As the encounters increased, so did the popularity of the ‘encounter specialist’. Daya Nayak, Pradeep Sharma, Ravindra Angre, Praful Bhosale, Raju Pillai, Vijay Salaskar, Shivaji Kolekar, Sachin Vaze and Sanjay Kadam became cult figures, mythologised by the media and hero-worshipped by the common man. History SheetBUT encounters were not a new phenomenon to the Mumbai police. ‘‘It would be naive to believe the police would have been able to tackle organised crime in a city like Mumbai without encounters,’’ says former Maharashtra DGP Arvind Inamdar, who resigned from the force in 2000. ‘‘But there were no such squads back then. And the junior police officers who carried out the encounters were always kept in check and rotated out after a certain number of encounters.’’ According to Inamdar, the Maya Dolas incident—a Dawood henchman, he was shot dead in 1992 by a policeman named Aftab Ahmad Khan, allegedly at the underworld’s behest, in an encounter televised live on CNN—was one of the first indicators of how the strategy could backfire. The Anti-Terrorist Squad, which conducted the encounter, was accused of walking away with Rs 70 lakh belonging to Dolas. Petitions alleging corruption were also filed against those involved in the encounter. But to all intents and purposes, encounter specialists got a free hand from then on. ‘‘Gopinath Munde, then home minister, openly declared he had ordered the police to shoot down gangsters,’’ says Julio Ribeiro, former Mumbai police chief. ‘‘But it all started going wrong post-1997. And the situation went out of control from 2000,’’ adds Inamdar. Order of CorruptionTHIS was also the period, say former top brass of the police, when the senior officers who could have checked the juniors were themselves unscrupulous. The order of command was subverted, with the ACP-level made redundant and the junior officers reporting directly to the top rung who, in turn, got their orders from corrupt politicians. ‘‘The situation was so bad that police postings and transfers were paid for. Police stations were literally auctioned by home ministers. I have openly mentioned Chhagan Bhujbal in various articles in this connection. With the seniors so corrupt, there was no way they could have checked the junior encounter specialists,’’ says Ribeiro. ‘‘One of the major reasons for the problem at hand is the degeneration of the criminal justice system,’’ says Ribeiro. ‘‘When I was a law student, cases of murder, dacoity, rape would be decided within eight months. Now it takes years to get a conviction. That is why police officers tend to take a short cut.’’ JCP Borvankar is categorical that she does not encourage ‘‘quick justice’’ through encounters. ‘‘Now we are using detection skills to pick up the foot-soldiers and book them under MCOCA to cut off their economic links with their bosses abroad,’’ she says. But the system comes too late for the likes of Daya Nayak.