For over a decade, a syndicate kept Delhi Traffic Police on edge — now, authorities strike back. Here’s the story

Not just this officer, but many others within the Delhi Police murmur that the case is unlike anything previously seen in the national capital. “It has sent shockwaves through the police establishment,” said another officer, in disbelief.

The reason, another officer explains, was what they describe as the “breaking point”. “It came”, the officer says, still shaken, “when the syndicate targeted women traffic officers”. According to the police sources, Raju threatened to circulate purported videos showing women traffic officers accepting bribes unless they complied with his inappropriate demands.

“As the complaints from women traffic officers began to reach senior ranks, the response hardened,” a police officer said. Then, on the instructions of Delhi Police Commissioner Satish Golcha, nearly 15 FIRs were clubbed together, and the case was brought under the stringent provision of the Maharashtra Control of Organised Crime Act (MCOCA).

“A step that signalled just how seriously the police now viewed the threat,” a senior-rank police officer said.

That fear and unease surrounding Raju can also be sensed far from the police offices – on the main road in North West Delhi’s North Ghonda area.

The single-lane road is lined with closely packed houses and small shops selling sweets, jewellery, and groceries. At one of the grocery stores, when asked about Raju’s house, a man in his twenties shakes his head, denying any knowledge of the name. He then pulls a phone from his pocket, presses it to his ear – as if pretending to take a call – and gestures with his right thumb towards a blue building.

The blue structure is a primary public school. Wedged between it and a small jewellery shop is a three-floor building bearing a prominent board: ‘Surekha Rani, Advocate’. From the second floor, an elderly couple peeps out and shouts, “Wo aayi nahi hai abhi…”

Surekha Rani, a Delhi-based lawyer practicing at Karkardooma district court, is Raju’s wife.

Raju, she says, was questioned for days before his arrest. “On the fourth day, he went to the police station at 5 pm. By 6:30 pm, a 14-15 page FIR was registered. They had already made up their mind,” she alleges, struggling to catch her breath.

Surekha says she married Raju nearly two decades ago and moved almost immediately to their current residence. What she knew of her husband, she claims, was that he was involved in some form of transport business.

Investigators describe a far more elaborate operation.

Police officers say Raju had cast a long shadow over some traffic police officers for more than a decade. A single word – tafteesh (investigation), typically used by police officers to make criminals squirm – had come to mean something very different in this case. Whispered in police stations, it signalled that a sting operation had been conducted.

“That word alone was enough to unsettle them,” a police source said, still sounding astonished. “In those moments, it was not the criminal who felt the fear – it was a few traffic police officers themselves”.

Across Delhi, traffic cops in various complaints lodged in different police stations stated that the commercial vehicles were routinely violating traffic timings and rules, and often picked fights when questioned. “Many vehicles were entering no-entry zones and operating during restricted hours without facing any checks,” a police officer said.

“What initially seemed like occasional lapses or routine violations prompted closer scrutiny. An internal enquiry was set up to understand how such violations were occurring so openly and so frequently. As the enquiry progressed, it became clear that these were not isolated incidents or acts of chance,” Sanjeev Yadav, DCP, Crime Branch said.

Senior police officers say the investigation has since peeled back multiple layers to reveal a more disturbing reality. “Behind the unchecked movement of vehicles were several organised crime groups exploiting the transport system, influencing enforcement, and undermining the rule of law on Delhi’s roads,” a senior police officer said.

Officers probing the case say Raju’s syndicate worked in a simple, well-defined way. “Commercial drivers were encouraged to deliberately violate traffic rules – jumping signals, entering no-entry zones, or plying during restricted hours. When traffic police intervened, the interactions were covertly recorded using spy cameras worn by drivers or videographers stationed nearby,” explained an officer involved in the investigation.

“These recordings were later edited and weaponised,” said the officer. “They were used to threaten traffic police personnel with false complaints, departmental action, or public exposure.”

Officers say freelance videographers, including women, were deployed across multiple traffic junctions in Delhi to carry out these recordings.

“Traffic police officers summoned to negotiate were allegedly humiliated and threatened with doctored footage and fabricated allegations,” a police officer said. “Extortion demands ranged from Rs 20,000 to Rs 20 lakh”.

Police acknowledge that several FIRs had been registered over the years for offences such as forgery, obstruction of official duty, and misbehaviour with police staff. “However, despite these cases, the operation continued,” a police officer said.

The turning point for Delhi Police, a source said, came when Raju allegedly obtained recordings of female traffic police officers. “This time, it was not money he demanded. He sought inappropriate favours from the women officers,” the source said. The women subsequently approached senior police officials with complaints.

Following this, Delhi’s top police leadership stepped in.

“The Delhi Police Commissioner ordered the clubbing of around 15 FIRs,” a police officer said. According to a source, the investigation then expanded to include forensic analysis of seized digital devices and financial records. “It revealed that while the blackmail syndicate operated independently, it was feeding another organised crime operation – the sticker racket,” the source said.

“Considering the scale and organised nature of the syndicate, a case under MCOC Act was registered, formally recognising Raju’s operation as an organised crime syndicate,” the source said, referring to the stringent provisions invoked.

As the probe gathers momentum, police officers say around a dozen video makers, including women, are under scrutiny and will be arrested in due course. “They were deputed across different areas to record traffic police personnel and their activities,” a police officer said.

‘Substitute syndicates’

Raju was not alone. He had partners, the police say, running ‘substitute’ syndicates in north-east and west Delhi.

“Though the operations were starkly different – some even cutting into Delhi Traffic’s senior officials – the end goal was similar: having cops on tape,” a police officer said.

One of his partners is Jeeshan Ali (37).

A toll on the Dwarka Expressway needs to be crossed in order to reach Begumpur, geographically in Delhi’s Rohini area, and hardly on anyone’s mind in the mainland capital. In this remote area’s Naveen Vihar locality is a house – a three-floor building with a golden nameplate that reads ‘Abbasis’. It is the home of the Ali brothers: Jabbar, Zafar, Jeeshan, Danish, and Saif.

Now, only Jeeshan’s wife, Nazra, 28, and the couple’s two children – a girl aged 10 and another aged 7 – are left. On the ground floor of the building is a hall that smells of fresh paint and looks newly renovated. Cans of paint, plaster, and wall-scraping tools lie around, with a ragged bluish couch the only old-looking part of the room.

“Agar itta bada crime kar rahe the… ghar pe toh paise itte dikhe nahi kabhi. This house was not even painted for all these years. Just now we have painted and decked up this house,” she says.

“I got a call on the evening of November 19 that my husband had been picked up by the police. The next day, Crime Branch people were at my door. God, I had never seen police even in my locality. And here they were, carrying guns. They searched the whole house, emptied my cupboards and bags, and told me my husband had been running some scam,” says Nazra.

Nazra, who has now been married to Jeeshan for 10 years, looks lean, of medium height, with a green dupatta covering her head, and too young to be a mother of two. A homemaker all her married life, she says that all she knows about Jeeshan is that he has a transport business and a mandir-making business in Kirti Nagar.

“He was initially just in the transport business, phir humari OLA bhi chalne lagi. Ek do saal pehle partnership mein ek ghar ke mandir banane ka business start kiya tha,” she says.

Nazra, born and brought up in Delhi, says that her husband’s family came from Aligarh and built their business from scratch. Now that he is in Tihar, she has been left to live on handouts from neighbours. “I am taking loans from neighbours and relatives. Vo toh accha hai bacchon ka admission EWS quota mein hai. Varna fees bhi de rahi hoti,” she says.

The last time Nazra saw Jeeshan was on December 19, when she met him in Tihar. The next time she will go, she says, is on Tuesday. “He says he doesn’t know what is happening to him. He says he hasn’t even heard of these people who have been arrested with him,” says Nazra.

For the Delhi Police, though, Jeeshan probably knows the most about the syndicate after Raju.

The unravelling

It was Jeeshan’s arrest on November 19 that set off the unraveling of the syndicate, police say. According to them, the first hint of the scam, authorities say, came months earlier – in March, in South-East Delhi’s Badarpur – when a commercial vehicle tried to flee a routine traffic checkpoint.

“When the officials stopped the driver, he kept pointing at a sticker on his windscreen, insisting it allowed him to pass,” a police official recounts. “He admitted that these stickers were being sold openly, promising drivers immunity from challans during No-Entry hours. Within days, similar incidents started cropping up across Sarita Vihar, Saket, Paharganj, Civil Lines, Model Town, Kashmere Gate, and Jahangirpuri.”

As the probe deepened, police say they uncovered a sprawling network of forged No-Entry Permissions (NEP) and monthly ‘Marka/Stickers’ circulating across the city. “Nearly 2,000 to 2,500 of these stickers were out there, duping over a thousand commercial drivers and openly flouting the authority of the Delhi Traffic Police,” the officer said.

Jeeshan, police say, was running the West Delhi ‘branch’ of this syndicate. “The group issued fresh stickers every month. Drivers paid between Rs 2,000 and Rs 5,000 per vehicle, and were added to WhatsApp groups that acted as live control rooms,” the officer explains. “Through these groups, drivers received real-time alerts on traffic police movement and safe routes to take. It was sophisticated, organized”.

In the North-West and Outer areas of Delhi, the syndicate’s operations were being overseen by the third gang leader, Rinku Rana, 38, a man who, police officials claim, has never had a case registered against him.

Tucked away in a semi-urban patch of Outer North Delhi’s Samaypur Badli is Block D of Yadav Nagar Colony. The sprawling locality is home to people of mixed economic backgrounds. From two-room units to double-storey bungalows in its narrow lanes, with cows and cow dung scattered in between, the area is predominantly inhabited by locals from Haryana.

Yet the four-floor building, whose first floor houses Rana’s residence, stands out as probably the most urbane structure in the area. The entrance has a steel door with woodwork in the middle, bordered by green marble, all beneath a false wooden ceiling. Inside, a staircase and a lift lead to the upper floors. On the stairs is a four-year-old boy. When asked about Rinku Rana, he says, “Jail mein.” He is one of Rana’s three sons.

Downstairs comes Preeti, Rana’s wife. “Bahar nikalna mushkil ho gaya hai. I can’t even show my face to people. He (Rana) is everywhere – on the news, on YouTube. Neighbours ask my kids about him. I am not even sending them to school,” she laments.

Preeti insists that there is no way Rana, who has never had a police case in his life, could have been running a full-blown syndicate.

“He works as a broker in Sanjay Gandhi Transport Nagar. He connects drivers with vehicle owners. That’s what he has been doing for over a decade.”

“I have my own job: I work at Herbalife, where 400 people work under me. We have family property in Kaithal, our village in Haryana. We didn’t need any extra money,” she says.

Preeti claims that the police have raided her house twice, taking property papers, Rs. 31 lakh in cash, and other documents belonging to Rana.

“Vo paisa zameen bech ke aaya tha. It’s not some scam money. They took it all without any explanation,” she alleges.

According to police, Rana was operative in Outer and North-West Delhi: Outer, Rohini, North-West and North Districts.

“This syndicate was mainly involved in distributing stickers to various transporters and monitoring the movements of traffic police. In this way, they were committing fraud against both transporters and the traffic police,” Special Commissioner of Police (Crime Branch) Devesh Srivastava said.

Police officers stress that this is only the beginning of a much larger investigation, and that Raju, Jeeshan, and Rana together account for just three pockets of the national capital on the syndicate’s map. “There are three to five more gang leaders operating in Central, South, and Dwarka districts,” an officer said, adding that they would be tracked down in the coming days.

But the focus of the probe has now turned inward.

Investigators say they are examining how the syndicate was able to operate for years without resistance – and which traffic officers were aiding the gang.

­“Many challans issued to drivers, worth Rs 20,000 to Rs 30,000, were cleared for as little as Rs. 200 at Lok Adalats. All these aspects are being investigated” a police officer said.