Rubina Siraj Sayyed's MCOCA conviction

Rubina Siraj Sayyed's MCOCA conviction stands as a stark illustration of how the Maharashtra Control of Organised Crime Act was deployed to dismantle not just the shooters and kingpins of the Mumbai underworld, but the intricate support networks that sustained them. Rubina, a beautician by trade, had transformed herself into a trusted financial manager for Chhota Shakeel's gang, handling money, coordinating with lawyers, and looking after the families of jailed gangsters. Her arrest in 2004 and subsequent conviction in 2006 revealed the extent to which women could rise within criminal hierarchies, only to fall just as dramatically when the state's surveillance machinery closed in. Her story is one of ambition, arrogance, and the unforgiving nature of both the law and the underworld it sought to crush.

Rise of a Beautician in the Underworld

Rubina's entry into the underworld was driven by a distinctly political ambition. When Chhota Shakeel, impressed by her capabilities, asked her to join his gang, she accepted an offer that was simply too lucrative to refuse. Her motivation was not merely financial gain; she assumed that her role in the underworld would boost her chances of contesting the municipal elections and becoming a municipal corporator. This political aspiration set her apart from many other women associated with gangsters, framing her criminal work as a means to a civic end. She began working for the gang almost immediately, taking instructions from Shakeel aide Fahim Mach-Mach, coordinating with lawyers, handling the financial affairs of all the gang members between south Mumbai and Jogeshwari, and looking after all the needs of Shakeel's gangsters in jail. In only a few months, Rubina's lifestyle changed tremendously. Now more affluent than she had ever been, she moved from riding a two-wheeler to driving a car; and from being a beautician, she was now the notorious, powerful 'heroine' of an underworld gang.

The Intercepted Call and Arrest

Rubina's downfall began not with a violent confrontation but with a routine extortion demand. For a couple of years, one of Shakeel's men, Uday Pawar alias Pankaj, had been demanding Rs 50 lakh from a film distributor and issuing threats to him. When the distributor agreed to pay Rs 10 lakh, Pankaj called Rubina to report this to her. The police happened to be listening in on this conversation. This single call provided the Crime Branch with the breakthrough they needed. They soon began tracking Rubina's movements and calls, and in the process, recorded twenty-six conversations made to Fahim Mach-Mach and Shakeel. After watching her movements closely for over four months, the Crime Branch finally arrested her in 2004. Rubina's fluency in English and her tech-savvy nature had allowed her to evade the police's electronic surveillance time and again, but this time the net had closed. The Crime Branch only discovered her activities a year after she had joined the gang, after Pankaj got in touch with her.

Conviction and the Role of MCOCA

The legal framework that brought Rubina to justice was MCOCA, a stringent law promulgated by the Maharashtra government in 1998 after the abrogation of the TADA. Since the state did not have any firm law with which to fight organised crime, the government formulated this law, and later the Gujarat and Delhi governments used the same law to control criminal gangs. According to the police, at the last count, Rubina was looking after twenty-five families of men affiliated to the Shakeel gang and would distribute Rs 1.5 lakh among them every month, apart from making payments for legal expenses. The special MCOCA court convicted her for charges under MCOCA and 120 (b) (Conspiracy) of the IPC and sentenced her to five years of rigorous imprisonment on 23 March 2006. Her case was fought by advocate Shahid Azmi, who years later, in February 2010, fell victim to a former shooter of the Chhota Rajan gang, a grim reminder of the violent world Rubina had inhabited.

Life in Jail and the Fall from Grace

Rubina's conceit and arrogance only seemed to increase during her years in jail. The jail authorities were regularly inundated with complaints from prison inmates against Rubina for assaulting them. Among the most prominent of these cases was when Rubina, along with her cellmate and Gateway blast-accused Fahmida Sayyed, had attacked a diminutive Zahira Sheikh, who was serving out her perjury sentence in the Gujarat Best Bakery case. Following this, jail authorities punished Rubina by barring her from buying jail canteen coupons, which otherwise provided inmates access to luxury goods, such as soaps, biscuits, toothpaste and dry fruit. This punishment, while seemingly minor, struck at the privileges she had come to expect even in confinement. Today, after completing her five-year term in jail, Rubina is a free woman, but her time behind bars has sent her back to square one. Rubina, who lost her husband Siraj recently, is back to riding a two-wheeler and has nothing that she can consider to be a source of livelihood. While her parlour business shut down years ago, her political dreams, too, have not been realised. The once well-known beautician and Shakeel aide is far from being the underworld's favourite Pathani heroine anymore, she'd be hard-pressed to even be deemed an extra.

The Gendered Economics of Crime

Rubina's story, while unique in its details, fits a broader pattern of women who built economic power through illicit means in Mumbai. Her role as a financial manager, distributing money and managing families, echoes the economic functions performed by other women in the book's world. Jenabai Daaruwali, for instance, started as a broker for smuggled grain in the 1940s, playing intermediary to wholesalers and dealers of lentils, pulses, sugar and basmati rice at Daana Bazaar, a role that earned her the title 'Chaavalwaali'. Similarly, Mahalaxmi Papamani built a drug empire in the Sion-Koliwada slum, buying five kilogrammes of heroin and converting ten grams into forty pudis sold at twenty-five rupees each, making a profit of around three lakh rupees per month. Sujata Nikhalje, the wife of Chhota Rajan, used her husband's reputation to arm-twist people into selling their homes and launched her own construction company, Khushi Developers Private Ltd. These women, like Rubina, operated at the intersection of criminal enterprise and economic necessity, their stories revealing how the underworld provided avenues for financial advancement that the legitimate economy often denied them. Rubina's conviction, however, shows the ultimate cost of such advancement, as the state's legal machinery, embodied in MCOCA, proved capable of dismantling even the most carefully constructed criminal careers.