Organised crime in India
Its virulent form in modern times is due to several socio-economic and political factors and advances in science and technology.
The powerful trio of Haji Mastan, Varadarajan Mudaliar, and Karim Lala enjoyed backing from their communities.
Karim Lala commanded south and central Bombay, and the majority of smuggling and illegal construction financing was Haji Mastan's domain.
They were especially involved in hashish trafficking, protection rackets, extortion, illegal gambling, gold smuggling, and contract killings and held a firm stranglehold over parts of Mumbai's underworld.
It has been argued that the D-Company is not a stereotypical organised crime cartel in the strict sense of the word, but rather a collusion of criminal terrorist groups based around Ibrahim's personal control and leadership.
After the 1993 Bombay bombings, which Ibrahim allegedly organised and financed with Tiger Memon,[9] both men became part of India's most wanted.
Gawali started his criminal activities there and used the rooms there for keeping kidnapped persons, torturing them, extorting money from them, and murdering them.
Thuggee were crimes carried out by organized gangs of robbers and murderers which operated in the northern and eastern parts of the Indian subcontinent.
[33] There are families with blood feuds with each other in the Rayalaseema region of Andhra Pradesh and parts of eastern Karnataka in India, and associated with alleged Mafia Raj.
Much of the mining and real estate mafia in the region is run by such families, and to avoid punishment, they are often involved in corruption and local politics.
Factionalism is one of the main reasons for which vendetta politics is widely practiced in Andhra Pradesh, and is also a major cause of rioting and domestic terrorism in the region.
Several local Indian, Russian, Israeli and Nigerian criminal groups are reported to be heavily involved in the organised drug trade in Goa, one of the smallest states of India.
[34] Goa has, in recent days, become a principal hub of the international drug trade apart from being a key point of consumption.
According to estimates, drugs flowing out of different foreign locations lands on the comparatively unguarded Goan coastline as Mumbai and its hinterland are no longer considered an easy route for trafficking since checks by the Coastguard, Navy, Customs, and other government bodies began.
The real estate and industrial sector boom of the early 2000s saw several criminals surfacing with the primary objective of controlling unions.
The flourishing of the banking sector, especially finance companies, spurred the demand for bouncers who ensured recovery of bad loans and helped in taking disputed properties.
Around five years back when the boom in real estate ended, these gangs then turned to extortion and protection money as their source of income.
[38] Gang members perform attacks while wearing only their underwear, which is the source of their name (in the local languages, chaddi, or kachcha are underpants and baniyan is undershirts).
The Kala Kachcha gang members are robbers and dacoits, who don police uniform or 'Kale Kachche' (black underpants)[43] to evade detection.
The dacoit film was a genre of Indian cinema that began with Mehboob Khan's Aurat (1940) and gained popularity with its remake Mother India (1957) as well as Dilip Kumar's Gunga Jumna (1961).
These films are often inspired by real Mumbai underworld gangsters, such as Haji Mastan, Dawood Ibrahim and D-Company.
[52] This resulted in their creation of the "angry young man", personified by Amitabh Bachchan,[52] who reinterpreted Dilip Kumar's performance in Gunga Jumna in a contemporary urban context.
The writing of Salim-Javed and acting of Amitabh Bachchan popularized the trend, with films such as Zanjeer and particularly Deewaar, a crime film inspired by Gunga Jumna[46] that pitted "a policeman against his brother, a gang leader based on real-life smuggler Haji Mastan" portrayed by Bachchan; Deewaar was described as being "absolutely key to Indian cinema" by Danny Boyle.
[54] The crime films written by Salim-Javed and starring Amitabh Bachchan reflected the socio-economic and socio-political realities of 1970s India, channeling the growing discontent and disillusionment among the masses, and the failure of the state in ensuring their welfare and well-being, in a time when prices were rapidly rising, commodities were becoming scarce, public institutions were losing legitimacy, smugglers and gangsters were gathering political clout,[48] and there was an unprecedented growth of slums.
[50] The cinema of Salim-Javed and Amitabh Bachchan dealt with themes relevant to Indian society at the time, such as urban poverty in slums, corruption in society, and the Bombay underworld crime scene,[51] and was perceived by audiences as anti-establishment, often represented by an "angry young man" protagonist, presented as a vigilante or anti-hero,[52] with his suppressed rage giving a voice to the angst of the urban poor.
[50] Later films in the genre include Ram Gopal Verma's Satya (1998) and Company (2002), based on the D-Company, which both offered "slick, often mesmerising portrayals of the Mumbai underworld" and displayed realistic "brutality and urban violence."
Another notable film in the genre was Black Friday (2004), adapted from Hussein Zaidi's book of the same name about the 1993 Bombay bombings.
