Once Upon a Time in Mumbai

William Henry Sleeman (1788-1856) was the greatest crime buster in Indian history who ended the “Thugh” menace by 1848. He did not do this through modern police ‘encounters.’ As I show in my book ‘Keeping India Safe’ (2017,) Sleeman achieved his goals through legal means, by a pan-India crime investigation and court trials.

Between 1826 and 1848 Sleeman prosecuted 4,500 thugs of whom 504 were given death sentences. More than 3000 were given life term. Most of them were sent to the penal colonies in Malaya. Only 250 were acquitted.

The Guinness Book of Records once claimed thugs were responsible for 2 million deaths between 1550 and 1840; the historian Mike Dash, in his 2004 book Thug, suggests a figure closer to 50,000–100,000. Either way, Sleeman’s campaign ranks among the greatest policing feats in history.

The pity is that Sleeman’s works, and his method of investigation are not taught in Indian police schools. Yet his methods are little studied in Indian police academies, perhaps because he never wrote a systematic manual, his insights scattered across memoirs like the two-volume ‘Rambles and Reflections of an Indian Official’ (1844).

Likewise, I am not aware whether any Maharashtra police official had written authoritative accounts about those dark days, when Mumbai was reeling under underworld terror by way of kidnapping, extortion, killings and gang warfare.

That gap is now filled by ‘The Brahmastra Unleashed,’ a new book by senior police officer D. Sivanandhan, one of the architects of the Maharashtra Control of Organised Crime Act (MCOCA), unveiled in 1999.

Like Sleeman, the then Mumbai police Commissioner R.H. Mendonca and his chief strategist Sivanandhan, who was then Joint Commissioner (Crime) conceived the idea of creating a ‘Brahmastra’ in form of a new law called ‘Maharashtra Control of Organised Crime Act’ (MCOCA) for their offensive against the Mumbai underworld rather than resorting to the highly controversial ‘encounters.’

In this process they were helped by Chief Minister Manohar Joshi, Deputy CM Gopinath Munde, Additional Chief Secretary Karun Shrivastava, Law Secretary Ms. Pratima Umarji and the late S.S. Puri, Additional Director General of Police. The author says: “The basic essence of the law was that it would be very difficult for the police to book a person under MCOCA, but once booked, it would be extremely difficult for the person to come out of it.”

The backdrop was grim. In October 1998 a spree of killings claimed 12 businessmen in 15 days. This trend started when Bharat Shah, owner of ‘Roopam’ in Crawford Market sited near the office of the Police Commissioner was shot dead in broad daylight. This was followed by the killings of two brothers running a café in Bhandup on 13 October and another three businessmen on October 18.

This triggered panic among Mumbai’s traders, who, in a meeting which included Joshi, Munde, Mumbai Police Commissioner R.H. Mendonca and the author threatened to abandon the city unless order was restored. Sivanandhan recalls the moment vividly: “Little did anyone know that this peculiar gathering…would permanently alter the history of Mumbai city… I realised that the special task the government had chosen me for was to end the menace of the Mumbai underworld and free the city and its people from the clutches of crime and terror.”

What follows in the book is a vivid account of how organised crime was then committed in the city by cartels and how it resembled a ‘corporate-like’ structure under a project manager who juxtaposed advance intelligence on special projects (killings) with methodical plans on recruitment, training, funding and procurement of weaponry. Allied matters like getaways, medical treatment of the injured and legal aid to those arrested were also planned.

The author’s account of the various gangs that operated in Mumbai reads like the best-sellers on Chicago gangsters, Al Capone and John Dillinger. He gives statistical details of the police work during this period which will be of great use to researchers. There is also a separate chapter on the provisions of the new law while another one analyses how MCOCA was successfully applied in specific cases.

By the early 2000s, shootouts had become negligible. To quote the author: “The fact that there were negligible shootouts from 2003 till date reveals a clear picture of how the Mumbai Police’s MCOCA-its Brahmastra -wiped out the entire underworld in one clean sweep.”

(The reviewer is a former Special Secretary, Cabinet Secretariat. His latest book is ‘India and China at odds in the Asian Century.’)