Of course, this guarantee didn’t work for the poor tribals of the Narmada Valley earlier this decade, as the Supreme Court allowed dams on the river which displaced millions of villagers, on the grounds that such action met “overriding national interest”. But such an argument could hardly be pressed in the courts in favour of a steel plant. No wonder then that the Centre and the Chhattisgarh government are restive as the Tatas’ project is delayed because of the villagers’ refusal to part with land. Technically, the Tatas have completed the ‘land acquisition process’. Some villagers have initiated a Chhattisgarh High Court lawsuit arguing against the Tata project, but few have faith in the outcome of the judicial process, knowing how slowly that wheel always turns. It must be said that the steel plant has support in and around Jagdalpur town, perhaps due to the belief that it will bring jobs. Two months ago, the Naxals killed a local politician, Vimal Meshram, who had vociferously supported the steel project. Activists working in Bastar for long say the Naxals had little presence in Lohandiguda, where the 10 villages are located, until the Tatas’ project controversy warmed up. Today, unsurprisingly, the Naxals are said to have struck roots in the region. ON THE day — October 12 — the government turned the public hearing on the Tata EIA into a farce, long-time Bastar resident and Gandhian activist Himanshu Kumar had visitors late at night at his makeshift ashram in the smaller town of Dantewada, west of Jagdalpur. These were survivors of attacks by the police and Special Police Officers (SPOs) drawn from the Salwa Judum. While the media highlighted the Naxals’ beheading of policemen, allegations that the police and Salwa Judum-SPOS have been killing tribals and creating terror in Bastar forests have been consigned to the media’s black hole. Sitting through the night to take their testimonies, Kumar prepared a list of people who have been killed in two attacks in the last three weeks, on September 17-18 and then on October 1. Here are just some of them: • SPOs killed Madvi Deva of village Gachhanpalli at a rivulet on September 17. Another village’s Patel claimed seeing Deva being buried in the Chintagupha police station compound. • CRPF men and SPOs cut off the breasts of 70-year-old Dudhi Muye, an invalid who could not walk, and stabbed her to death on September 17. • CRPF and SPOs caught Madkami Muke of village Gachhanpalli and tied her up with her own sari. They beat, stabbed and shot her husband in front of her. Muke saw the attackers stab and shoot Madvi Joga, 60, in his field. She saw them strip 35-year-old Madvi Hidma, stab and shoot her. • Also in Gompad village, four of a family — Madvi Bajar, 45, his wife Madvi Subbi, his married daughter, Kartam Kanni, 20, and younger daughter Madvi Mutti, 15 — were killed by SPOs. The attackers cut off the tongue and fingers of Kartam Kanni’s two-year-old son. • Muchaki Aanda of Bhandarpadar village and his nephew, Madvi Deva, were returning from Andhra Pradesh when the police caught them. They were hacked to death with axes and knives, their bodies dumped near corn fields. Two villagers informed Deva’s mother, Madvi Joge, of their killing. On October 11, Kumar and several other activists and lawyers travelled south of Dantewada to visit Nendra village. Until last year, Nendra had been a ghost town, after the Salwa Judum burnt it down two years ago, forcing residents to flee. Kumar’s NGO, Vanvasi Chetna Ashram (VCA), had had it rebuilt and persuaded the villagers to return. Within hours of the activists’ visit to the village, news of their presence spread quickly. More than 200 people from villages nearby assembled there, converting the meeting into a people’s tribunal. Since September the SPOs have killed wantonly in Nendra. Six people have gone missing. In the last two months, as a precursor to Operation Green Hunt, police have harassed VCA activists. One volunteer has been jailed and tortured on false charges. Ironically, the Naxals, too, distrust Kumar, especially because of his efforts to repopulate the villages burnt down by Salwa Judum. You see, the people of those villages have found an answer away from both the Naxals and the Indian State, in Kumar’s Gandhian methods of resistance. Many of those who have gone back to their villages had been eager to turn the Naxals away. But now, of course, the renewed Salwa Judum violence and Operation Green Hunt could once again quickly fatten the Naxals’ enrollment registers. Such is the scale of the Indian State’s violence that it is turning even Kumar increasingly despondent. “I stare dumbly at all these people who come to me, the old man who saw his daughter raped and son shot dead, the young wife who was raped repeatedly, the family whose house was burnt down,” Kumar said to me one night on the phone from Dantewada, unable to sleep. “They keep saying to me: help us. I keep quiet. Because how do I help them?” And then, he added: “I am too much a son of Mahatma Gandhi and Vinoba Bhave to ever leave the path of nonviolence. But I look at these people and wonder, if I were a tribal person, raped, shot, abused, humiliated, wouldn’t I, too, pick up the gun to defend my family, my home, my lands, my forests?”
A Dalit Organisation In Kerala Is Accused Of Terrorist Links Ajit Sahi,Editor-at-Large Men in black DHRM activists Photos: Ajit Sahi AT FIRST sight, 27-year-old VV Selvaraj looks more the assistant manager with Idea Cellular that he was until six years ago than the firebrand — and controversial — dalit leader he has quickly turned out to be in Kerala. He appears even less the man with the dubious distinction of being India’s first dalit activist the police say they are probing for possible links with terrorism, as they indeed are. It all started on the morning of September 23, 2009, when Siva Prasad, 61, a retiree in an idyllic suburb 50 km north of the state capital Thiruvananthapuram, was brutally attacked with swords on his morning walk and died on the way to the hospital. Once a driver for US Embassy officials in New Delhi, Prasad earned enough to build a house in this suburb of Varkala, where he returned 13 years ago to join his wife, daughter and son. By evening, police had arrested K Das, a top functionary of the Dalit Human Rights Movement (DHRM), a quasi-political outfit floated by Selvaraj in December 2007, and accused him of masterminding the killing. Over the next few days, six others, including DHRM’S legal adviser, known as ‘Advocate Asokan’, were picked up for Prasad’s murder. Then, on September 29, Kerala Director- General of Police (DGP) Jacob Punnoose made a stunning claim. “We know the existence of the organisation [DHRM] and its activities,” he told reporters at Kochi. “We are now looking into [allegations] whether it has any terrorist links.” The state’s topmost police officer’s sensational claim brought sharp focus on Selvaraj’s fledgling outfit. The police are yet to offer any evidence to back the DGP’s claim. (The DGP’s office said he was travelling overseas and unavailable for comment.) Prasad’s widow, Saraswati S, told TEHELKA that her husband had no political interests, and she hadn’t heard of the DHRM until the police told her that the group had killed her husband. Varkala police chief, P Anil Kumar, refused to divulge their leads on DHRM’S involvement in the murder. “They killed Prasad to get public attention and prove their strength in their ranks,” Kumar told TEHELKA.
‘DHRM teaches against drug addiction and alcoholism and encourages dalit education. How can it be a terrorist organisation?’ SHASHIKALA, 44, DHRM Member
In Varkala, a clutch of villages with roughly 40,000 people, the divide among dalits over the DHRM has got sharper since the murder. Shiv Sena activist N Babu — yes, Bal Thackeray’s party has struck roots here — claims that DHRM men regularly attack dalits, including him, who refused to join them. “They are criminals,” Babu says. Several women in his municipal ward, with about 300 dalit families, claim DHRM men often roughed them up. Hapless DHRM members Podiyan and Shantha, whose son Shivalal is among the missing But then, many others in the same ward swear by the DHRM. “My husband would drink all day and was a total waster,” 29-year-old Kochumol, a mother of three, says. “He turned a teetotaler after attending DHRM study circles.” Soon, she followed him to these Sunday gatherings where, over five hours, Ambedkar’s life would be recalled and advice given on daily affairs. Cultural shows at the end were a big hit. Despite their meagre earnings as wage labourers — they call themselves ‘coolies’ — everyone would gladly pay Rs 30 for the events. But today, Kochumol’s husband, also named Babu, has gone underground, fearing arrest. Selvaraj says 35 DHRM men are in police custody or jails, picked up over the last three weeks. Hundreds have possibly run away. In village Thachode, Podiyan, 52, and his wife, Shantha, are clueless on the whereabouts of their son, Shivalal. All three are DHRMmembers. The say that on September 22, a day before Prasad’s murder, two plainclothes policemen dragged Shivalal away. “My son has never caused anyone harm,” says Shantha. “I beg the police to free him.” (Varkala police chief Anil Kumar denied that Shivalal was in their custody.) For now, DHRM has stopped all activities. Having taken anticipatory bail, Selvaraj is lying low. He called this reporter to a village in Ernakulam district, 260 km north of Thiruvananthapuram along the coast, to a house not his own. After the interview (see box), he quickly left the area. Selvaraj’s fear of the police may not be entirely misplaced. When I visited dalits in Podiyan’s village on October 12, about a dozen policemen landed up suddenly and began questioning me. “Your T-shirt had us worried,” their boss said.
‘DHRM activists are the prime accused in Siva Prasad’s murder. Now people want to have nothing to do with them’ V SIVANKUTTY, BJP District President, Thiruvananthapuram
HIS REFERENCE is to the black T-shirts with Ambedkar’s face, which Selvaraj made mandatory for DHRM members. Selvaraj also mandated they wear jeans, a practice few follow since the arrests began. Selvaraj may have a point in saying that neither the political parties nor the government has taken kindly to the DHRM. In a state where centuries old anti-dalit violence is legendary, DHRM has spread its influence quickly by articulating the dalits’ desire for dignity. DHRM also issued I-cards to its volunteers. Selvaraj says its total membership topped 10,000. Alarmingly for the political parties, it has political ambitions. A DHRM activist fought — and lost — this year’s Lok Sabha elections as an Independent from the Attingal constituency, winning about 5,000 votes. Perhaps the BJP, striving to grow influence among Kerala dalits, feels the greatest threat from the DHRM. “I was once a BJP member,” says Selvaraj. “But dalits need to be on their own because every political party treats them as pawns.” For now, though, Selvaraj’s social reform and political ambitions are subordinated to the needs to extricate his and his outfit’s name from charges of terrorism.
