#3 India needs more cops like this fellow
Bombay's Dirty Harry counts 103 kills in war on gangsters
Broad-shouldered and six-feet (1.83-metres) tall, Pradeep Sharma keeps a .38-calibre quick-action revolver within easy reach as he drives through the slums and bylanes of this seaside city in a jeep with dark-tinted windows. An AK-47 lurks in a squash bag on the back seat.
Zig-zagging through the bustling financial and entertainment capital for possible wanted gangsters -- he eyes a street toughie outside a teashop and notes the motorcycle that just pulled up next to him. In this game, no one is to be trusted.
Sharma, 42, is one of the "famous five" cops selected 15 years ago to put an end to daylight shootouts and street killings of businessmen and film dons.
Their brief was simple: fight fire with fire.
Sharma claims to have personally killed 103 gangsters of the total 350 police say have been gunned down in the past 10 years by the entire team. He says he and his colleagues swoop down the backstreets and dark alleys, chase gangsters and gun them down if they refuse to surrender.
Their critics say the gangsters are killed in cold-blood -- often driven to a lonely spot outside the city, told to run and then shot. Human rights activists breathe down their necks, saying that because these Dirty Harrys shoot first and ask questions later, they're no better than the gangsters they kill.
But with unblinking conviction, Sharma denies any of his 103 hits were in cold-blood.
"They fired at me. I fired in self-defence. They had weapons. Obviously they were not going to a temple," he says.
Sharma's reward for being an "encounter specialist", a term used for the bunch of quick-draw cops, is a life of constant danger, including for his family. "I am like a World Cup for the mafia gangs. Each one of them wants me dead," Sharma says while suddenly turning the wrong up a one-way street on a muggy spring afternoon.
"I have to do this -- enter no-entry zones, one-way streets, jump red lights to dodge them. They could be waiting anywhere. But they can never get me," he says, scanning the streets for that lone gunman who could make his day.
Sharma's exploits are fodder for Bollywood movies along the lines of Clint Eastwood's "Dirty Harry".
"How quick are you with it?" I ask, pointing to the gun tucked under his thigh. In a flash he has pulled out the weapon and is aiming into the street through the windscreen.
"This quick!" Sharma boasts in true cowboy style. "It's a good revolver. It doesn't have a locking mechanism -- always loaded, always ready for action."
-- 'The gangs of Bombay are now on the run' --
Bombay is India's sprawling lifestyle mecca where models sashay down the ramp and stars flit in and out of five-star hotels while the middle class jostles for space in cluttered squalor and the teeming poor sweat it out in dark, labyrinthine slums that spread for miles.
The city's criminal gangs deal in a shadowy world of slush money and fight for control over gaudily-lit bars featuring sari-clad girls with drooping cleavages who dance to the latest Bollywood tunes while men shower them with wads of rupee notes.
What began as mugging by thugs and gambling rackets in the 1960s soon swelled into a full-blown Mob as thousands of poor Indians began migrating to the city in their quest for quick fortunes.
When disappointed, they took to guns -- to snatch what they could not earn.
Today, 14 million people fight for space in its narrow streets, a maze of open drainage-lined ghettos, bursting local trains and towering skyscrapers.
The leading gang in the city is run by Dawood Ibrahim, a Bombay native now believed to be in Pakistan. Declared a "global terrorist" by the United States, Dawood's "D-company" fiefdom stretches from Bombay to east Africa and southeast Asia.
Known as "Bhai" (brother), his name is said to inspire terror.
Young boys, lured to the city and gangsterism by the glitter of Bombay's films, end up as his recruits ready to kill people who refuse to pay extortion for a "supari (fee)" which in the 1990s was as low as 5,000 rupees (116 dollars) per kill.
"They would enter any office and kill a builder or a restaurant owner in broad daylight for not paying up," says S. Hussain Zaidi, a crime reporter with Mid Day, a tabloid afternoon daily newspaper.
"There was always this palpable fear of the midnight call by the mafia."
In 1997, famed music director Gulshan Kumar was gunned down for not paying extortion money.
"After the killing, they called builder Pradeep Jain and said, 'You heard the firecrackers? Next week we will get you.' And Jain was killed next week," Zaidi says.
But things were changing as Sharma and his fellow 'encounter specialists' -- Praful Bhosle, Vijay Salaskar, Ravinder Agre and Daya Naik -- got to work on their assignment to tackle the growing bands of armed criminals.
Each one of them has killed dozens of gangsters, yet the squad has never suffered any casualties.
After a decade of hot pursuit, the gangsters' guns are falling silent in Bombay as shootings have dramatically reduced from three to four a month to two to three in a year.
"The gangs of Bombay are now on the run," Sharma says with a chuckle.
-- "It's an addiction for me. I feel bored on Sundays." --
Sharma knew he was made for this job from when he first joined the police in the early 1980s.
"There was this big gangster Sarmast Khan. He was wanted in 18 to 20 cases of murder and extortion. I got a tip-off about him. I went there, put a pistol to his head and marched him two kilometres (more than a mile) through the market and threw him in the lock up," he says.
But a lack of witnesses and India's overloaded judicial system often ensured that gangsters like Khan were soon out on bail or acquitted.
Sharma, considered one of the force's top marksmen, had joined the service as a sub-inspector, above the common entry rank of constable, and was elevated quickly to the elite mob squad.
His wife, Swikriti, was shocked out of her wits when Sharma first killed a man in 1990. "But now I have got used to it and feel proud of him," she says at their home, a modest flat on the top floor of a multistorey building guarded by four plain-clothed policemen and fitted with closed-circuit TV cameras.
"Our two daughters love him. They write poems about him," she says proudly showing a file of verse, two of which were titled "Life" and "Fear to Die".
But Sharma's school-going girls cannot play in the park or ride a bicycle around the neighborhood. And the family rarely goes on a vacation.
And for Sharma, Sunday's are the most boring days of the week.
"At any given time, I have 10 to 12 'files' of hardened criminals open in my mind. It's an addiction. I feel bored on Sundays because the family keeps me at home," Sharma says.
He always aims to kill.
"The top half of the body," he says in reply to a question over where he aims when confronting a suspected gangster. "Normally they die on the spot or on way to the hospital. They look shocked when hit ... I don't like talking about all this ... I am a Brahmin," he says, referring to his caste. The Brahmins are considered a Hindu priestly caste, known for conducting prayers in temples.
On "encounter" days, Sharma says he doesn't get home until 1.00 am.
He first soaks his sometimes bloodstained clothes in a bucket of water. Then he has a bath and climbs into bed.
"Sleep is no problem. I get so tired," he says.
-- 'All encounters are stage-managed, extra-judicial killings' --
For decades, Majid Menon has been climbing down the creaking wooden steps of his office in a dilapidated building, and walking to the nearby court in his quest for justice.
In 1998, he represented the family of a peanut vendor, Javed Fawda, who was picked up by police and shot dead in an "encounter". In that case Memon got the court to rebuke the police who put a brake on the killings.
Today, Memon is seeking justice for the "mysterious disappearance or death of accused Khwaja Yunus" and thinks Sharma's partner Praful Bhosle knows what happened.
"A 27-year-old civil engineer Yunus, was picked up overnight and blamed for the Ghatkopar blasts," said Memon, referring to a 2002 explosion in a bus that killed four people and injured 32.
According to the police, Yunus, who has studied in Germany and had a job in Dubai, escaped when he was being taken for interrogation on January 6, 2003.
But co-accused Abdul Mateen says that at 1:30 am on January 6, he saw an officer beating Yunus with a belt in the Ghatkopar police station.
According to Mateen, Yunus vomited blood and was never heard of again.
On the basis of Mateen's complaint, Bhosle and three others were arrested and their trial is now going on in a dingy courtroom under whirring ceiling fans.
"All encounters are stage-managed and are extra-judicial killings with the artificial face of sudden encounters. They have no place in a civil society governed by the rule of law," Memon says.
Civil rights activist Yogesh Kamdar says that between 1996 and 1999, an average of 100 encounters took place every year.
"And if you see the police reports of the encounters, they are like xerox copies. They say we went to nab the criminal; asked him to surrender but he showered bullets on them from his AK-47; they fired in self-defence and he was killed," Kamdar says.
"A hail of bullets and not a single injury to anyone, not a single car windscreen smashed?" the activist asks.
For Sharma, such criticism easily washes off -- there is no evidence against him, there are no witnesses. His biggest defence is his own life on the edge.
"Do you think we are fond of killing and putting our own lives at stake?" he asks. |
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