The murder of politician Baba Siddique in the financial capital of the country has raised concerns of law and order in the maximum city which is the power engine for the economy of India.
While the Mumbai police is probing the murder from different angles with Lawrence Bishnoi gang claiming the responsibility for the murder, Mumbai, which has enjoyed the status of one of the safest cities in India, for close to 3 decades, seems to be drawn back to the grim days when gangwars, murders in broad daylight, extortion, and a crippling law and order situation cast a long shadow on the city and its inhabitants.
The organised crime in Mumbai rose to prominence in the late 1970s to the early 1980s when the city of Bombay witnessed mass worker strikes. The Great Bombay Textile Strike of 1982, called by union leader Dutta Samant, led to permanent closure of mills in the financial capital of India, rendering thousands of mill workers jobless.
However, the strikes failed as mills shut shops and wrapped up their operations. Today, lavish malls and restaurants stand at the sites of shut mills as the historical structures are rendered an avante-garde architecture to appeal to the aesthetic sensibilities of the city’s creme de la creme.
Meanwhile, the failure of the Great Bombay Textile Strikes back in the day, did more harm than good. It changed Mumbai’s functional nature from industrial to commercial, the youth in a bid to stay afloat in the face of mounting financial uncertainty and job insecurity, joined local gangs and mafioso thereby strengthening the underworld’s hold over what was back then known as Bombay.
The organised crime in Mumbai reached its prime in the 1990s, when the underworld reigned an open terror on the city casting fear on a spectrum of city dwellers including the common man, politicians, builders, actors, film producers and even police officials.
Salman Khan’s Security Tightened After Baba Siddique’s Killing: Is Lawrence Bishnoi Warning The Megastar?
With such a deteriorating situation, Mumbai police had no other option but to tackle the beast by engaging in a bloody stand off against different gangs. These wars between the keepers of the law, and the gangsters blurred the lines between morality and ethics as Mumbai Police not just targeted the gangsters but also went after their families in order to get what they wanted.
One of the earliest clashes between the Mumbai police and the underworld was the Shootout in Swati building in the Andheri area of Mumbai in 1991 between Mumbai police and the gangster Maya Dolas. The story was immortalised on screen 16 years later in the form of the multi-starrer ‘Shootout at Lokhandwala’ directed by Apoorva Lakhia.
While the conflict raged between the Mumbai police and the underworld, the city was rocked by serial blasts of 1993 allegedly by Dawood Ibrahim following the demolition of Babri Masjid. This collusion of underworld and terrorism was the last straw for police, as they went all out after the underworld like rabid monsters with the sole intention to draw out the blood, and to cause maximum damage to the unlawful machinery.
What followed was a gory war with no holds barred. Mumbai police killed gangsters on the streets with zero impunity. While the war raged, another case of assassination took the city by storm. It was in 1997 when the music mogul Gulshan Kumar, a film and music producer and the founder of the Super Cassettes Industries Limited, presently known as T-Series music label was brutally murdered while he was doing his morning prayers.
On August 12, 1997, he was reportedly shot sixteen times by contract killers Daud Merchant alias Abdul Rauf and his brother Rashid Merchant outside the Jeeteshwar Mahadev Mandir, in Andheri West suburb of Mumbai. The music mogul succumbed to his injuries on the spot.
Music composer Nadeem Akhtar Saifi of the duo Nadeem-Shravan, who famously composed hit numbers for films like ‘Aashiqui’, ‘Saajan’, ‘Sadak’, ‘Dil Hai Ke Manta Nahin’, amongst several others under the T-Series label, was named as one of the the accused by Mumbai police. In its 400-page charge sheet, the police named 26 people, including Saifi and Ramesh Taurani, owner of Tips cassettes; both were named as co-conspirators.
Mumbai police’s efforts finally started yielding fruits in the late 1990s when a majority of gangsters getting murdered from different outfits left the underworld with almost no manpower to carry out the dirty work. The opening of India’s economy and the policy of globalisation and liberalisation in 1991 also brought employment opportunities over a period of time to the youth of the city across different stratas of the society thereby encouraging them to leave the path of crime.
Further, in 1998, the late politician Sushma Swaraj, who served as the Union Minister of Information and Broadcasting under the Atal Bihari Vajpayee-led government, granted the “industry status” to film production changing the face of the film industry forever. This move allowed the producers to seek loans from banks at a certain interest rate to make movies which automatically cut down on the funding of films from the underworld.
Finally, Maharashtra Control of Organised Crime Act (MCOCA) introduced by a coalition government of the Bharatiya Janata Party and Shiv Sena in the state cleared the city’s streets of underworld and washed off the blood stains.
However, with the murder of Baba Siddique, and constant threats to Bollywood superstar Salman Khan by the Lawrence Bishnoi gnags, the fears of city dwellers, a majority of which includes migrants from different parts of India, have been reignited.
