17th JUNE 2015
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Crime & Place
Haji Mastan enjoys the view at Haji Ali
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Mastan Mirza tried every trick in the book to undo his past. After his 18-month incarceration during the Emergency, which debilitated the once notorious smuggler, he surrendered in the presence of revolutionary leader Jayaprakash Narain. Subsequently he performed Haj, wrapped himself in a cloak of piety and got a more respectable name, Haji Mastan. But despite this, and despite his other famed sobriquets like friend of the poor, Mumbai's Robin Hood and kind-hearted Muslim patriarch, Haji Mastan could never wash away the infamy that accompanied his meteoric rise. That infamy hounds him even in death.
Mastan's adopted son Sunder Shekhar will soon approach the Bombay high court to mitigate some of this notoriety by trying to stall the release of Once Upon A Time in Mumbai—a film which reportedly paints Mastan as an underworld don. Nagpada, an area near which Mastan began in Mumbai, must undoubtedly figure in the movie—as it does in a recent academic work which revisits city localities that bred smugglers, dons and criminals. Abdul Shaban's Mumbai: Political Economy Of Crime And Space provides a ready reckoner—and a perspective—to understand why some minority-concentrated corners in the city became what scholars refer to as "delinquency areas or hot spots of crime". Shaban, who teaches Developmental Studies at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), especially dissects the psychology of Nagpada, the area which produced the maximum number of dons and their underlings. Shaban's study frequently mentions the area which stretches from Temkar Street to Maulana Azad Road in Nagpada. "The area produced gangsters like Karim Lala, Dawood Ibrahim, Yusuf Patel, Chhota Shakeel, Alamzeb, Ameerzada, Ahmed Kashmiri and Asif Baatla while the adjoining Agripada houses Dagdi Chawl, Arun Gawli's den," says 38-year-old Shaban, who spent weeks roaming the streets conversing with locals. In this crime hotspot, three generations live in single, tiny rooms where privacy is a privilege. Outside the tenements, in narrow lanes and bylanes, drug dealers, pimps and prostitutes prowl as cops look away. "Before the Mumbai police started cracking down on organised crime post the 1993 serial blasts, people in the delinquency areas trusted the dadas or bhais (goons) more than the cops," explains Shaban who hails from Gonda (UP) and has studied at various institutions, including AMU, JNU and IIT-Powai before he landed at TISS. During the British era, Nagpada, Pydhonie and Dongri became enclaves of Muslim merchants and over the years turned into Muslim ghettos as migrants began to settle there. Their numerical strength in these areas provided the Muslims with a certain psychological comfort, writes the scholar. He maps the ghetto's psychology: in the absence of trust in the police, the community depends on criminals, and some even harbour them and look upon them as role models. Criminalisation, Shaban says, is a byproduct of ghettoisation and a feeling that institutions of the State like the police are a community's enemy, which leads inhabitants of the ghetto to hold hardened criminals in high esteem. Shaban maintains that Shekhar's protest against Once Upon A Time In Mumbai is misplaced and unwarranted. "A son is bound to find any negative depiction of his parents malicious," he says. "But even if Haji Mastan might never have fired a shot at anyone, he presided over a culture which incubated notorious criminals." Indeed, Mastan—who was a coolie at the Bombay Docks before he endeared himself to corrupt officers, bypassed laws, and smuggled gold, silver and electronic goods—was very friendly with dons like Karim Lala and Varadarajan Mudaliar, on account of which the rich and powerful hobnobbed with him. A senior Urdu journalist, who would regularly meet Mastan, concurs. "Does Shekhar want the world to call Haji Mastan a saint?" he asks. "Don't forget that Mastan had friends across the social spectrum, from film stars to politicians to the underworld. Karim Lala was one of these, and among those who benefited from Lala's tutelage was Dawood Ibrahim." Many also recall Mastan's benevolence, his help to the poor who queued up every morning outside Baitul Surur, his palatial bungalow on plush Warden Road. But, they say, that does not negate the criminality he practised, encouraged and condoned. Shaban compares the landscape of Nagpada, on which Mastan banked a lot after he launched his outfit Dalit-Muslim Suraksha Mahasangh, with that of Five Oaks in Ohio (USA). In the 1970s and 1980s, he writes, Five Oaks (with a heavy concentration of African-Americans) was infested with crime where pimps and prostitutes, drug dealers and local goons abounded. Then in 1990s Five Oaks was redesigned, street layouts were altered and mini-neighbourhoods created which led to a sharp drop in crime in the area. Almost a similar plan for Mohammed Ali Road and adjoining Nagpada, dreamed up by Dawoodi Bohra entrepreneurs, is in the pipeline. Perhaps the image of the city's crime hot spots too could change in future.
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