MUMBAI ATTACKS: Excerpts from Suketu Mehta's book

[See SAJAforum's full coverage of the Mumbai attacks]

Suketu Mehta's "Maximum City: Mumbai Lost & Found" [more on the book at SuketuMehta.com] is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the city. During one of our webcasts after the Mumbai attacks, Mehta read out two sections that featured places and people that happened to be involved in the events of today. One about the Taj Mahal Hotel, and the other about one of the officers killed during the attacks.

About the Taj Mahal Hotel (from the 'Powertoni' chapter)

The people I meet who are seeking position or money in Bombay often use this one hotel, this one citadel of Empire, as a mark or measure of their progress upward through the strata of Bombay. The Taj was born out of a slight; because a man was turned away from a fancy hotel. When the prominent Parsi industrialist Jamshetji Tata was refused entrance into Watson's Hotel in the nineteenth century because he was a native, he swore revenge, and built the massive Taj in 1903, which outshone Watson's in every department. It is less a hotel than a proving-ground for the ego. The Taj lobby and its adjoining toilets are where you test your self-worth; theoretically, anyone can come in out of the heat and sit in the plush lobby, on the ornate sofas, amidst the billionaire Arabs and the society ladies, or relieve themselves in the gleaming toilets. But you need that inner confidence to project to the numerous gatekeepers, the toilet attendants; you need to first convince yourself that you belong there, in order to convince others that you do. And then you realize that the most forbidding gatekeeper is within you.

Excerpts from the section about Vijay Salaskar, one of the policemen who were killed, and Mumbai's top 'encounter' cop (From the 'Number Two After Scotland Yard' chapter):

Naeem Husain, the crime reporter for one of the leading Bombay dailies, is to meet with Assistant Police Inspector Vijay Salaskar, the top "encounter specialist" of the Bombay police. He takes me along. Salaskar's office is in a little hut all the way in the back of Nagpada Police Station... He seems curiously gentle for Bombay's top encounter cop; he has the demeanor of a middle-class Maharashtrian engineer. But he has almost single-handedly wiped out the Gawli gang, killed five of their top shooters. This is why, says Husain, "Salaskar allegedly has links to Shakeel." Every senior police officer has these alleged links, even Ajay. The gangs watch the record of individual policemen jealously: is he shooting more men of the D-company? Then he must be a Chotta Rajan man. Is he killing off the Gawli boys? Then he must be a Sena man. These rumors attach themselves to a person, and they are hard to shake; the only way to clear your name is to kill some people of the gang you allegedly have links to. Salaskar, when Husain asks him if he has specially targeted the Gawli gang, protests that he has killed Shakeel men, too. 

Husain asks him how many encounters he's been involved in, and what kind of gun he uses.

The cop thinks. "Deaths... twenty."

Salaskar brings a black leather pouch out of a cupboard, unzips it, and then I'm holding it in my hands. It is a six-shooter, and it has a brown handle and a steel barrel. It bears the logo "Titan Tiger", and, below it, ".38" and the provenance: "Miami, FL". On the handle is engraved a bearded Norse god. It looks like a prop in a Hollywood movie of the '50's. I stare down the barrel...

Husain asks him if he had ever been in any kind of personal danger during an encounter. Never, he says. The trick was to fire on the targets "before retaliatory fire." He says that he or his men get very close to the target before firing. He is not a good marksman, he admits, but then he has never had to fire from a distance of more than 25 feet.

As Judge Aguiar wrote in his report on the recent encounter, "It is amazing that despite Sada Pawale having fired from a sophisticated weapon, namely, an AK‑56 which is capable of firing 600 rounds per minute and having an effective range of 300 meters, neither A.P.I. Salaskar nor P.S.I. Desai or any of the police officers, suffered any bullet injury... The police officers must surely bear a charmed life."

The gangs will never go after the policemen, says Salaskar, not even after a constable. "What you saw in "Satya"  -- referring to a scene in a gangster movie in which a police commissioner is shot dead by the gangs -- only happens in the movies." He doesn't feel personally threatened. "I am fair. I know where the criminals' families are, but I never touch them."

 Husain asks Salaskar about his family; he has a ten-year-old daughter.

 
"Do you want your children to join the police force?"

 
The cop shakes his head emphatically no.

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