Crime: Death of a Gunslinger

Crime

India Today
October 5, 1998

UTTAR PRADESH
Death of a Gunslinger

Kalyan Singh has the edge in his war against as the police guns down top don S P Shukla.

By Kumar Sanjoya Singh

Sri Prakash Shukla must have loved it. All his life -- the police say he was born about 25 years ago though nobody can produce a birth certificate -- he sought fame, whatever the form. Eventually it came the hard way, as notoriety, as the sinister criminal to whom Zee TV devoted an entire episode of its India's Most Wanted series. Yet, it was recognition, national recognition for the man whose ambition was to "become India's Dawood Ibrahim".

It was to last less than a week. At 2.15 p.m. on September 22 -- only days after he was crowned Mr Evil on the small screen -- Shukla lay dead. It wasn't the way he would have wanted to go. There was no braggadocio, not even an audience. There were only policemen -- and a gunfight.

The Special Task Force (STF) of the Uttar Pradesh Police, along with a Delhi Police squad, caught up with Shukla on the Delhi-Ghaziabad highway. They had been told he would be leaving his hideout in south Delhi's Vasant Kunj area around noon to visit his girlfriend in Ghaziabad. The trap was laid in time for the return journey. There were five car-borne police teams near the Mohan Nagar flyover at 1.50 p.m. when Shukla's blue Cielo -- its number hr-26 g-7305 was fake, having actually been allotted to a scooter -- was spotted.

Sub Inspector V P S Chauhan Shukla himself was at the wheel, Anuj Pratap Singh sat beside him, while Sudhir Tripathi was on the backseat. Shukla was quick to sense trouble. He pressed the accelerator, dodged the first police vehicle and the second too. It was the quick-thinking Sub-Inspector V.P.S. Chauhan who blocked the road with his Gypsy. Alarmed, Shukla swerved to the left and sped off towards the Uttar Pradesh Awas Vikas colony, the policemen in hot pursuit. A kilometre down the road, he was overtaken and surrounded.

Pushed into a corner, Shukla did what came to him instinctively. He whipped out his revolver. It was never an equal battle. The mafia don fired 14 rounds; the law responded with 45. In a matter of minutes, Shukla and his accomplices were history. Operation Bazooka had been accomplished.

It need not have ended this way. In fact, if Shukla had not got carried away with his sense of power and terror, he may even have found himself on the right side of the law. He was contemplating a career in politics, of late the favoured vocation of retired criminal dons in the state.

Till even a few months ago, the more cynical were wondering -- only half-jokingly -- if he was a future chief minister. That was before the word got out that he had accepted a Rs 6 crore supari (contract) to assassinate Chief Minister Kalyan Singh, apparently from one of Kalyan's political rivals.

Suddenly a sense of urgency came into the working of the STF, set up in April with a mandate to arrest or liquidate 43 top criminals in Uttar Pradesh. Here was their chief target, cocking a snook at the state and vowing to kill the chief minister. The countdown had begun.

The critical clue came in the final week of August, when the STF received information that Shukla had rented a flat in Vasant Kunj. The flat came with a telephone which was rarely used for business calls. Shukla was a creature of the night, he made his calls after dusk on his cell phone (number 9810198194). It was from this number that Shukla issued his last threats, to a builder in Lucknow who had just constructed a block of 105 flats. The demand was very simple: Shukla wanted a "tax of Rs 50,000 per flat".

It should have been routine, just another extortion exercise in the life of a master criminal. Shukla, however, made one cardinal error. He had 14 SIM cards with him -- and thereby, theoretically, 14 cell phone numbers. Yet, inexplicably he used only one card in the final week of his life. This made it that much easier for the police to track his calls and pinpoint the area he was making them from.

Late on September 21, an informer told the STF that Shukla would be boarding the Indian Airlines flight to Ranchi at 5.45 the next morning. Plans were made for an ambush at Delhi airport, policemen all alert as early as 3.00 a.m. Shukla never turned up. It was another red herring, the type the STF had got used to.

Later in the day, of course, it was to prove lucky. Shukla contributed to the luck by keeping his cell phone in constant use, right up to the closing minutes of his dramatic existence. As the control room monitored number 9810198194, the policemen on the Ghaziabad highway had a fair idea about their prey.

The cell phone; this unlikely killer was a manic obsession with Shukla. He boasted of running up call bills of Rs 5,000 daily, largely courtesy grandiloquent speeches -- Hindi film style -- to friends and foes. As he gripped his little mobile machine, Shukla must have sensed success at its most tangible. After all, the trappings of the affluent society had been unknown to him when he was no more than the son of a Brahmin schoolteacher in Gorakhpur's Mamkhor village.

When still a boy, he made a name for himself as a wrestler to be reckoned with in local akharas. It was potent cocktail: wrestling tyros from Gorakhpur, a virtual seminary of vice in eastern Uttar Pradesh, have often graduated to crime syndicates. About half a dozen ministers in the state Cabinet allegedly bear these credentials.

Shukla made it to the police records in 1993. One Rakesh Tiwari, a local ruffian, had whistled at Shukla's sister. It was enough for the livid brother to kill. After Tiwari's murder, Shukla fled to Bangkok. He came back a changed man. He had tasted blood and was hungry for more. In Suraj Bhan of Mokamah, Bihar, Shukla found his mentor, his godfather.

Slowly, he built his empire. Shukla masterminded criminal operations in Uttar Pradesh, Delhi, Bihar, West Bengal and Nepal. He was involved in everything from kidnapping for ransom to property to drug running to manipulating the lottery trade to murder for a price. It is estimated that he personally killed about 20 people -- generally remorselessly, with the skill of a practised exponent.

As his legend grew, so did his rakishness. Shukla was a womaniser with a vengeance, his preference being expensive call girls, luxurious hotels, massage parlours, gold chains and fast cars. Yet, he never let all this get in the way of action. He realised the old school in the Uttar Pradesh mafia would not accept him as anything more than an upstart. It had to be bludgeoned into submission.

In early 1997, he killed Virendra Sahi -- a fellow Gorakhpuri and pivot of the provincial underworld -- in the heart of Lucknow. The old order had been crippled. Next on the hit list was Hari Shankar Tiwari -- Sahi's opponent in a pulsating but gruesome rivalry that raged through the '70s. Tiwari, now a minister in Kalyan's Government, has been the MLA from Chillupar for a decade and a half. Suddenly, Shukla decided he wanted the seat. Tiwari would have to bow out or he would have to die. The vaulting ambition was Shukla's real vulnerability. He made too many enemies, too early.

Uttar Pradesh may be free of Shukla but its battle against crime has only just begun. Of the STF's 43 targets, four -- including Shukla and his friends -- have been eliminated. A fifth, Munna Bajrangi, has been captured. Thirty-eight are still at large; not to speak of new entrants. As Vikram Singh, DG, STF, put it, "We can't afford to be euphoric about Shukla. The mafia will not let the vacuum be. It will try to fill it immediately. But we will not give up." Uttar Pradesh certainly hopes so.

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