Local muscle, gangleader, Robin Hood, neta: The many lives of Arun Gawli

His bastion, Dagdi chawl in Agripada, built like a fort with multiple hidden doors and escape hatches from where he outfoxed the police several times, is set to be redeveloped and replaced by sky scrapers–a project that had the Gawli family onboard. While the chawl still exists, the process to redevelop the same has begun.

He will also be one of the few ‘gangsters’ who will be back in Mumbai, while the others with whom he locked horns like Dawood Ibrahim have moved outside India while Chhota Rajan and Ravi Pujari are behind bars.

The Mumbai in which the likes of Gawli and Dawood Ibrahim ruled the roost does seem like last century–as it is the case. In the 80s, Gawli, the son of a retired mill worker, who too worked at a mill briefly, ran his network from the Dagdi chawl in the Byculla-Saat Raasta area of south-central Mumbai. He was first arrested for the murder of one Shreedar Shetty at Dagdi chawl in 1983.

He was part of a gang known as BRA, after the initials of its three leaders, Babu Reshim, Rama Naik and Arun Gawli. The BRA’s activities first involved providing muscle power to other gangs, like that of Dawood Ibrahim’s, until they branched out to take control of the Girangaon (the erstwhile mill area) through extortion and ‘protection’.
Gawli was mostly in the backdrop while Rama Naik and Babu Reshim led the BRA’s activities. In 1987, however, Reshim was killed by a rival gang and Naik died in an encounter, leaving Gawli as its sole leader who continued with the gang activities.

In around 1982, a mill strike led to closure of mills, giving Gawli enough recruits as many were unemployed. The fact that he could pay these people to carry out illegal activities and support the family when they were arrested gave him a Robin Hood-type aura. Soon, his residence at Dagdi chawl also became a place where darbars were held and he would resolve disputes. His word was respected.

Meanwhile, the battle for dominance in the city led to Arun Gawli losing his elder brother Kishore. He suspected Dawood Ibrahim to be behind the killing and eliminated Ibrahim Parkar, the brother-in-law of Dawood in 1992.

Later, Dawood plotted revenge in the infamous JJ Hospital shootout case of 1992 by getting the main Gawli gang shooter Shailesh Haldankar gunned down inside the JJ Hospital along with two police constables who were guarding him.

Even as cases kept piling up against him and he kept coming in and out of prison, he was not convicted in any case. By the late 90s and early 2000s the administration wanted to stop underworld killings and certain officers later termed ‘encounter specialists’ started going after gangsters.

Old time officers say that Gawli’s arch nemesis in khakhi was slain encounter specialist Vijay Salaskar, known to have gunned down at least top 11 shooters of the Gawli gang, crippling his gang.

Legend has it that on the day of voting for the 2004 Lok Sabha elections, Gawli heard that Salaskar had been given the bandobast of his area and refused to leave his house to vote even after the zonal election officer promised him security.

He is known to have said, “What is Salaskar doing in my area on election day? Woh chakram officer mera murder kar dega (That mad officer will kill me).”

Realising the local support he had and changing times, he decided to pivot and formed his own party, Akhil Bhartiya Sena (ABS) in 1997 and started sporting Gandhi topi. Later he contested the 2004 elections to the Maharashtra Legislative Assembly and was elected as a legislator from the Chinchpokli constituency.

Later, his daughter Geeta Gawli and sister-in-law Vandana Gawli also became corporators in the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) while his wife Asha, referred to as ‘Mummy,’ supported him from the sidelines.

Many believed that while initially Shiv Sena chief Bal Thackeray supported him and called his gang ‘aapley muley’ (our kids) as against the Dawood gang, he fell foul when he formed his own party. It was alleged that soon his gang members were pursued by the police much more vigorously.

He himself was eventually arrested in the Jamsandekar murder case in 2008, while he was a sitting MLA and for the first time convicted in a case which eventually resulted in his downfall. Since then, he has been behind bars, and come out on parole for nearly 15 times, before his eventual release on conditional bail on Wednesday.

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