Maximum City (29 page)

After the interrogation, I invite Ajay to dinner at my house. Ajay asks if we can write a book together; he trusts me. He has never been in the slightest doubt that I am writing a book; when he has people beaten in his office, he can see me on the sofa in the back of the room, scribbling away in my notebook, noting each slap, writing down the exact wording of each death threat. Isn’t he afraid he’ll get into trouble after this gets published? All I have told him by way of reassurance is that the names in my book will be changed. Perhaps he lets me sit there because he needs someone to stand witness, to keep a record of these melancholy evenings of his life. Or perhaps he is simply past caring.

On the threshold of sleep and waking one morning, I have a dream. My eyes haven fallen on a document on Ajay’s desk. It is about me. He is out of
the room, so I filch it. They have been monitoring my movements, tapping my phone. He is leading the surveillance operation on me. There is a plan drawn up to eliminate me; the special squad has been named. I run, take a rickshaw. I have to get myself and my family out of Bombay. When he comes back to his desk he is going to notice the missing document and throw all his men on my track. They are going to encounter me.

It is an innocuous word, “encounter,” suggesting a chance meeting while strolling in the park. But in Bombay it has come to mean murder by the state without benefit of trial, an extrajudicial killing. It occurs when the police arrest and interrogate a suspect and then take him to a public place and shoot him dead. The explanation they give out to the press is that they “encountered” a dreaded gangster, asked him to surrender, found themselves fired upon, and fired back in retaliation, killing him. The gangwar boys have shortened the word still further. “He has been ‘countered,’” they will say.

Naeem Husain, the crime reporter for one of the leading Bombay dailies, is to meet with Assistant Police Inspector Vijay Salaskar, the top “encounter specialist” of the Bombay Police. He takes me along. Salaskar’s office is in a little hut all the way in the back of Nagpada Police Station. We wait for him to come back from headquarters.

As we are waiting, I hear an agonized screaming. The office across the corridor, which has been open, now has its doors closed and a man is howling inside.

“Interrogation?” I ask a senior inspector.

He smiles, nods. Nobody else looks up from their tea, their newspaper.

Just as Salaskar is about to come into the office, two boxes of milk sweets come in, and I am offered pedas from a huge box. Before realizing what I am celebrating, I have eaten one. Salaskar has just been acquitted in the Sada Pawale encounter case. The gangster had set out to get away from Bombay. He asked his sister and his brothers to travel with him in the car. The car was stopped at a junction by Salaskar and his men, and the family was made to get out. The sister knew what was coming; she put her body around her brother’s and said, “Don’t shoot him.” The police separated them and shot him at the junction, in front of his family. Five of them testified about the encounter. The police put a constable in Pawale’s home and attached a loudspeaker to the phone, so that every incoming call rang around the house. They told the sister, Do you want to lose your youngest
brother also? The Aguiar Commission, investigating the incident, held that the encounter was fake, but the high court had just cleared Salaskar because all the witnesses, including the victim’s brother, sister, and sister-in-law, had suddenly recanted their testimony. Four sets of fresh testimonies appeared in court: We didn’t say what we said, we didn’t see what we saw.

All the time I am in Salaskar’s office, top policemen come in and shake his hand and tell him, “Congratulations.” One of them says in Marathi that starting tomorrow he should resume the killings “with full force.” Salaskar receives their greetings with a smile. He seems curiously gentle for Bombay’s top encounter cop; he has the demeanor of a middle-class Maharash-trian engineer. But he has almost single-handedly wiped out the Gawli gang, killed five of their top shooters. This is why, says Husain, “Salaskar allegedly has links to Shakeel.” Every senior police officer has these alleged links, even Ajay. The gangs watch the records of individual policemen jealously. Is he shooting more men of the D-Company? Then he must be a Chotta Rajan man. Is he killing off the Gawli boys? Then he must be a Sena man. These rumors attach themselves to a person, and they are hard to shake. The only way to clear your name is to kill some people of the gang you allegedly have links to. Salaskar, when Husain asks him if he has specially targeted the Gawli gang, protests that he has killed Shakeel men too.

Husain asks him how many encounters he’s been involved in and what kind of gun he uses.

The cop thinks. “Deaths . . . twenty.”

Salaskar brings a black leather pouch out of a cupboard, unzips it—and then I’m holding it in my hands. It is a six-shooter, with a brown handle and a steel barrel. It bears the logo
TITAN TIGER
, and, below it,
.38
and the provenance:
MIAMI, FL.
On the handle is engraved a bearded Norse god. It looks like a prop in a Hollywood movie of the 1950s. I stare down the barrel.

I ask Salaskar if he has ever felt bad after an encounter, after taking a human life.

“They are not humans,” he replies immediately. “They are animals. Waste.” To take a human life, you first of all have to deny that the victim is human. You have to reclassify him.

Husain asks if he has ever been in any kind of personal danger during an encounter. Never, he says. The trick is to fire on the targets “before
retaliatory fire.” He says that he or his men get very close to the target before firing. He is not a good marksman, he admits, but then he has never had to fire from a distance of more than twenty-five feet.

As Judge Aguiar wrote in his report on the recent encounter:

The gangs will never go after the policemen, says Salaskar, not even after a constable. “What you saw in
Satya”
—referring to a scene in a gangster movie in which a police commissioner is shot dead by the gangs—“only happens in the movies.” He doesn’t feel personally threatened. “I am fair. I know where the criminals’ families are, but I never touch them.”

Husain asks Salaskar about his family. He has a ten-year-old daughter.

“Do you want your children to join the police force?”

The cop shakes his head emphatically: no.

The parade of felicitators continues all through our conversation. The screaming in the next room also continues. Nothing can be heard of the screaming man’s interrogators; there are no shouts, nothing but the steady, full-throated screaming. Then I hear a series of thwacks, some instrument hitting something soft. Nobody is taking any notice except me. A senior inspector says they will have to get everybody on the team that did the encounter together and celebrate. Salaskar will now have whatever strictures that remained on his behavior lifted. The Titan Tiger is ready to take its twenty-first life.

“Does it have a safety catch?” Husain asks, turning the gun over in his hands.

“No safety catch.”

Husain tells me later about seeing a man begging for his life shot dead by the police. “It’s wrong to call it an encounter. It was cold-blooded murder.” He was taken to the spot ahead of time by the police. He was shown his place to stand and watch. Don’t move from here, he was told. You could get hit by a bullet. “What chutiapanthi”—bullshit—Husain says to me.

He describes what he saw. It was 11:30 p.m. Six policemen came in two gypsy vans to the spot. The man knew what was coming. He was groveling, pleading for his life. “I have children, sir, please spare me. I’ll do anything, I’ll become an informer, anything.” As he was begging, the police raised their guns and began firing, different shots from different angles, according to a prearranged plan. One policeman would stand at a particular spot and fire two shots, another at a different spot; it was agreed that about six or seven rounds in all would be fired upon the begging man. As they fired, they were cursing vigorously at him, but there was no regret or rationalization on the faces of the cops that Husain saw. After the man hit the ground, they brought out a revolver, holding it with a handkerchief, put it in the dead man’s hand, and made the corpse’s hand squeeze off two shots. Whatever public there was at the spot had long since fled after hearing the police’s first shots. The cops waited for forty-five minutes, till there were no more signs of life in the body, then took it to a hospital. “I couldn’t sleep till 3 a.m. that night, and I couldn’t eat for three days,” Husain recalls. “I had seen someone begging for his life. I saw blood squirting out of his head.” It changed his relationship with the cops. “I hate them. Bombay cops are the worst.” Husain is probably the city’s best crime reporter, and he works for a major newspaper. He has never written about that incident. He now realizes that everything the press reports about police encounters is nonsense; he is a glorified stenographer. “We are the munshis of the police.”

The police, the newspapers, and the courts all keep up the fiction of the encounter killing. They know the script—the gangsters are always supposed to have fired first, and the police fire only in self-defense—and they never bother to ask questions, just as they never bother to ask logical questions about the plots of Hindi movies. If you were to believe the press reports of encounters, you would think that all gangsters are astoundingly bad shots. The police, on the other hand, get their man every time.

In America they call it the thin blue line, the cops who (dressed in blue) separate us, society—men and women who work in jobs in offices and come home and sleep and go to work the next day—from the bad guys, the people who are constantly peering into our brightly lit living rooms from the road below. In Bombay it would be the thin khaki line. But the line here is fuzzy. It is not discernibly a part of us, and it is not clear who is being protected from whom. It is a ragged, childlike slash with a piece of heavy
chalk. At times it is fat and sturdy; other times it is so faint it has all but disappeared.
They
are constantly watching for such gaps, such breaches, into which they can slip, like otters into water on a dark night.

Among the public, there is a steadily increasing tolerance for violence. In October 1998, the Mumbai Police formed six secret Special Teams “whose sole brief was to gun down gangsters,” according to a report Husain wrote in his newspaper. The police had killed ten people in encounters in the nine months before setting up the Special Teams. In the five months after the teams were formed, the police shot dead fifty-three alleged gangsters in forty-three encounters. One of the death squads was headed by Salaskar, another by Ajay. The teams were not limited by jurisdiction; they could roam far and wide over the city, picking off targets as they chose. When an encounter occurred, it was officially credited to the nearest police station. This did not make the front page in Husain’s newspaper; no other paper followed up on Husain’s exclusive. There was no reaction from the public, no outrage that the police had decided to turn executioners.

When you live in a world of fear, you give unlimited power to the state. “What about the human rights of the innocent businessmen killed by the criminals?” demands a trader at a large public meeting of traders and state government officials, called to discuss the widespread extortion threats that the businessmen have been receiving. A few of them have been shot dead for not paying. The speeches at the meeting are a curious mixture of fawning obeisance and veiled threat. The favorite comparison of the Bombay Police is with Scotland Yard. “Best in the world after Scotland Yard” was something I’d grown up with, probably a misquote of some survey carried out in the West. And the people on the other side of the law repeated the phrase as if it were established fact. Amol the street ruffian, who has been suspended between two tires hanging in midair and beaten by the police, said to me with no little pride, “After Scotland, our Bombay Police are number two.” Now it has changed, as at the traders’ meeting, to “Better even than Scotland police.” But the traders are upset. They are threatening to stop paying sales taxes, which are collected by the state government.

In the meantime, the city goes about its business, convinced of its own menace. The newspaper headlines, the movies, suit gangsters and cops both: the gangsters because it increases their stature in society—after all, they live on fear, fear is their sugar solution—and the cops because the
public now grants them the highest power, the power to take a life without a trial. I get the sense of a city straining to imagine itself more violent than it actually is.

O
NE EVENING
, on the way home to Nepean Sea Road, I get a ride in the commissioner’s car. I tell Ajay about my meeting with Salaskar. “They’re exterminators,” he says of Salaskar and other encounter specialists like Pradeep Sharma and Pradeep Sawant. “Good police work involves picking up a little clue and building it and staying with it till you crack the whole puzzle.” He elaborates on the encounter specialists. “They’re contract killers. They get orders from one faction to shoot members of the other gang.” He has heard reports that Gawli himself ordered some members of his gang killed, men who could become potential rivals. For this reason, the moment Salaskar or Pradeep Sharma does an encounter, “immediately a big question mark is put. He cannot do all and sundry which he probably did a couple of years back.”

Although Ajay is a leader of one of the six Special Teams, he does not have a reputation as an encounter specialist. But he uses the fear that Salaskar and Sharma and Sawant evoke to good effect in his own investigations. When Ajay threatens the men he’s interrogating with encounters, they believe him. Every single time I’ve seen him interrogating suspects in his office, he’s threatened to kill them without benefit of a trial. Ajay keeps tight control over who his people shoot. He doesn’t give his lower ranks the discretion, the license to kill. “I have told my entire people, no encounters without telling the DCP and myself. Unless we give the green signal, no. We have done twenty-three in our region in the time I have come.” It hasn’t even been a year.