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Journalism of Courage
The year was 1997. Among the journalists in the waiting room outside the chamber of then Mumbai Joint Commissioner of Police (crime) R S Sharma was a nervous looking builder. Soon came news: Sada Pawla alias Sada Mama, gangster Arun Gawli’s sidekick on whom Satya’s Kallu Mama was loosely based, had been gunned down by Vijay Salaskar, an ‘encounter specialist’ with the Mumbai Police, in Ghatkopar. The builder started jumping and shouting in delirious joy: “Sada Mama mar gaya (is dead)”. He left without meeting the joint commissioner.
Those were different times — when Bombay was grudgingly getting used to being called Mumbai, but when extortion calls and daylight shootouts were routine affairs and underworld gangs lorded over the city. Somewhere in this mix were the ‘encounter specialists’ — police officers whose trigger-happy ways of dispensing justice and settling scores meant that they were dreaded and admired in equal measure.
When the Bombay High Court on March 19 convicted Pradeep Sharma, now retired Assistant Commissioner, and 12 other policemen of the 2006 killing of Ramnarayan Gupta alias Lakhan Bhaiyya, an alleged aide of gangster Chhota Rajan, and called it a “cold-blooded murder”, it was a throwback to the Mumbai of the late 1990s and early 2000s when police officers had bragging rights over how many they had killed in ‘encounters’.
It is surprising then that Pradeep Sharma’s conviction is only the first such in which officers of the Mumbai Police have been convicted of carrying out fake encounters.
The Batch of 1983
Many point to an incident of gang-war from 1998 as a trigger for the spate of encounter killings that rocked Mumbai. In November that year, two bystanders were killed as Chhota Rajan gang members shot dead a Dawood aide at the Bandra railway station. Following this, the then BJP-Sena government in the state is said to have given the Mumbai Police a free hand to strike back at the underworld.
Ronnie Mendonca, who was Commissioner of Mumbai Police from 1996 to 2000, declined to comment.
In a decade and a half since 1990, the Mumbai Police reportedly gunned down over 400 gangsters.
Since many of these police officers were from the 1983 batch of the Maharashtra Police Academy at Nashik, they became famous as the ‘Batch of 83’, trained by the legendary IPS officer Arvind Inamdar, who passed away in November 2019.
In an earlier interview with The Indian Express, Inamdar, who eventually went on to become Maharashtra Director General of Police, had said of the dreaded ‘Batch of 83’, “We never allowed anyone to become an encounter specialist… I remember all these blokes… Sharma, Salaskar… all quiet, disciplined and good officers. They were very good at that time. After they joined the force something happened. They should have been curbed in those initial stages. I feel very disappointed that their careers ended up with inquiries and suspensions. Achcha nahin lagta (it doesn’t feel good). Lot of things went wrong.”
As more encounters continued, some of the police officers — Pradeep Sharma, Vijay Salaskar, Prafful Bhosle, Aslam Momin, Ravindra Angre, Daya Nayak and Sachin Waze — gained cult status. A 2003 Time magazine article on these officers called them ‘Urban Cowboys’.
Old-timers in the force like to recount a story about gangster-turned-politician Arun Gawli to indicate the effect the encounter specialists had on the underworld. “Gawli lived in the mortal fear of officer Vijay Salaskar and feared that Salaskar would gun him down in an encounter. That was even after he joined politics. Once, on the day of an election, in which Gawli himself was the candidate, Salaskar parked his vehicle outside Gawli’s Dagdi chawl. Gawli was so scared that he told a reporter, ‘He is going to shoot me.’ He finally did not step out to vote for himself,” a retired officer said.
Others talk of how when Daya Nayak, then a police Sub Inspector, built a school in his village Yennehole in Karnataka in 2000, a Bollywood superstar flew in to inaugurate it, with other actors in attendance, and M F Husain painted a canvas specially for the occasion.
Meeran Borwankar, who was Mumbai’s Joint Commissioner of Police (Crime) between 2004 and 2007 and to whom some of these officers reported, told The Indian Express, “These Crime Branch officers did have an excellent network of informants. They were a sharp lot with patronage from the high and the mighty. Citizens, who otherwise would have spent decades waiting in courts in civil and criminal cases, also approved of the ‘quick justice’ that they dispensed.”
Their popularity meant that the officers flaunted their ‘scorecards’. While Pradeep Sharma is said to have gunned down 114 people, Vijay Salaskar clocked 75-80 encounter killings, Praful Bhonsle over 70 and Daya Nayak over 80.
“A lot of these encounter specialists kept count of the number of people they gunned down and bragged about it. When reporters called them to talk about an encounter, they would give their ‘count’ as well. Some of their senior IPS officers competed with each other and so these policemen gunned down petty offenders such as chain snatchers to inflate their encounter numbers,” the retired officer said.
Some of the encounter specialists even mediated between disputing builders, for a commission — until then, the domain of the underworld. “During my tenure we had issued very strict warnings against getting into civil disputes and the personnel knew we would take strong action. I remember suspending a few of them for dereliction of duty. Still, some officers could have taken the risk of settling civil issues and may have escaped our notice,” says Borwankar.
Sources who worked in the police force then say some of these officers were hailed as heroes within the department. “There were murmurs that juniors who were not even part of an encounter would get their names added to the squad to gain recognition. Eventually, when these encounters were proven fake, some of these officers too ended up behind bars,” says a former Deputy Commissioner of Police.
‘Special work’ in a store room
The Lakhan Bhaiya case in which Pradeep Sharma was recently convicted is a pointer to the world in which the encounter specialists functioned. According to the evidence in the case presented before the High Court, a store room behind the D N Nagar Police Station in Andheri was renovated into the office of a squad headed by Sharma for ‘special work’.
The prosecution in the Lakhan Bhaiya case told the court that members of Sharma’s squad were allegedly hand-picked from across the city without any formal orders. They did not do any work at the police station and nobody from the police station was allowed access into this room. While policemen on duty are expected to record their movement and details of each occurrence in a case diary, there was no daily record of the work the squad did in that room. The prosecution told the court that the squad moved around in private vehicles and used civilians “for assistance”.
On November 11, 2006, Sharma’s squad claimed that they had received secret information about gangster Lakhan Bhaiya arriving at a public park near Versova. The police claimed that Lakhan was apprehended but he fired at the team and that he was killed when the policemen shot in self-defence.
Around four hours ago, Lakhan’s brother, Ramprasad Gupta, an advocate, fearing that brother might be killed in a staged encounter, had sent faxes and telegrams to various authorities, including the Commissioner of Police. Ramprasad’s messages for help were to end up as crucial evidence in court against the policemen.
Gupta told The Indian Express, “The way the police picked up my brother raised my suspicion. My brother and his friend Anil Bheda were picked up around noon, hurriedly packed off in a vehicle and rushed away. When there were no phone calls from the police till about 4 pm, I began sending the faxes and telegrams.”
In 2006, Gupta approached the High Court. A Special Investigation Team (SIT) set up on the orders of the court concluded that police had staged the encounter, leading to the first arrests in the case in 2010.
During the trial, the policemen denied that the encounter was fake. Sharma too said that he was falsely implicated due to rivalry within the police force. The court, however, relied on call data records, ballistic reports on the guns used to fire at Lakhan and testimonies of Gupta and other police personnel.
The prosecution complained that during the trial, witnesses were regularly threatened. A magistrate conducting an inquiry too complained of receiving threats. On March 13, 2011, three days before Anil Bheda, the main eyewitness in the case, was to depose, his charred body was found. A police inspector accused in the encounter case was sentenced in 2011 for contempt after it was found that he was interfering with the investigation.
“As an advocate, I had the personal capacity and the legal understanding to pursue the case at every stage. It was challenging since the people involved were powerful but I knew that I had to continue fighting,” Gupta says.
While Pradeep Sharma was arrested in 2010 over Lakhan Bhaiyya’s killing, a trial court acquitted him in 2013. However, the other policemen, all his juniors, were convicted in the case. In 2019, the year he retired from service, Sharma contested the Nallasopara Assembly seat on a Shiv Sena ticket, but lost.
He would eventually be arrested by the National Investigation Agency in the Antilia terror scare case in 2021 for his alleged role in the murder of Thane resident Mansukh Hiran. Despite the UAPA charges against him, Pradeep Sharma came out on bail two years later.
The beginning of the end
As allegations of corruption, staged encounters and links of some of the police officers to underworld gangs emerged, the script began to unravel.
Pradeep Sharma was dismissed in 2008, reportedly after telephone conversations between him and Dawood henchman Chhota Shakeel came to the fore. The dossier based on which Sharma was dismissed reportedly contained affidavits by exporters, builders and businessmen about the alleged harassment they faced at the hands of Sharma. He was reinstated with the Thane Police seven years later. Within a month of his reinstatement, Sharma hit the big league when he arrested Iqbal Kaskar, brother of fugitive gangster Dawood Ibrahim.
Gradually, the narrative around these officers changed within the police department. The ‘encounter specialists’ now served as a cautionary tale to most policemen who had seen this crop of officers rise to dizzying heights in the late ‘90s before a free fall landed some of them behind bars while others faced suspensions.
Yet, some of them brazened it out. An officer recalls a tale about one of the encounter specialists who was facing trial in a fake shootout case. The officer, who did not come to court when the witnesses were deposing during the trial, turned up only when the ballistics expert deposed. Later, when asked why he had attended the proceedings only when this ballistics expert was deposing, the officer said, “To understand the mistakes I made during the encounter… I do not want to repeat them in the future.”
