Chennai’s date with Chotta Rajan’s gangster

April 20, 2002 was one such day. That Saturday, city’s crime reporters woke up to telephone calls from their sources about an encounter on Jawaharlal Nehru Salai in Guindy near the Kathipara junction, when the grade separator was still a distant dream.

It took some time for reporters who were only familiar with local criminals to grasp the name of person – Sanjay Ghate – who was killed in police encounter. It took some more time for them to sync with the fact that he was an aide of Chota Rajan, the dreaded don of Mumbai. It was the time when then city police commissioner K. Vijay Kumar and his joint commissioner J.K. Tripathy were engaged in ‘clean up mission’ and eliminated a good number of city gangsters, including Ayodhya Kuppam Veeramani, in encounters.

The encounter took place near the signage board on Jawaharlal Nehru Road at the junction. The gangster was arrested for making extortion calls from Chennai to a Pune

businessman. Sanjay Ghate was shot dead on way to the airport from Virugambakkam police station.

Police said the encounter took place when he allegedly snatched an inspector’s revolver while being taken from a police station to the Chennai airport.

The body was later shifted to Royapettah government hospital and his wife Sangeetha flew down from Mumbai next day to receive body after post-mortem.

In February 2010, Chennai witnessed another incident related to a Mumbai don. Bengaluru police team tracked Nizamuddin, a right-hand man of Mumbai don Ravi Pujari, in the city and arrested him, indicating that it was not Varadarajan Mudhaliar, one of the powerful mob bosses of Mumbai alone who treated the city as retreat point, where he died of heart attack in the year 1988.

In May 2009, another Mumbai don Chota Shakeel’s sharp shooter Rashid Malabari was detained by immigration officials at Chennai airport based on a look out circular, after he had escaped from Uduppi, Karnataka.