New Delhi: Chhota Rajan was the right hand man of don Dawood Ebrahim till the two parted ways over the latter’s role in the 1993 Mumbai bomb blasts.
Differences had arisen in 1992 itself after Dawood henchman Subhash Thakur killed three Chhota Rajan groupies. But after the blasts, they fell out completely, with Rajan positioning himself as a ‘patriotic don’ not wanting to betray his country, and challenging the hegemony of Dawood as a “people’s gangster.”
More than 100 men have been eliminated in five years since the inter-gang rivalry started in Mumbai. Some top D Company sharp shooters like Mohan Kuttian, Sadhu Shetty and Jaspal Singh too abandoned ship along with Chhota Rajan, who fled abroad, to escape Dawood’s stronghold, after the bitter parting of ways.
Chhota Rajan is believed to have assisted intelligence agencies in getting a low down on the activities of the D Company and its members using his intimate knowledge of the gang and its operations. To demonstrate his claims of being a Hindu don, Rajan threatened to kill those accused of engineering the Mumbai bomb blasts. The most prominent accused to be killed was Saleem Kurla in April 1998, followed by Mohammad Jindran in June 1998 and Majid Khan on March 1, 1999.
Shiv Sena, which ruled Maharashtra along with Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) from 1994 to 1999, is believed to have a soft corner for the ‘Hindu Don’. It is alleged that selective police action against the Dawood gangsters during the Shiv Sena regime and their elimination in encounters helped strengthen Rajan’s position, just as Dawood himself had benefitted in the 1980s.
In February 2010, Chhota Rajan gang assassinated Jamim Shah, a third-generation Nepali media baron of Muslim Kashmiri origin. Shah allegedly had links with Dawood and Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) and was the kingpin of a racket producing fake Indian money in the Himalayan nation. His anti-India activities had rankled New Delhi for more than a decade and half.
