With the arrest of 5 gangsters recently in Mumbai, I thought I’d write on the gangs which used to control the financial capital of India that Mumbai, during their height being able to cause great destruction even today their presence can cause fear in people.
What’s The Background Of These Gangs?
Mumbai has a long history with gangs starting in the 50s, starting with Karim Lala, Haji Mastan and Varadarajan Mudaliar. They ruled the crime scene in Mumbai, keeping a low profile in the 60s until the 80s, when they started losing influence to other gangs and eventually faded into irrelevancy.
It was with the rise of a gangster named Dawood Ibrahim, who made a gang known as D Company, that the people of Mumbai would actively have to start fearing gangs in Mumbai. Dawood Ibrahim would order killings regularly to the point that the police decided that something had to be done to stop him from continuing his reign of terror; the police batch of 1983 would be acclaimed for fighting the gangs on the streets of Mumbai.
The increasing amount of crime pressured the police to act as killings by the D Company were becoming a weekly occurrence. In the streets of one of the most important cities in India, this was unacceptable. The police had a detection unit, often used to dispatch gangsters and would become known for encounter killings.
The D Company’s most infamous crimes came with starting the Bombay riots by burning alive six girls in a place called Gandhi Chawl. During the Bombay riots, gangs were active, and two months after the riots had ended, the D Company was responsible for the Bombay blasts, which would be one of the worst bombings India ever saw, killing 257 people.
Due to such incidents, the police took action and their crack down on the gangs ended in over 1000 gangsters being killed by the police. Still, not all clean for the police and human rights organisations found hundreds of cases of civilians being killed in fake encounters by the police. This led to the Mumbai police being infamous in more poor parts of Mumbai where these encounters would happen.
The Present Situation
Today the gangs aren’t big as they were and the last significant killing having been done by them was ten years ago. The killing of journalist Jyotirmoy Dey, an investigative editor with the newspaper Mid-day, shook the journalists in Mumbai since the shooting of journalists in Mumbai hadn’t been seen in decades.
Today they’re not as strong as before. They are routinely arrested by the police, the gang leaders that terrorised Mumbai in the 80s and 90s currently are either living in hiding outside of the country or are currently in jail, yet the fact their gangs still run in the city show the influence they hold still.
Today gangs typically fight their conflicts between themselves and don’t try to draw the attention of the police by harming civilians as in the years of violence of the 80s and 90s. However, the police are still eyeing to finish off these gangs for good, and the people of Mumbai still fear the gangs in case they come back to their original height of power.
Conclusion
The gangs are currently still an issue with their drug trade, among other things; thanks to the police, it is hopeful that in the years to come, we can see an underworld-free Mumbai, a city like Mumbai being a centre of finance, to have gangs is always a threat to investment among other things. Thus the gangsters can harm the city.
Each week when police arrest gangsters, the threat decreases, and the likelihood of resurgence diminishes with the decrease. It can only be hoped that from now no significant incidents of terrorism are used by any of the gang leaders to bring themselves back into the spotlight, as even a small number of people can commit such a terrible act.
Hopefully, a better Mumbai is ahead for a city that is integral to this country’s modern history.