Abdul Ghani's faction

Abdul Ghani's faction was the secret engine of the Sapna killings, a violent false-flag operation that manipulated fear to protect and extend its leader’s power within Bombay’s mafia. By inventing a common enemy, Abdul Ghani’s group drew police, politicians, and rival councils into cooperation; when the deception risked exposure, it sacrificed Madjid, a trusted member of the Khader Khan council, and helped turn an underworld operation into a war within that council.

Position in Bombay’s Underworld

Abdul Ghani’s faction operated inside a mafia order shaped by the council system, which divided Bombay into territories ruled by separate dons. Abdel Khader Khan was one of the system’s founders. The arrangement had followed a decade of bloody power struggles, and its reputation for bringing relative order helped make the councils powerful across the city. The Sapna operation depended on this existing structure: Ghani sought leverage within Khader’s council while also manipulating the police, politicians, and other councils around it.

Ghani was also associated with an illegal passport business. The passport network served economic refugees forced from their homes by poverty and political refugees escaping war or persecution. Its agents checked documents against airline watchlists as well as customs filters, and less than half of the acquired passports passed both checks. The larger network issued about a hundred poverty passports a year and made more than a million dollars in annual profit after expenses. This commercial activity provides context for the criminal organization around Ghani, but the evidence distinguishes the passport trade from the Sapna operation: it does not establish that the faction’s killings were a method of running that business.

The Sapna Operation

The Sapna killings were planned as an instrument of political and criminal manipulation. According to Sanjay Kumar’s later account, the operation was Ghani’s from the beginning, although he and Khader were both involved in using the resulting panic to obtain cooperation from the police and government. The campaign supplied a common enemy: people were being killed, and the supposed Sapna announced a revolutionary identity, while the real organizers remained hidden. Councils that would ordinarily have been adversaries were consequently willing to help Khader move weapons and explosives through Bombay in exchange for assistance in finding and stopping Sapna.

The plan served more than one purpose. Ghani’s faction used the supposed threat to divert attention from its own actions and to eliminate people it wanted removed for business reasons. Sanjay described the arrangement as effective until Sub-inspector Suresh Patil told Ghani that investigators had found a clue linking the latest killing to the Khader Khan council. That discovery changed the faction’s immediate priority from exploiting the investigation to keeping suspicion away from the council. Ghani decided that the apparent enemy needed to kill one of Khader’s own men, so the authorities would read the death as evidence that Sapna was attacking the council rather than acting for it.

The Framing of Madjid and the Exposed Killer

Ghani chose Madjid, a loyal and long-standing member of the council. The plan succeeded in its narrow aim: Patil, the officer handling the case, knew how close Madjid had been to Khader and was present as the body was being removed. The evidence also reveals that Patil’s father had previously put Khader in prison, adding a personal history between the investigator’s family and Khader to an already fraught case. Madjid’s death was therefore both a frame-up and a betrayal from within the organization it was designed to protect.

The identity of the real Sapna emerged only later, in an account given to Lin by Sanjay, Salman Mustaan, and Nazeer. He was Jeetendra, known as Jeetudada, a gunman from the Delhi area whom Ghani had brought to Bombay with four other men. Ghani kept the group in five-star hotels for two years, even as he complained that Khader was spending too much money on the war in Afghanistan. Salman suggested that the prolonged impersonation and the loss of the supposed Sapna’s public identity began to distort Jeetendra’s sense of what was real; this remains a character’s explanation, not a confirmed account of Jeetendra’s state of mind.

After Abdullah’s death, Jeetendra became drunk in a bar at the President Hotel and began claiming that he was the real Sapna. He threatened to disclose who had arranged and paid for the killings, and said Khader would also be killed. A member of Khader’s organization alerted Khader, who went to the hotel with Nazeer, Khaled Ansari, Farid, Ahmed Zadeh, Andrew Ferreira, and others. Jeetendra and three of his men died in the ensuing shoot-out; one of Khader’s men suffered a serious injury, and Ahmed Zadeh helped get him to hospital. Khader personally confirmed the deaths of the four attackers. A fifth member of the hired group was absent, escaped, and disappeared after returning to Delhi. The surviving organizers thus did not all come to light at once, but the faction’s central deception had been exposed.

Factional Breakdown and Aftermath

The accounts differ over how Ghani turned against Khader. Salman believed Ghani had initially remained loyal and that the Sapna scheme later changed him; he also recalled Ghani speaking for about a year about the so-called hero curse before creating Sapna. Sanjay instead emphasized that Ghani feared Khader’s attention to Afghanistan and other planned missions would cost the council money, business, and political power. In his version, Ghani used a gang that answered only to him, and ultimately hoped to challenge Khader. The conflicting recollections leave the precise point at which loyalty became conspiracy uncertain, but agree that the campaign served Ghani’s interests and brought the council to the brink of exposure.

Once the deception and Ghani’s betrayal were understood, the faction’s protection collapsed. Nazeer killed Abdul Ghani, and Nazeer’s men released Krishna, Villu, and the household servants because they were considered uninvolved. They then set out to hunt members of Ghani’s faction. The faction’s defeat accompanied the victorious Khader side’s re-formation of the local council under Sobhan Mahmoud. Nazeer and Mahmoud Melbaaf became full council members alongside Sanjay Kumar, Salman Mustaan, Farid, and other dons. The episode marks the transition from the Sapna crisis to a new settlement of power: the faction that had manufactured a citywide enemy was itself eliminated as the council reassembled around its victors.