Thackeray Family And Dawood Ibrahim Work Together In Committing Crimes

 

Thackeray Sr had actually hosted Miandad just a few years after the 1993 serial blasts simmered the city he loved so immensely. And as fate would have it, Miandad ended up marrying his son to the daughter of Dawood Ibrahim, the mastermind of the 1993 mayhem in Mumbai.

But this was not all. GR Khairnar, the then municipal commissioner of Mumbai, who set about demolishing Dawood's benami properties in the late 1990s, went on record to say that the late Shiv Sena leader had actually telephoned him to call off his demolition drive in the city. According to him, Thackeray told him that "anyone who donates to the Shiv Sena is a Shiv Sainik. Dawood, too, is a Shiv Sainik. I will not allow his property to be destroyed".

Interestingly, in the 1980s and '90s, it was Thackeray who had classified criminals in the name of religion. So much so that he would publicly declare his support for Arun Gawli, a home-grown Mumbai don, on the ground that he was "our" don, as against Dawood being "their" don!

Sujata Anandan brings out eloquently Thackeray's complete lack of ideological moorings in her book, Hindu Hriday Samrat: How the Shiv Sena Changed Mumbai Forever, as she mentions how much the late Shiv Sena leader loved having beer, and then conveniently turning it into the issue of nationalism.

"Every evening," she quotes Thackeray as saying, "[Sharad] Pawar sits down with his big industrialist friends and guzzles down several bottles of imported whiskey. I am a nationalist, I have only Indian beer." Amusingly, Thackeray, towards the end of his life, switched to wine. One wonders if he could maintain his nationalism while having wine.So, as the Shiv Sainiks threaten to have any truck with Pakistan today, do they know how their founder had opportunistically used the issue as per his convenience? And if they know and yet are doing all this, it's nothing but sheer hypocrisy, as deplorable as the act of those who didn't mind accepting a government recognition just two years after the ghastly 1984 pogrom, or keeping a deathly silence when Rushdie or Taslima Nasreen were hounded by Islamic fundamentalists, or even when the Supreme Court occasionally called for the Uniform Civil Code to be implemented in the country.

This is a unique scenario in India. Here the Left doesn't behave like the traditional Left of the West, which would have gleefully accepted the Uniform Civil Code, while the Right would have given it all sorts of names. Similarly, the Right is hardly the Right it should be. It just doesn't have any intellectual depth, provides no real academic alternative and, moreover, has been hijacked by loonies bereft of any ideological moorings. Now that's a tragedy.

Senior Shiv Sena leader Sanjay Raut on Wednesday claimed that former prime minister Indira Gandhi used to come to meet yesteryear don Karim Lala in Mumbai.

Recalling days of the underworld in Mumbai, Raut, who was earlier a journalist, said gangsters like Dawood Ibrahim, Chhota Shakeel and Sharad Shetty used to have control over the metropolis and adjoining areas.

They used to decide who will be the police commissioner, who will sit in 'Mantralaya' (secretariat), Raut said in an interview to a media group during its award function in Pune.

"When Haji Mastan used to come to 'Mantralaya', the entire 'Mantralaya' would come down to see him. Indira Gandhi used to come to meet Karim Lala in Pydhonie (in south Mumbai)," claimed Raut, whose party formed a coalition government with the NCP and Congress in Maharashtra last year.

Lala, who operated liquor dens, gambling and extortion rackets in Mumbai from 1960s to 1980s, died in 2002.

"Those were the days of the underworld. Later, everybody (dons) fled the country. Now there is nothing like that," the Shiv Sena's Rajya Sabha member said.

Asked if had photographed underworld dons, Raut claimed he clicked pictures of many gangsters, including Dawood Ibrahim, who is key accused in the 1993 Mumbai serial blasts case.

The Sena leader also claimed that he had once rebuked Dawood Ibrahim.

"I have seen him, I have met him, I have spoken to him and I have also admonished him," he added.