India's real-life Dirty Harry faces grubby demise

INDIA - In a courtroom in Mumbai this week, one of the most remarkable stories in modern policing is drawing to a close.

The man in the dock is no ordinary criminal. He is one of the most celebrated police officers in India, a real-life Dirty Harry who made his name by gunning down Mumbai's gangsters in the streets, and was part of the elite unit credited with cleaning up India's commercial capital.

Sub-inspector Daya Nayak killed 83 men in just four years. In 1997, thousands watched as he ambushed a famous gangster in the streets during rush hour. Nayak was wounded and spent 27 days in hospital. The gangster was killed.

It is a career that has turned Nayak into a working-class hero - not least because he started out as a child labourer, working as a waiter at the age of nine. He's the stuff of movies - Bollywood has made four on his life.

He has posed for pictures toting an AK-47 assault rifle - a rather heavier-duty piece of weaponry than is usually associated with police work.

Then there were the macho remarks: "We do not have a personal life. We lead such risky lives that there is no place for family life." But even amid the adulation, controversy has never been far behind. Human rights groups maintain that most of the criminals were gunned down in cold blood, and Nayak and colleagues later invented stories in which they had no choice but to fire.

But, in the end, that is not what brought down Nayak. These claims never dented his popular appeal.

What finally prompted his fall were claims that he was taking bribes to let the mafia leaders off the hook - and to kill their rivals. An anti-corruption probe found he had amassed a wealth more than twice his legitimate earnings.

Although he lives in a crumbling police flat, Indian newspapers reported the probe found he also owned a flat in Switzerland, a fleet of tourist buses and two hotels in Goa. They also reported suspicions he was financing a Bollywood film.

Nayak insists he is innocent, and says the accusations are an attempt by the mafia to put him out of action.

Nayak's story is what Mumbai dreams are made of: the poor immigrant who comes to the city and makes good. Every day, new immigrants arrive in "maximum city", a metropolis of at least 16 million people.

The roads are so crowded that they have had to build flyovers over the entire length of them, turning them into double-decker highways. Housing is in such short supply that the slums come up to the end of the airport runway, and the wheels of the planes almost touch the roofs as they land.

This is the city Nayak came to aged 9 in 1979. "Our family's financial condition was very bad. My mother told me to go to Mumbai to earn some money for us," he has said.

He started out working as a waiter. At nights, he slept in a porch. But he was lucky: the restaurant owner insisted he go to school, and he left with a full education.

After he left he joined the police. In the early 1990s, Mumbai was dominated by organised crime. There were more than 100 shootings a year.

Businessmen were under the mafia's grip. Those that did not pay were assassinated as an example.

It was a city of godfathers, and the most legendary of all was a man called Dawood Ibrahim. In those days he was just a mafia don, but later he was accused of planning bombings that killed hundreds across the city, and was designated an "international terrorist" with links to Osama bin Laden.

It was this underworld that Nayak entered. On New Year's Eve in 1996, he received a tip-off that two members of a gang were going to be in the Juhu area, and went to intercept them.

"I went to arrest them, but they fired," he has said. "In retaliation I shot them dead. I was worried because they were big gangsters. But the department appreciated my work."

In fact, it was a night that was to help turn Nayak into a major star.

Desperate to rein in the mafia, the police created five tight-knit elite units to hunt down the dons.

Except, human rights groups have alleged, the police commanders were not bothered whether the crime lords were brought in dead or alive.

After that New Year's Eve in Juhu, Nayak was recruited to one of the units. They became known in India as the "encounter specialists". Originally, encounter was a term used when an officer killed a criminal in self-defence. But it quickly became a euphemism for when the police caught and gunned down the criminals on the spot. The self-defence shoot-out was added to the police report later.

It was a policy which originated in India in the suppression of separatist Sikh militants in Punjab in the 1980s. "As the gang wars spilt out into the streets of Mumbai, the police followed a straightforward policy," the commentator Vir Sanghvi wrote in the Hindustan Times . "They made out a list of gangsters and killed them."

The police got away with it, Sanghvi wrote, because Mumbai's middle classes had lost faith in a judiciary that was failing to convict arrested mafia leaders.

A senior minister "openly declared he had ordered the police to shoot gangsters", former police chief Julio Ribeiro told the Indian Express.

But it was a world in which Nayak thrived. He and his colleagues have always insisted that all of the killings were in self-defence.

In an interview two years ago, he said that he may have killed 83 gangsters, but he had arrested more than 300 alive, and the media "should highlight arrests more than killings".

All the same, the various "encounter specialists" came to be known in the press by their number of kills.

Even though Nayak did not have the most kills - that was Inspector Pradeep Sharma with more than 100 - he became the big celebrity, partly because of his rise from nothing, partly because he loved the limelight.

He used to hang around with the Bollywood glitterati, and was a regular at parties with the beautiful people. He helped fund an expansion of his old village school, and managed to get Bollywood's biggest star, Amitabh Bachhan, to come to the opening.

Since those heady days, most of the encounter specialists have hit harder times. Several have been suspended, under investigation for misconduct.

Nayak's fall began in 2003, when associate Ketan Tirodkar filed a complaint against him. Tirodkar describes himself as a former journalist. He is also in the extortion business.

He alleged that Nayak had close links with two mafia dons, and had amassed huge private wealth through his dealings with them.

Specifically, he alleged Nayak had arrested gangsters and then demanded bribes for releasing them. He alleged the policeman had accepted payments from gangsters to eliminate rivals.

He also alleged the mafia had paid Nayan to have officers who were getting in the way moved to other units.

Mumbai's police commissioner vouched for Nayak, and a report exonerated him. But the investigation continued, and the anti-corruption bureau began to investigate his disproportionate wealth.

Last month they raided his Mumbai home, and he was suspended from the police force. Nayak's supporters still believe he is the victim of a stitch-up.

But whatever the outcome of his trial, it seems that the era of the Mumbai "encounter specialists" is coming to an end.

- INDEPENDENT