The scourge of the Underworld
The mere utterance of his legendary one-liner, “Me YC (I am Y C)” was enough to send shivers down the spines of hardened criminals and crooked politicians. At a time when politicians and policemen paid their respects to the dreaded underworld don, Vardabhai, YC Pawar put him behind bars. In acting against Vardabhai, helping quell the 1992-93 communal riots in Mumbai, nabbing a powerful politician from Nashik, saving the life of Congress MP Sunil Dutt, slapping former Congress-NCP leader Pappu Kalani in the presence of top cops, Pawar acquired a cult status as a top crime-busting cop in Maharashtra.
MUCH before being selected to the IAS cadre on April 13, 1971, I joined the Maharashtra police as Deputy Superintendent of Police, Deogad, Ratnagiri, after clearing the Maharashtra Public Service Commission (MPSC) in 1969. Given my rustic rural background, the rebellious streak in me never let me keep quiet till the day I retired in 2001. I still vividly remember the then Inspector General of Police, Rajadhyaksha, asking me in the interview why I was joining the police force. To which I promptly retorted, to make money! Because in those days my family and I struggled to make ends meet.
In my very first posting as Sub-Divisional Officer in Nashik division, a sub-rural posting, on August 3, 1973 at Ozar, I dared to cross swords with a powerful politician. Chandrasen Kalwankar was the Nashik district president of the Samajwadi Party and hailed from Kalwan.
No officer till then had had the guts to catch him. He refused to come when called so I told my men to have him handcuffed and brought before me. This fellow had an unusual knack of creating trouble. On the day of the weekly village market, he would often declare a bandh and then his cronies would indulge in looting. His arrest ensured a peaceful weekly market, upon which villages in the vicinity depended so much.
The next high-profile politician I happened to cross swords with was the vineyard king, Ramrao Gaikwad, again in Ozar, Nashik district. It so happened that the senior investigating officer was on leave and I received information of a murder. Knowing his antecedents well, I grilled him relentlessly the whole day and night and at around 4 am he confessed to the crime.
His involvement in the merciless beating up of a thief who had entered his 51-acre vineyard would never have been unearthed. Gaikwad beat up the thief and dumped him in his garage, only to find him dead the next day. His men then used a pick-up truck and a Fiat to dispose of the body in Kasara Ghat, near Igatpuri in Nashik district. I painstakingly collected all the belongings of the dead man and the bones for DNA sampling. I was reprimanded by my seniors for having dared to lay my hands on Gaikwad. I stood my ground and bluntly told DIG Gokhale that I was prepared to risk my job for the cause.
The man’s widow identified his clothes. The blood samples found in the pick-up truck, the Fiat and on the gunny bag cloth used to tie up the man matched the DNA sample. It was the first perfect case of my life, I had all the proof to nail Gaikwad. Then I was offered a bribe of Rs 5 lakh which I promptly refused. Later, to my horror, I found that everybody else involved in the case had been bribed, including the trial court judge. Even the widow turned hostile. The court set Gaikwad and nine other accused free, while two others, including the driver, were sentenced to rigorous imprisonment.
My second posting was at the communally sensitive power loom town of Malegaon during the Emergency days of 1975. There I found that, despite the provisions of the Shops and Establishment Act, hotels, shops and eateries remained open way beyond 11 pm and hordes of people, especially unemployed youths, hung around them. They were readymade manpower for anyone itching to start a riot. Riots would start on the smallest pretexts. After inquiries, I found out that the places they stayed at were very small and often more than one family lived in one place and hence people took turns to sleep.
I ruthlessly shut down the shops by 10 pm. That did not go down well with the local leaders who pressured Chief Minister Shankarrao Chavan to intervene. At the meeting, I said that I had given them the option that the police would give the youths a photo pass so that at night they could deliver tea and bread on bicycles to the loom workers. But this idea was not liked by them as the leaders and the youth had a penchant for kicking off riots at the drop of a hat.
Sensing that I would not back down, the CM let me have my way. In the two and-a-half years that I was posted there, I followed the simple rule of not registering any non-cognizable offence. And that resulted in no riots taking place in Malegaon as long as I was posted there. Today Malegaon may be known for its ramshackle part-time movie industry but in those days cinema halls in the city used to be filled with thick cigarette and bidi smoke and no respectable family ever entered them. All I did was to send police teams inside once the movie began to drag out the smokers and fine them, and within months the cinema halls were a place where all could go to enjoy a movie.
ON April 22, 1973, five people died in a firing incident at Sinnar, near Nashik. As the first anniversary of the incident neared, local leader Awhad and his supporters decided to observe a Martyrs’ Day. On that day, External Affairs Minister Yashwantrao Chavan was in town to attend an official function.
I was told by my local staff that the leaders were a bit arrogant and refused to listen to reason. As matters came to a head, I told Awhad and his men that they could very well go ahead with their planned protests. I will not arrest any one of you, neither will I order anyone to shoot at you, I said. They got confused. All I insisted on was that I would not allow any provocation or any untoward incident. The trick worked and the day passed off peacefully.
By then I was in the spotlight. Around 1982, I was asked to come to Mumbai for a posting. On July 28, 1982, I was posted as DCP of Zone 4, that covered Dadar, Matunga, Mahim, Dharavi, Chembur, Sion-Trombay. However, the Mumbai police commissioner, Julio Ribeiro, prevailed upon his bosses in insisting that I join him in his fight to weed out the underworld and gang wars. But in the end, during my tenure, I was left all alone to fight cases filed against me in court with belated help coming from the government.
Around 1990, I was posted as DCP, Kalyan range, in Thane district which covered the industrial and residential belts of Thane, Kalyan, Dombivli, Ulhasnagar and Ambernath. These cities were growing and so were illegal encroachments, crime and construction. At the time, the murder of Duli chand Kalani, a one-time close aide of then Congress leader Suresh alias Pappu Kalani, had taken place in Ulhasnagar. Much to my horror, all the three accused, Lalu Hemdev, Gop Bahirani and Inder Bhatija, died one by one under rather mysterious circumstances.
The darkest day of my career was March 30, 1990. On that day, the State Board SSC exams were on. A boy named Harish Patel and two of his friends barged into one of the schools that was a centre for the exams, threatened the lone cop with a fake gun, and told the students to leave. They then locked up a girl, Rinku Patil, poured kerosene on her, set her on fire and fled the scene. The girl’s sister had been among the students who were forced to leave.
Intriguingly, the lady principal, instead of ringing up the police, chose to ring up Pappu Kalani. His brother, Narayan Kalani, came to the school and shot a video film of the entire incident, locked the room and handed over the keys to the principal. They tried every trick in the book to have me transferred out of the Kalyan zone. At one point of time, the police party which had gone to pick up Pappu for questioning had to return empty-handed following orders to the contrary from the powers that were.
Then I was sent on a five-week study trip to the National Police Academy, Hyderabad, to take part in a senior management course. By the time I returned, to my utter surprise, the Kalyan zone had been bifurcated and Ulhasnagar town was taken out of my jurisdiction. Much later, on November 12, 1992, Pappu was arrested in Dadar, Mumbai. His wife, Jyoti Kalani, unsuccessfully tried to gherao the police commissioner, AS Samra, who refused to meet her. I chased the women out of the DCP’s office premises. Later, I happened to come across Pappu in the presence of the police commissioner and other top cops. I had the guts to slap him in their presence.
At the time of the December 6, 1992, communal riots that occurred after the Babri Masjid demolition, I was posted as Commandant, SRPF, Jogeshwari, in north Mumbai. I was asked by Ministers and politicians to assist the Mumbai police in quelling the riots. However, given the bitter experiences of the past, I insisted that the government amend the law and provide protection to officers who try to maintain law and order outside their duty hours and jurisdiction.
ON February 1, 1993, I was on foot patrol in the worst-affected Behrampada locality, near Bandra. At one location, near Rizvi Mansion, along Anant Kanekar Marg, rioters were hurling Molotov cocktails at one another. One of my junior officers even tried to dissuade me from going inside. Seeing me coming, the local Congress corporator, Gulzar Sheikh, shouted, “Arre, YC Pawar aaya.” Immediately, all the miscreants ran helter-skelter and hid.
A day earlier, celebrities Alyque Padamsee, Keku Gandhi, Lt-Gen D’Souza and Ishaq Jamkhanwala had visited the local Nirmal Nagar police station and heaped abuse on the police. That day, I made them accompany me on foot into the troubled area which I had managed to quieten. They had to eat crow.
But that was not the end of it. The next day, the Governor, Dr PC Alexander, was to visit the Golibar Maidan locality in Khar, close to Behrampada, with Congress MP Sunil Dutt in tow. All of a sudden, Dutt, taking another route, took the Governor along with him to Behrampada. The Governor stopped at Rizvi Mansion to speak to the residents of the locality. By then an angry crowd of locals, mostly women, had gheraoed them and virtually blocked the road to the Western Express Highway.
The agitated women began throwing chappals at Dutt. Sensing that the situation was getting volatile, I just caught Dutt by his collar and dumped him inside the Governor’s car. Then I ran in front of the car, shoving aside the women. Later, when the city came back to normal, Dutt, speaking at a function, publicly thanked me for having saved his life that day. I even got arrested the Shiv Sena leader, Madhukar Sarpotdar, under the NSA for his role in the communal riots.
After the March 1993 serial bomb blasts that rocked Mumbai, I was called to head the investigation team. Some politicians questioned my wisdom in setting aside standard investigating procedures and arresting most of the local king-pins within three days.
Police commissioner AS Samra gifted me one of the two Maruti 1000s that were seized during the raids as a token of recognition of my efforts in cracking the case. I was twice recommended for the President’s Police Medal and once for the Padmashri.
The mere utterance of his legendary one-liner, “Me YC (I am Y C)” was enough to send shivers down the spines of hardened criminals and crooked politicians. At a time when politicians and policemen paid their respects to the dreaded underworld don, Vardabhai, YC Pawar put him behind bars. In acting against Vardabhai, helping quell the 1992-93 communal riots in Mumbai, nabbing a powerful politician from Nashik, saving the life of Congress MP Sunil Dutt, slapping former Congress-NCP leader Pappu Kalani in the presence of top cops, Pawar acquired a cult status as a top crime-busting cop in Maharashtra.
MUCH before being selected to the IAS cadre on April 13, 1971, I joined the Maharashtra police as Deputy Superintendent of Police, Deogad, Ratnagiri, after clearing the Maharashtra Public Service Commission (MPSC) in 1969. Given my rustic rural background, the rebellious streak in me never let me keep quiet till the day I retired in 2001. I still vividly remember the then Inspector General of Police, Rajadhyaksha, asking me in the interview why I was joining the police force. To which I promptly retorted, to make money! Because in those days my family and I struggled to make ends meet.In my very first posting as Sub-Divisional Officer in Nashik division, a sub-rural posting, on August 3, 1973 at Ozar, I dared to cross swords with a powerful politician. Chandrasen Kalwankar was the Nashik district president of the Samajwadi Party and hailed from Kalwan.
No officer till then had had the guts to catch him. He refused to come when called so I told my men to have him handcuffed and brought before me. This fellow had an unusual knack of creating trouble. On the day of the weekly village market, he would often declare a bandh and then his cronies would indulge in looting. His arrest ensured a peaceful weekly market, upon which villages in the vicinity depended so much.
The next high-profile politician I happened to cross swords with was the vineyard king, Ramrao Gaikwad, again in Ozar, Nashik district. It so happened that the senior investigating officer was on leave and I received information of a murder. Knowing his antecedents well, I grilled him relentlessly the whole day and night and at around 4 am he confessed to the crime.
I told Awhad and his men that they could go ahead with their planned protests. I will not arrest any one of you, neither will I order anyone to shoot at you. They got confused.
His involvement in the merciless beating up of a thief who had entered his 51-acre vineyard would never have been unearthed. Gaikwad beat up the thief and dumped him in his garage, only to find him dead the next day. His men then used a pick-up truck and a Fiat to dispose of the body in Kasara Ghat, near Igatpuri in Nashik district. I painstakingly collected all the belongings of the dead man and the bones for DNA sampling. I was reprimanded by my seniors for having dared to lay my hands on Gaikwad. I stood my ground and bluntly told DIG Gokhale that I was prepared to risk my job for the cause.
The man’s widow identified his clothes. The blood samples found in the pick-up truck, the Fiat and on the gunny bag cloth used to tie up the man matched the DNA sample. It was the first perfect case of my life, I had all the proof to nail Gaikwad. Then I was offered a bribe of Rs 5 lakh which I promptly refused. Later, to my horror, I found that everybody else involved in the case had been bribed, including the trial court judge. Even the widow turned hostile. The court set Gaikwad and nine other accused free, while two others, including the driver, were sentenced to rigorous imprisonment. My second posting was at the communally sensitive power loom town of Malegaon during the Emergency days of 1975. There I found that, despite the provisions of the Shops and Establishment Act, hotels, shops and eateries remained open way beyond 11 pm and hordes of people, especially unemployed youths, hung around them. They were readymade manpower for anyone itching to start a riot. Riots would start on the smallest pretexts. After inquiries, I found out that the places they stayed at were very small and often more than one family lived in one place and hence people took turns to sleep.
I ruthlessly shut down the shops by 10 pm. That did not go down well with the local leaders who pressured Chief Minister Shankarrao Chavan to intervene. At the meeting, I said that I had given them the option that the police would give the youths a photo pass so that at night they could deliver tea and bread on bicycles to the loom workers. But this idea was not liked by them as the leaders and the youth had a penchant for kicking off riots at the drop of a hat.
Sensing that I would not back down, the CM let me have my way. In the two and-a-half years that I was posted there, I followed the simple rule of not registering any non-cognizable offence. And that resulted in no riots taking place in Malegaon as long as I was posted there. Today Malegaon may be known for its ramshackle part-time movie industry but in those days cinema halls in the city used to be filled with thick cigarette and bidi smoke and no respectable family ever entered them. All I did was to send police teams inside once the movie began to drag out the smokers and fine them, and within months the cinema halls were a place where all could go to enjoy a movie. ON April 22, 1973, five people died in a firing incident at Sinnar, near Nashik. As the first anniversary of the incident neared, local leader Awhad and his supporters decided to observe a Martyrs’ Day. On that day, External Affairs Minister Yashwantrao Chavan was in town to attend an official function.
I was told by my local staff that the leaders were a bit arrogant and refused to listen to reason. As matters came to a head, I told Awhad and his men that they could very well go ahead with their planned protests. I will not arrest any one of you, neither will I order anyone to shoot at you, I said. They got confused. All I insisted on was that I would not allow any provocation or any untoward incident. The trick worked and the day passed off peacefully.
By then I was in the spotlight. Around 1982, I was asked to come to Mumbai for a posting. On July 28, 1982, I was posted as DCP of Zone 4, that covered Dadar, Matunga, Mahim, Dharavi, Chembur, Sion-Trombay. However, the Mumbai police commissioner, Julio Ribeiro, prevailed upon his bosses in insisting that I join him in his fight to weed out the underworld and gang wars. But in the end, during my tenure, I was left all alone to fight cases filed against me in court with belated help coming from the government.
I happened to meet Pappu Kalani in the presence of the police commissioner. I slapped him in the presence of the top cops
Around 1990, I was posted as DCP, Kalyan range, in Thane district which covered the industrial and residential belts of Thane, Kalyan, Dombivli, Ulhasnagar and Ambernath. These cities were growing and so were illegal encroachments, crime and construction. At the time, the murder of Duli chand Kalani, a one-time close aide of then Congress leader Suresh alias Pappu Kalani, had taken place in Ulhasnagar. Much to my horror, all the three accused, Lalu Hemdev, Gop Bahirani and Inder Bhatija, died one by one under rather mysterious circumstances.
The Vardarajan saga
IN those days the activities of Haji Mastan, Yusuf Patel and Karim Lala were on the wane. Vardarajan Mudaliyar or Vardabhai was slowly taking over all the illegal activities in the city. He virtually ran a parallel ministry of sorts with politicians and bureaucrats registering their presence at his darbar. His henchmen, like Bada Soma, looked after smuggling, gambling and matka dens. Darshankumar Dhalla alias Tillu took supari (contract killing), N Vitthal looked after the fake passport business and Thomas Kurien alias Khwaja looked after illicit breweries and transportation of illicit hooch.
In June 1985, I happened to come face to face with Vardarajan in Matunga, in south central Mumbai. He operated his empire from his stronghold in Dharavi. A Tamil family used to live opposite his house. In the compound of this house was a seller of idlivada who had been given place by Vardarajan in return for acting as an informant for him. This person would bang and clang his utensils well into the wee hours, much to the discomfort of the Tamil family. One day, the 30-year-old youth, his wife and aged parents mustered the courage to approach me. The youth ran an electrical goods shop in the same compound. He complained bitterly that neither he nor his aged parents could get any proper sleep because of the noise the idli-seller made. In those days, registering a case against Varda was unthinkable as it entailed grave consequences for anyone who did so. The police themselves would tip off the don whose cronies would then take care of the complainant.
I made him stand the whole night in the police lock-up. The humiliation was enough to rattle him. He then tried to harass me by filing false cases against me. Even then I was told quietly by politicians and by policemen not to cross swords with the don whose writ ran large in the corridors of power.
The next body blow that I delivered to him was denying him space for his once-famous Vardabhai ka Sarvajanik Ganapati outside Matunga railway station. In those days, he used to put up a huge pandal outside the railway station, effectively blocking all exit and entrance routes for daily commuters. To make matters worse, his henchmen extracted huge amounts of protection money from the nearby shopkeepers and hawkers. Just days before the festival was to begin, I found out from the BMC administration that the vacant plot on which the pandal used to come up was reserved for parking purposes. I kept the civic administration in the loop and moved the traffic police chowki to the place. The matter reached the court, which finally awarded a very small strip of space for the pandal. That, in effect, took the wind out of Vardarajan’s sails.
By then he was losing his grip on the underworld. I had effectively put an end to the illicit breweries, smuggling and other illegal activities. As the last throw of the dice, he made a daring plan to attack the ACP’s office at Dadar police station. A huge haul of arms and weapons was seized. I then made it a point to book Vardarajan under the NSA. Sensing that the end was near, he fled to Chennai to escape arrest and died a rather inglorious death.
His cronies did try to shore up his empire by bringing his body on a chartered plane from Chennai. But it did not work. In his last days, Vardarajan even tried to make a Tamil movie, Naayakan, and a Hindi one, Dayyavan, to shore up his sagging image. He made it a point to negatively base the character of the police officer in the films on me. But even that did not work in the end. He died in January 1988 in Chennai, still in hiding to evade arrest.
IN those days the activities of Haji Mastan, Yusuf Patel and Karim Lala were on the wane. Vardarajan Mudaliyar or Vardabhai was slowly taking over all the illegal activities in the city. He virtually ran a parallel ministry of sorts with politicians and bureaucrats registering their presence at his darbar. His henchmen, like Bada Soma, looked after smuggling, gambling and matka dens. Darshankumar Dhalla alias Tillu took supari (contract killing), N Vitthal looked after the fake passport business and Thomas Kurien alias Khwaja looked after illicit breweries and transportation of illicit hooch.In June 1985, I happened to come face to face with Vardarajan in Matunga, in south central Mumbai. He operated his empire from his stronghold in Dharavi. A Tamil family used to live opposite his house. In the compound of this house was a seller of idlivada who had been given place by Vardarajan in return for acting as an informant for him. This person would bang and clang his utensils well into the wee hours, much to the discomfort of the Tamil family. One day, the 30-year-old youth, his wife and aged parents mustered the courage to approach me. The youth ran an electrical goods shop in the same compound. He complained bitterly that neither he nor his aged parents could get any proper sleep because of the noise the idli-seller made. In those days, registering a case against Varda was unthinkable as it entailed grave consequences for anyone who did so. The police themselves would tip off the don whose cronies would then take care of the complainant.
Registering a case against Varda entailed grave consequences. The police themselves would tip off the don whose cronies would then take care of the complainant.
I told this family that I could register the FIR against Vardarajan, but they had to stand their ground come what may even if I was transferred later. I reminded them that Vardarajan behaved very roughly with women. I told them that he could even lay his hands on them. The old lady boldly said that she was prepared for the worst. I then entrusted the job of picking up Vardarajan from his den to my trusted Inspector, MG Rao. I told him to pick up Varda in any state and bring him before me. Rao picked him up in the dead of night and dumped him in the lock-up at the Matunga police station and informed me that the job had been done. Instead of rushing to meet the don in the wee hours, I chose to meet him in the lock-up only in the morning. I made him stand the whole night in the police lock-up. The humiliation was enough to rattle him. He then tried to harass me by filing false cases against me. Even then I was told quietly by politicians and by policemen not to cross swords with the don whose writ ran large in the corridors of power.
The next body blow that I delivered to him was denying him space for his once-famous Vardabhai ka Sarvajanik Ganapati outside Matunga railway station. In those days, he used to put up a huge pandal outside the railway station, effectively blocking all exit and entrance routes for daily commuters. To make matters worse, his henchmen extracted huge amounts of protection money from the nearby shopkeepers and hawkers. Just days before the festival was to begin, I found out from the BMC administration that the vacant plot on which the pandal used to come up was reserved for parking purposes. I kept the civic administration in the loop and moved the traffic police chowki to the place. The matter reached the court, which finally awarded a very small strip of space for the pandal. That, in effect, took the wind out of Vardarajan’s sails.
By then he was losing his grip on the underworld. I had effectively put an end to the illicit breweries, smuggling and other illegal activities. As the last throw of the dice, he made a daring plan to attack the ACP’s office at Dadar police station. A huge haul of arms and weapons was seized. I then made it a point to book Vardarajan under the NSA. Sensing that the end was near, he fled to Chennai to escape arrest and died a rather inglorious death.
His cronies did try to shore up his empire by bringing his body on a chartered plane from Chennai. But it did not work. In his last days, Vardarajan even tried to make a Tamil movie, Naayakan, and a Hindi one, Dayyavan, to shore up his sagging image. He made it a point to negatively base the character of the police officer in the films on me. But even that did not work in the end. He died in January 1988 in Chennai, still in hiding to evade arrest.
The darkest day of my career was March 30, 1990. On that day, the State Board SSC exams were on. A boy named Harish Patel and two of his friends barged into one of the schools that was a centre for the exams, threatened the lone cop with a fake gun, and told the students to leave. They then locked up a girl, Rinku Patil, poured kerosene on her, set her on fire and fled the scene. The girl’s sister had been among the students who were forced to leave.
Intriguingly, the lady principal, instead of ringing up the police, chose to ring up Pappu Kalani. His brother, Narayan Kalani, came to the school and shot a video film of the entire incident, locked the room and handed over the keys to the principal. They tried every trick in the book to have me transferred out of the Kalyan zone. At one point of time, the police party which had gone to pick up Pappu for questioning had to return empty-handed following orders to the contrary from the powers that were.
On February 1, 1993, I was on foot patrol in the worstaffected Behrampada locality, near Bandra. At one location, near Rizvi Mansion, along the Anant Kanekar Marg, rioters were hurling Molotov cocktails at one another.
Then I was sent on a five-week study trip to the National Police Academy, Hyderabad, to take part in a senior management course. By the time I returned, to my utter surprise, the Kalyan zone had been bifurcated and Ulhasnagar town was taken out of my jurisdiction. Much later, on November 12, 1992, Pappu was arrested in Dadar, Mumbai. His wife, Jyoti Kalani, unsuccessfully tried to gherao the police commissioner, AS Samra, who refused to meet her. I chased the women out of the DCP’s office premises. Later, I happened to come across Pappu in the presence of the police commissioner and other top cops. I had the guts to slap him in their presence.
At the time of the December 6, 1992, communal riots that occurred after the Babri Masjid demolition, I was posted as Commandant, SRPF, Jogeshwari, in north Mumbai. I was asked by Ministers and politicians to assist the Mumbai police in quelling the riots. However, given the bitter experiences of the past, I insisted that the government amend the law and provide protection to officers who try to maintain law and order outside their duty hours and jurisdiction.
ON February 1, 1993, I was on foot patrol in the worst-affected Behrampada locality, near Bandra. At one location, near Rizvi Mansion, along Anant Kanekar Marg, rioters were hurling Molotov cocktails at one another. One of my junior officers even tried to dissuade me from going inside. Seeing me coming, the local Congress corporator, Gulzar Sheikh, shouted, “Arre, YC Pawar aaya.” Immediately, all the miscreants ran helter-skelter and hid.
A day earlier, celebrities Alyque Padamsee, Keku Gandhi, Lt-Gen D’Souza and Ishaq Jamkhanwala had visited the local Nirmal Nagar police station and heaped abuse on the police. That day, I made them accompany me on foot into the troubled area which I had managed to quieten. They had to eat crow.
But that was not the end of it. The next day, the Governor, Dr PC Alexander, was to visit the Golibar Maidan locality in Khar, close to Behrampada, with Congress MP Sunil Dutt in tow. All of a sudden, Dutt, taking another route, took the Governor along with him to Behrampada. The Governor stopped at Rizvi Mansion to speak to the residents of the locality. By then an angry crowd of locals, mostly women, had gheraoed them and virtually blocked the road to the Western Express Highway.
The agitated women began throwing chappals at Dutt. Sensing that the situation was getting volatile, I just caught Dutt by his collar and dumped him inside the Governor’s car. Then I ran in front of the car, shoving aside the women. Later, when the city came back to normal, Dutt, speaking at a function, publicly thanked me for having saved his life that day. I even got arrested the Shiv Sena leader, Madhukar Sarpotdar, under the NSA for his role in the communal riots.
After the March 1993 serial bomb blasts that rocked Mumbai, I was called to head the investigation team. Some politicians questioned my wisdom in setting aside standard investigating procedures and arresting most of the local king-pins within three days.
Police commissioner AS Samra gifted me one of the two Maruti 1000s that were seized during the raids as a token of recognition of my efforts in cracking the case. I was twice recommended for the President’s Police Medal and once for the Padmashri.
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