Mumbai's Gangland Tales

Reading Dongri to Dubai by S Hussain Zaidi was like going through a guided tour of the evolution of organized crime in Mumbai. However my attempt here is not to do any formal review of the book, but recount some of the interesting nuggets in the bygone era.

When the country became independent it had espoused a brand of Fabian socialism, which later came to be known as Nehruvian socialism. The country was to be developed according to five year plans with emphasis on the public sector. The 'blood sucking' capitalists (some of them actually lived up to that reputation) were to be restricted using licence permit raj.

Another major credo of the Indian Government back then was 'self reliance' and hence goods produced by local manufacturers were to be encouraged and protected using prohibitively high customs duty on imported goods. During the Indira Gandhi era it was succinctly expressed in a slogan 'Be Indian, Buy Indian'. To be fair to them the import duty was there even during the British era, but the Indian government honed it as a potent weapon to earn revenue and keep the native manufacturing units ticking.

Hence the Indian middle class had to make do with electronic goods, vehicles and consumer products manufactured within the shores of the country. As for consumer electronic goods such as radio, record players, cassette tape recorders (both reduced to museum pieces in this pen-drive era) and watches the technology used by domestic manufacturers were quite primitive, when compared with their German and Japanese counterparts. There were also many fly-by-night operators who took customers for a ride by pawning of fake versions of globally famous brands like Phillips and later Sony.

All this only whetted the appetite for 'phoren' products and ripened the prospects of a grey market. Smuggling in independent India started off as means of undercutting the import duty. One of the early pioneers who thought on these lines was Haji Mastan. He felt if he can bring in these goods without paying import duty, he can make a huge profit. As a justification for all this he professed that import duty was relic of British India and hence need not be respected. He went on to capture India's imagination and even acted as muse to many of the Bollywood script writers.

Similarly as part of this austerity mantra the import of gold was restricted. But for Indian household the lure of gold has been second nature and cuts across all class barriers and even eras. Even today it is a major bugbear for finance ministry mandarins battling with the country's runaway import bills. So to satiate this craving the smuggling of gold began and soon it proved many times more lucrative than electronic goods.

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Haji Mastan rose to prominence when the organised crime in Mumbai was at its age of innocence - when there was little khoon kharaba and gang wars meant only fisticuffs and knife fights. Mastan himself was too suave for all this and had outsourced this function to guys like Varadarajan Mudaliar and Karim Lala.

But for his stint in jail around Emergency period, this dock-worker-turned-smuggler was fortunate enough to enjoy the riches he had aspired for (had a Merc and lived in plush South Bombay locality) and even got the luxury of retiring from crime. He later went on to give interviews to mainstream newspapers and magazines like any public figure.

This is something none of his successors could achieve. Their lives remained stuck in the mean streets of Dongri and Byculla (or holed up in places like Dubai and Bangkok) and they often gave up the ghost to the bullets of either rival gangs or the police. These gangland wars got meaner and bloody and reached its gory climax during the infamous shootout at Lokhandwala. They also acquired a communal colour after the Babri Masjid demolition riots.

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The day Dawaood's brother Sabir died in a shootout in 1981 he was romancing with his paramour in a Premier Padmini Fiat. It was the same year when Maruti Suzuki rolled out its first car, which later proved to be a game changer and thoroughly overhauled the carscape on Indian streets. Nowadays apart from some rickety old taxis in Mumbai, Premier Padmini has for all purposes been banished from Indian roads.

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Lastly during my stay at Mumbai I had often heard about the Congress House (located near Grant Road station)  and the notoriety associated with it, though never bothered to know how that place got such a name. It seems the place had seen nobler days in the past. During the days of freedom struggle Congress stalwarts had set up base there. However by 1970s it became a haven for modern day slavery - flesh trade. 

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