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(This is Part II of a series by senior journalist Smruti Koppikar, on the Ambani-Sachin Vaze crime ‘thriller’ unfolding in Mumbai. You can read Part I here.)
What started as a threat to the Ambanis with a gelatin sticks-laden SUV parked near their residential tower in tony south Mumbai nearly a month ago, has turned into a full-fledged multi-pronged attempt to destabilise the Uddhav Thackeray-led government in Maharashtra. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) would love nothing more than a stint of President’s Rule in the state, followed of course, by its government.
This calls for a central character that can capture public imagination and exploit the anti-incumbent sentiment — former Mumbai Police Commissioner Param Bir Singh plays that role. Singh taking on Deshmukh is unfolding as an open war between the administrative and political wings of the government — except that Singh’s moves carry impeccable political timing and appear to march to the BJP’s beat.
Will it come to pass? All bets are off the table, for now. Should it happen, it will mark a new low in federal relations and could leave the Maharashtra Vikas Aghadi (MVA) — comprising the Shiv Sena, the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP), and the Congress — in tatters. If it does not, it would go down as one more attempt that BJP’s Devendra Fadnavis made to dislodge Thackeray; a meme even mocked him as ‘Desperate Devendra’.
Two days later, as he took charge of his new post as Commandant General of Home Guards, Singh filed a petition in the Supreme Court saying his transfer was “arbitrary and illegal”, sought protection from further coercive action against him (read on to know why this is important), and demanded a Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) inquiry against Deshmukh. Barely six months ago, Singh had vehemently resisted CBI probe into actor Sushant Singh Rajput’s suicide case and praised the Mumbai Police.
Singh’s letter stated that Home Minister Deshmukh had asked Assistant Police Inspector Sachin Vaze to ‘collect’ Rs 100 crore a month from hotels and bars and that he, Singh, had verbally alerted Chief Minister Thackeray and NCP President Sharad Pawar about this.
He assumed that in the sensation created, people would overlook the obvious: that it was he who had signed to reinstate Vaze after 16 years of wilderness, political work and business, that it was he to whom Vaze often directly reported, bypassing at least four levels of police hierarchy — that it was his decision as Mumbai’s police commissioner to allow Vaze control of high-profile cases such as Rajput’s suicide, the TRP scam, and TV news anchor Arnab Goswami’s alleged involvement in architect Anvay Naik’s suicide.
Did his conscience awaken only after the NIA arrested Vaze in the Ambani-SUV case to perhaps protect himself? To do so, he would have had to redirect the fire at Deshmukh — and thereby, to the government.
Deshmukh has defended himself, his party boss Pawar and the NCP have defended him, and he threatened Singh with a defamation case for the “Rs 100 crore a month” allegation. But he is now the weak link in the government; his place in the Cabinet lies in Pawar and Thackeray’s sagacity and willingness to weather the political storm. Whether he brazens out this controversy to remain a minister or resigns to save the government, he will find it difficult to shrug off the taint. This, the BJP says, has revealed the rot and venality in the force.
Fadnavis upped the ante by stating he had “6.3 GB data and all (these) transcripts of severe and sensitive allegations” against cops negotiating their transfers and postings; he claims Thackeray had this data but did not act.
This is money collected to overlook or ‘pardon’ violation of a law; the bigger the violation, the higher the ‘vasooli’. Or the richer the target, the higher the ‘hafta’ demand, as it used to happen when gangsters ran amok in the 1990s.
There is a system for ‘hafta-vasooli’, as IPS officer Sanjay Pandey — considered an honest and no-nonsense officer, overlooked twice for Mumbai Police Commissioner’s post — explained on actor Aamir Khan's show a few years ago. Casual collection happens when people want to escape the fine for breaking a traffic signal, or a street vendor wants to secure his place in a no-parking zone and so on, while institutional collection from commercial establishments — including hotels and bars — is systematic, structured, predictable, and involves politicians.
Pandey also wrote a letter when Singh shot his off, but it hardly got media attention. In it, Pandey refers to the enquiry he was entrusted with of fellow IPS officer, Additional Director General Deven Bharti, whose last active post was the state’s Anti-Terrorism Squad chief. “In this enquiry against Deven Bharti, I have had severe hurdles to face with non-cooperation from CP Mumbai (commissioner of police) and the then DGP of Maharashtra. Witnesses were threatened on record by CP Shri Param Bir Singh, a fact which was reported to the government,” the letter stated.
AAP leader Preeti Sharma Menon verbalised what was known. “A retired assistant commissioner sent a letter and pen drive to Thackeray in February about Mr Bharti’s criminal associations; the pen drive has a video confession of a gangster who details the extortion modus operandi which involved the top cop,” she claimed.
The contents of the pen drive are reportedly explosive — way more than the 20 gelatin sticks found near Ambani’s tower — and lays bare the nexus between the top cop and gangster on ‘hafta-vasooli’, how they operated, and how the spoils were split, including money sent to Nepal.
Why did Param Bir Singh not cooperate with Pandey on the enquiry (refer to his plea to SC against ‘coercive action’)? The answers are bound to make both men more than worried.
The crime-politico thriller is spinning wild now, its plot lines going berserk. There’s no telling what and how much Vaze will sing to the NIA. Singh is looking for ways to protect himself, project himself as the good-clean cop amidst the venality in the Mumbai Police.
The letter to Thackeray, the subsequent petition in the SC, Fadnavis releasing sensational information to support him — are all parts of a piece; also a part of this is the proceedings in the Parliament on Monday where BJP MPs raised the “Rs 100 crore collection” charge against Deshmukh and demanded that the Thackeray government be dismissed.
But Singh may not have to try hard for protection. Fadnavis is clearly on his side in this battle and, ironically, firing from his shoulder too. Also, it helps that Singh already has a connection with the BJP. His son is married to the grand-daughter of Datta Meghe, a veteran politician from Vidarbha who spent the better part of his career as a Congress MP but switched over to the BJP. Meghe, now retired, still calls the shots in Wardha; his younger son is a BJP MLA.
How this layered and complex story eventually plays out, whether President’s Rule is invoked or not, depends largely on how Thackeray, with help from Pawar, checkmates the sub-plots within this murky story.
(Smruti Koppikar, a Mumbai-based senior journalist, writes on politics, cities, gender and media. She tweets @smrutibombay. is an opinion piece and the views expressed are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)
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Published: 23 Mar 2021,01:25 PM IST