The End of Days

‘‘Jaisa Nana bolta hai phillum mein, ‘Soch ne ka order nahi, thokne ka hai’, maine woh kiya. Thoka. Kya hua, main raste pe aur phillum hit. (Like Nana says in the film, there was no order to think, there was one to kill. I did that. Killed. What happened? I’m on the road, and the film is a hit.)’’

A torrid Mumbai summer is creeping up as Nayak, 36, sits quietly in a tea shop at Charkop in suburban Mumbai. He carries a pistol — after accounting for 83 mafia heads, he’s got many enemies — but the AK-47, the swagger, and his bodyguard are all gone.

‘‘Mai guarantee deta mujhe gangwala thokega (I guarantee that a mafia shooter will kill me),’’ exclaims the once affable officer who face is now creased with worry and agitation as he battles not be tried under the same anti-terror law that many of his victims were charged with. The accusations against him: conspiracy with the same underworld that he laid low.

Nayak is what Mumbai terms an ‘‘encounter specialist’’, a euphemism for one of a select band of officers who shoots underworld figures dead in an ‘‘encounter’’ — either a legitimate shootout or an extra-judicial assasination.

The leader of this band was then Deputy Commissioner of Police Pradip Sawant. Apart from Nayak, there was his partner Inspector Pradeep Sharma, Inspectors Praful Bhosale and Vijay Salaskar.

Mumbai has 42,000 police officers, but during the 1990s and right until last year, a band of five encounter specialists — at least in the imagination of the public and the media — came to represent the great fight against the underworld.

They developed a network of informers, latched on to the pulse of the underworld, acted on tip-offs, and systematically broke the mafia’s back. In all, 600 suspects were killed in the last decade. Once rampant, extortions of movie moguls, diamond traders, real-estate barons, the man on the street, slowly dwindled to nothingness.

But somewhere along the way, the encounter specialists began to live their image. They were eulogised. Books, novels and plays portrayed their lives; the Kannada film industry even produced a film called, blandly enough, Daya Nayak. They became, in the words of one senior officer, ‘‘bigger than the force itself’’.

But most damaging was the fact that no questions were ever asked about the ‘‘encounters’’, or their sources — and just how close they were to them. ‘‘I have said this often, no encounter specialist can operate unless he has sources in the underworld,’’ says Julio Ribeiro, former Mumbai police commissioner. ‘‘Why is it that not all officers got such tip-offs? While breaking the back of the underworld is necessary, it is the manner in which it is done that is questionable.’’

Then there was their lifestyles. Officers who earned no more than Rs 20,000 a month drove around in cars like Mitsubishi Lancers.

Everything began to fall apart late last year, when the revelations of the payoffs made by master forger Abdul Karim Telgi began to uncover all manner of misdeeds in Mumbai’s once celebrated police force. More than 65 policemen have been swept up and another 45 arrested in anti-corruption sweeps. With politicians on the defensive, policemen suddenly lost their godfathers — or, at least, the links were no longer as blatant as they once were.

Today, the team of encounter specialists has been sundered. Former DCP Sawant is in a Pune jail, accused of conspiring to protect forger Telgi. Salaskar moved to the Bandra crime branch, Sharma to the Kandivli crime branch and Bhosale to another side posting. Nayak himself is now posted to a suburban police station, looking after mundane patrol duties.

Nayak has clearly reached breaking point, and while interviews with his friends reveal minds in turmoil and a feeling of abandonment, the others are still wary of what they say. ‘‘Then we happened to get more criminals our way,’’ offers Inspector Salaskar. ‘‘Now they are probably keeping out of our way.’’

Nayak’s problems began when he fell out with his friend Ketan Tirodkar, a former journalist who has admitted to his own underworld links. Six months ago, Tirodkar filed a petition under the Maharashtra Control of Organised Crime Act in a Mumbai court, vowing to have Nayak behind bars.

Between real and surreal

‘‘Lagta hai mera vaat lagega. Ab Tak Chhappan mein jo hua, mera woh hoga. Bola thokne ko, thoka. Abhi mai jail mein jayega, nahin to gang ke hath marega. (Looks like I am finished. What happened in Ab Tak Chhappan will happen to me. They said kill, I killed. Now either I will go to jail, or die at the hands of the underworld.)’’

It’s all very surreal to the observer, this dialogue delivery, the stuff of films, pouring out of Nayak. India — and even Pakistan, as visiting journalists have just found — got acquainted with such Mumbai street language late last year through another mafia hit, Munnabhai MBBS. But this is Nayak’s reality, a quintessential Mumbai story of poor migrant-made-good.

The gold kada on his wrist, the thick gold chain around his powerful neck, and the wedding ring on his left ring finger flash in the sun. He senses the attention on his accessories. ‘‘I have worked for these,’’ he says quickly. ‘‘Nothing came easy.’’

For a long time, he maintains silence. Conflicting emotions — anger, fear, sadness, resentment — chase each other through his furrowed brow. Occasionally, a tear forms. He bites his lip and looks skyward as he wills the moisture away. Fiddling with his state-of-the-art cellular phone, he looks up finally. The despair is still strong. ‘‘Mera to vaat lagega, is hafte nahi to agle,’’ he mutters again. I will be finished, this week or the next.

It’s seems strange, this fear. Nayak cut his teeth, literally, on Mumbai’s teeth after joining the force in 1995. ‘‘I was scared of violence,’’ says this man to whom it became second nature. ‘‘There was a riot on the Andheri bridge. I was on a motorbike and when I saw a mob coming towards me with swords, I jumped from the bridge. I broke my teeth and wear artificial ones now.’’

It’s been a dizzying fall, after a life story that followed the script of the great Indian dream. Nayak came to Mumbai penniless at the age of 12 after passing his seventh standard. His mother worked as a domestic help, he waited tables at Hotel Sagar Kinara at the Versova Fishermen’s Colony. ‘‘I had to get out of the poverty,’’ he explains. ‘‘My mother needed a better life.’’ So he went to night school and graduated in Commerce.

Now, with his arrest imminent — or so Nayak believes — his mother Radha, wife Komal (a BA in Economics) and four-year-old son Chaitanya have been packed off to where his story began: his native village of Udupi on the southern coast of Karnataka.

‘‘If I get arrested, my family will be on the streets. Since the raid at my residence at the Kandivli police quarters (in February) my mother keeps crying. My wife is tense. There is hardly any conversation at home. We are haunted by the question whether I will be arrested. There is no way out, vaat lagega mera’’.

Start of the endgame

GIVEN the power of the encounter specialists, their reach into the highest echelons of power, it’s puzzling to the public at large how they have been cast aside. After all, there are no criminal cases registered against any of them.

But what’s happened, reasons a senior office on condition of anonymity, is that the run of encounter specialist could not last, based as it was on philosophy of fear, an oversize image — and a quiet acceptance of a bullet for the underworld instead of bringing a goon to trial. Make no mistake, it did work. The underworld has gone below the surface and extortion complaints stand at an all time low: zero.

It’s ironical that Nayak has to now make the rounds of a court. Briefly, these are the charges made against him: