A Feast of Vultures: The Hidden Business of Democracy in India

by Josy Joseph

The assailants ran back to their van and drove away. After the initial shock, Barkatalai regained his senses and rammed the Mercedes into their van, but the assailants got away. As they drove off, he saw in the rear-view mirror that his boss was bleeding profusely. He turned the car around as quickly as he could and drove back to the office, crying out for help as he pulled in. At the office, an East West employee got in the car with them and Barkatalai turned around again, rushing to the nearby Bhabha General Hospital. By the time Thakiyuddin was wheeled into the emergency ward at around 9.55 p.m., he was dead. The murder threw the improbable rise of East West Airlines into a tailspin. It was also further proof of the criminal underworld’s deep tentacles in Bombay. Many in the Bombay Police and Indian intelligence agencies were not entirely surprised by the murder. They had long suspected that the airline was involved financially with Dawood Ibrahim. The underworld don was by then hiding in Pakistan after accusations of masterminding thirteen blasts in Bombay in 1993, killing 257 people. One senior police officer involved in investigating the murder told me that they had several pieces of evidence to show that Dawood partially financed East West Airlines. Thakiyuddin also figured among the top targets of Dawood’s rivals – Hindu members of Dawood’s gang who had split from the Muslim don in the wake of the serial blasts. The Bombay Police had warned Thakiyuddin only a few d...