TADA

TADA, the Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act, stands in the book as the principal legal weapon of the Indian state against organised crime before the advent of MCOCA. Enacted by the Indian Parliament in 1985, it was a stringent anti-terrorism law that remained in force until 1995, and its shadow falls across the lives of several figures in the Mumbai underworld chronicled in these pages. The act is defined in the book primarily through its consequences: it is the law under which gangsters were locked away, the law that wives and associates manoeuvred around, and the law whose abrogation in 1995 left a legal vacuum that the Maharashtra government would later fill with the Maharashtra Control of Organised Crime Act in 1998. For the women of the underworld, TADA was not an abstraction but a concrete force that determined whether their husbands lived or died, whether they themselves were arrested, and how they had to reshape their lives around the threat of indefinite detention.

The Law and Its Successor

The book's most direct explanation of TADA comes in a footnote attached to the account of Sujata Nikhalje, the wife of the don Chhota Rajan. There, the act is described as a stringent law promulgated by the Maharashtra government in 1998 after the abrogation of TADA, with the state government having formulated this new law because it did not have any firm law with which to fight organised crime. The Gujarat and Delhi governments later used the same law to control criminal gangs. This framing positions TADA as the earlier, harsher instrument that was allowed to lapse, and MCOCA as its deliberate successor, crafted to fill the gap left by TADA's expiry. The relationship between the two laws is thus one of continuity and replacement: TADA's abrogation created a legal void, and MCOCA was the state's answer to that void, carrying forward the same logic of exceptional, preventive detention that had defined TADA's operation.

TADA in the Lives of the Gawlis

The most sustained treatment of TADA in the book concerns Arun Gawli, the don who founded the Akhil Bharatiya Sena, and his wife Asha Gawli. In 1996, when Arun was locked up in the Kolhapur jail and serving time under TADA, the author paid him a visit for a story. At the time, Arun had fleetingly mentioned his aspirations to join politics, giving as his reason the desire to save himself from a police encounter. This single detail reveals the stakes of TADA detention: for Arun, the law was not merely a punishment but a form of protection, because a political career could shield him from the extrajudicial killings that claimed so many of his rivals. The previous year, Asha had stood for the civic corporation elections, hoping her political standing would help her husband, but she had lost terribly. After this defeat, she shifted her focus to her husband's political career, and in 1997, with her encouragement and support, Arun started the Akhil Bharatiya Sena, with himself as president and Asha heading the women's wing. The women's wing was used as a shield for the don against arrests and police encounters: a group of women would constantly surround Arun every time he walked out of Dagdi Chawl, a strategy that other dons in the underworld made fun of but that worked, since the cops could neither trace him in the crowd nor get violent with the women. TADA thus appears as the catalyst that pushed the Gawlis toward politics, and the political career that followed was itself a direct response to the threat of being killed in an encounter while in custody or after release.

TADA and the Naiks

TADA also figures in the story of Ashwin Naik, the first educationally-qualified gangster in Mumbai's mafia circuit. Ashwin, whose car was attacked by members of the Chhota Rajan gang on his way home from the Santa Cruz airport, was persuaded by his wife Neeta to join the underworld after she told him she wanted him alive and not dead, and did not mind if he had to join hands with his own brother and become part of the crime syndicate. Over time, Ashwin became known for his meticulous planning and organisational abilities, and people still remember him for the killing of Tanya Koli in a Kalyan local train and the murder of textile tycoon Sunit Khatau in Mahalaxmi. Ashwin was later arrested under TADA, but this did not deter him. After Chhota Rajan's split from Dawood, Ashwin became an ally of the latter and was thus able to build a strong criminal base for himself. The mention of his TADA arrest is brief but significant: it places Ashwin within the same legal framework that held Arun Gawli, and it shows that TADA detention, while disruptive, did not end a gangster's career. For Ashwin, the arrest under TADA was an obstacle he overcame, not a terminal event, and his subsequent alliance with Dawood and his continued criminal activity suggest that the law's reach, however stringent, was not absolute.

TADA's Place in the Legal Landscape

The book's treatment of TADA is part of a broader pattern of exceptional laws that shaped the lives of the women and men it chronicles. The same passage that describes Arun Gawli's TADA detention also notes that Jenabai Daaruwali, the bootlegger, had been jailed under MISA, the Maintenance of Internal Security Act, though the charges against her could not be proved. MISA, like TADA, was a controversial law that provided law enforcement agencies with powers of indefinite preventive detention, and it was used against gangsters like Haji Mastan and Karim Lala during the Emergency. The progression from MISA to TADA to MCOCA in the book's narrative is a progression of increasingly targeted legal instruments, each designed to combat a perceived threat that the previous law could not address. TADA occupies the middle position in this sequence: it was the law of the late 1980s and early 1990s, the era of the Mumbai gang war and the rise of Dawood, and it was the law under which the state sought to contain the very men whose wives and associates populate the book's pages. The footnote explaining MCOCA's origins makes this lineage explicit, and it is in this context that TADA's significance is best understood: not as an isolated statute, but as one stage in the state's ongoing attempt to assert control over organised crime through ever more stringent legal means.