On a overcast April morning in the compound of a police barracks in central Bombay, a team of 6 young men in commando clothing, armed with AK-47′s and pistols, walked, crouched and lunged for our cameras. They simulated combat at close quarters: how to enter a building, guard its entrance, take control of the stairwell and burst into a room occupied by fictional terrorists. They were members of the Quick Response Team, or QRT, their existence a challenge to the much repeated cliché of a city police unprepared for the commando style attacks of last November. The QRT was created in 2003, after a series of bomb blasts in Bombay, precisely to counter a terrorist attack. Not to guard exits or form outer cordons or manage crowds, but to engage the bad guys. They were selected from among the constabulary for their youth and fitness. They trained with the army in Pune. They went to Manesar to train with the NSG. They have AK-47′s, 9mm pistols, bulletproof vests, imported helmets. They are divided into teams on multiple shifts, so that at any time of the day or night, one team of 12 commandoes is always on call, 24×7.
On their biggest night, they would barely fire more than a few rounds. By dawn, they were manning outer perimeters at the Taj and Trident. What went wrong? The answers are couched in that familiar, mystifying vagueness which has come to define Bombay police in its moment of reckoning: “We were called into action at ten pm. A team of 7 went to CST. We went from train to train clearing compartments. We surrounded a motor cabin on Platform 2 inside which two men were hiding. But it turned out to be false alarm. We realized by then the terrorists had left the station. We were told that they had gone towards Cama Hospital. As we left, we heard firing outside Metro cinema. We saw a Qualis with guns sticking out of the window. We fired at it. But by then it had sped off.” This from the team that went to the Trident Hotel: “6 of us entered the Trident. We saw glass, blood, bodies everywhere. A grenade dropped from one of the higher floors as we entered. We went up to the second floor going room by room. We didn’t know what we were looking for. We took turns in escorting guests to the exit. We thought we’d go right to the top and start clearing the floors, but we didn’t have enough numbers. We had been split up into very small groups. So we rescued guests and guarded the exits till the Navy commandos came.”
The exchange with the young commandoes of the QRT : S.I Vasave, S.I. Kerkar, constables Mhatre and Patil took place in a former complex of jail cells attached to the Bhoiwada police station, about 10 kilometers north of Victoria Terminus. Its walls are peeling, patches of damp everywhere. One of the now-empty lockups serves as the QRT’s main command post, with a roster sketched on a blackboard, and a wireless receiver propped on a table in the corner. Flies buzz around puddles and mounds of garbage. On the iron bars of the cells, underwear and trousers are hung out to dry. This is where the city has chosen to house and headquarter its elite anti-terrorist force.
The QRT was orphaned almost as soon as it was created, the casualty of yet another departmental turf war. It was meant to be part of the crime branch of the city police, but was then brought under the command of the Anti Terror Squad. The ATS itself is a bastard child; it’s raised from the Maharashtra police, but the chief of the ATS reports to the Bombay police commissioner. That night, says S.I. Vasave, as we went from location to location, we had no one to guide us. The man who is meant to be in charge of the QRT, himself caught up in the anarchy of the night, called them just as they were setting off: “This is your first chance to prove yourself”, Hemant Karkare told them. “Kuch karke dikhana hai”. Just over two hours later, they would discover his body in a pool of blood in a lane behind Cama Hospital.
Bombay turns you into a crime reporter. It is home to the most storied police force in the country. The only police force where a sub-inspector (Daya Nayak) can inspire a clutch of Bollywood thrillers. The only force which has a celebrity sniffer dog: Zanjeer, the golden labrador that scented out the hidden caches of RDX in Thane and Mumbra in 1993. Zanjeer was sent off with full honours when he died in 2000. Not long after we moved to Bombay in 2003, on my first visit to police headquarters, I lingered on the magnificent wooden staircase that leads to the police commissioners office. On the wall curved a gallery of the city’s khakhi celebrities: Ribeiro, Soman, Samra, Mendonca, Singh.
On that day, I was on my way to meet Commissioner RS Sharma. The Telgi stamp paper scam had just broken. Sharma and several others, including the encounter specialist Pradeep Sawant were charged with bungling the investigation into Telgi, a forger of stamp paper. Over the next few weeks more than a dozen policemen – officers like Sharma and Sawant, but many others of varying ranks – were suspended, arrested and sent to jail. Later, Sharma was discharged and released. He said his release proved his case: that he was the victim of murky departmental rivalries. Many saw the Telgi purge as one of the worst moments in the history of the force. Worse than the 1992-93 riots, when the police was seen as nakedly communal? I asked an officer who was with the crime branch. Worse, he said.
In August of that same year, two blasts went off in the city – one at the Gateway of India, another in Zaveri Bazaar, a crowded marketplace in central Bombay. 54 people died. Acting on the basis of a tip off from a taxi driver, and using their network of informants, the cracked the case within two months. One of the main accused was shot in an ‘encounter’. Three others were arrested. (They were recently sentenced.)
I had been in Bombay for only 6 months. I already had a taste of the fame and notoriety that is the legacy of its police force.
The city’s first police chief, an East India Company buccaneer called James Tod, was tried and sacked for corruption in 1790. “The principal witness against him (as must always happen)” wrote Sir James Mackintosh, “was his native receiver of bribes”. Charles Forjett, who became Commissioner almost a century later, was the police force’s first moderniser. He laid the ground for Bombay police’s high standards of detection. Forjett was Anglo Indian, and often moved around the city undercover to unearth crime, (“..the strong ‘strain of the country’ in his blood enabled him, when disguised, to pass among natives of India as one of themselves”), a technique he used to expose the Bombay chapter of the mutineers of 1857. The mutineers were strapped to cannons and blown to bits on the Esplanade.
The weight of so much history needs a suitable setting. Wander through the streets of south Bombay and it’s a fair chance that some of the finest Victorian and Gothic architecture is police property: the Commissioner’s office in Crawford Market, the late-18th century ATS headquarters in Byculla (which was the earlier Commissionerate, in Forjett’s time), the Old Bazaar Gate Police Station (now the headquarters of DCP Zone 1), the Colaba Police station, built in 1906, and the Maharashtra Police Headquarters at Apollo Bunder, a grand old Gothic pile of blue basalt, once called Sailor’s Home. All these buildings are a stone’s throw away from the Taj, CST, Cama Hospital, Leopold’s, Nariman House. Unknowingly, the terrorists of 26/11 had wandered into the heart of police Bombay. As the gunmen from Pakistan killed, lingered, reloaded, and killed again, they would unravel the reputation – and the troubled core – of the country’s most celebrated police force.
There is a story the officers of Bombay police like to tell: of brotherhood, risk and the fight against evil. But it is a story that unfolds far away from Bombay, in the jungles of Vidharbha. Many of the officers in the ‘frontlines’ of 26/11 had done postings, often overlapping, in Maharashtra’s naxal-affected districts: Chandrapur, Gadchiroli, Bhandara. This, I am told again and again, is not a coincidence. “You see who was the first to rush to the spots that night.” Hemant Karkare (S.P. Chandrapur 1991), Sadandand Date (A.S.P. Bhandara 1995) and Ashok Kamte (A.S.P. Bhandara 1991) were at Cama, Deven Bharati (A.S.P Gadchiroli 1996) and Hemant Nagrale (A.S.P. Chandrapur, 1992) were at the Taj, Parambir Singh (S.P. Bhandara 1995) at the Trident, KP Raghuvanshi (SP, Gadchiroli, 1992) at VT. “You get that killer instinct when you are in the jungle. We used to sleep with our AK’s”, one of them tells me. In the context of the November attacks, this may seem ironic, even mildly absurd. But this is a force looking for redemption. The successes of Maharashtra’s police force in containing naxalism in Vidharbha in the early to mid-nineties are generally unchallenged, unlike the events of 26/11. There is a nostalgia for that time in the forest; many of them straight out of the Academy, thrust into a sort of Boy’s Own world of adventure and danger, away from the politics and intrigue of headquarters.
When I met Hemant Karkare for the first time in August last year, the walls of his office were mounted with tastefully polished driftwood in interesting shapes – a crucifix, a stag’s head – picked up from the jungles of Chandrapur. He was precise, almost formal. But that evening he was incensed. Both the ATS and the Crime Branch of the Bombay police were chasing a key informant, a car thief called Afzal Usmani, a crucial link to the Bombay module of the Indian Mujahideen (IM). The IM have been blamed for the series of bomb blasts across India in 2008. The Crime Branch got to him first. Usmani led them to the entire local IM module, and then, when the ATS asked for his custody, he ‘vanished’. The IM case had gone out of the ATS’s hands. (The Crime Branch says they had nothing to do with the disappearance of the informant.)
Karkare wanted to complain to the DGP, AN Roy. But Roy was fighting his own battles. His status at DGP faced a number of legal challenges. And, going by the buzz in police circles, he was said to be locked in a factional war with Police Commissioner Hassan Gafoor. Roy’s admirers, most of whom served under him when Roy was Bombay’s police commissioner, found Gafoor uncommunicative and bureaucratic, not a leader of men. Gafoor’s supporters claimed this was untrue, that Gafoor was competent, but less publicity-seeking than Roy.
globesupdate
The ancient Mayan calender, with its supposed prediction of a December 21, 2012 apocalypse, has long fascinated assorted fringe scholars, doomsday fetishists and George Noory acolytes. In 2012, the audacious new disaster epic from director Roland Emmerich (10,000 B.C., The Day After Tomorrow), it provides the inspiration for a $250 million orgy of destruction, the likes of which has never been seen on the big screen.
