By Sushil Kutty
Assistant Police Inspector Sachin Vaze has put the Maha Vikas Aghadi government of the Congress, Nationalist Congress Party and Shiv Sena at a disadvantage. NCP Chief Sharad Pawar is very angry at how a loose cannon like Vaze was given a long rope to act on his own while a high-stakes political battle is on at the national level to get the seemingly invincible Narendra Modi against the ropes, and it’s succeeding, too, for the first time since 2014.
This is definitely not the time for distractions. Not a costly one such as the Vaze incident. Suddenly, Modi is between a wall and a sticky place. The electioneering in the five states is not going the BJP way. Even the notoriously vaunted BJP IT Cell has stopped drooling at the mouth. There are no takers for the Rs 2 a tweet. The ‘Didi in plaster-of-Nandigram’ jokes have boomeranged. The empty chairs at Amit Shah’s public meeting, which he skipped, have instead become the butt of jokes.
And just when it looked like Narendra Modi would be shown his place, there’s the disturbing news about police cop Sachin Vaze. Sena Rajya Sabha MP Sanjay Raut says Vaze is honest and capable. But Vaze’s arrest by the NIA is a direct challenge to Mumbai Police. Raut knows where the buck stops when it’s the NIA. And it’s not at Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray’s office tabletop!
Raut doesn’t like things the way they are panning out, especially against the Shiv Sena. Raut knows what’s going on in Mumbai more than any Johnny come lately. He admits Sachin Vaze was arrested because gelatin sticks were found outside Ambani’s residential building, and because one person was found dead suspiciously, but he asks why the NIA, when it was the Mumbai Police’s responsibility to investigate? NIA’s frequent trips to Mumbai has “demoralized” the Mumbai Police, Raut claims.
Mumbai is full of secrets even if it’s an open city with everything in plain sight. Sanjay Raut hears everything, sees everything even if he doesn’t say everything. That’s because he’s not the sort who blurts out everything. Raut may hold the additional charge of a Shiv Sena spokesperson, but that doesn’t mean he’s free with his words all the time. People who know him know that about him.
As for Sachin Vaze, he is not new to Mumbai Police. He’s an encounter specialist of the old genre, when encounter specialists used to put the fear of the Grim Ripper within gangsters of Dawood Ibrahim’s vintage and shrink their hearts to the size of dried apples. They say Sachin Vaze has “Ab Tak 64” or some such ear-hazing number to his credit.
Right or wrong, true or false, that’s a record only bested by Pradeep Sharma and Daya Nayak, two of the most feared encounter specialists Mumbai Police had. Then, Sachin Vaze allegedly went Dirty Harry! He got himself implicated in a custodial death. Vaze allegedly beat up a man black and blue and then poured ice cold-water on the top of his head. Poor fellow collapsed in a heap, shocked to death!
Vaze was suspended from the force, and the judge hearing the case was transferred in 2018. Now, Vaze has been suspended again, in a second case, and the MVA government faces more than embarrassment. Sanjay Raut stands by Vaze because Vaze had joined the Shiva Sena after his first suspension. Vaze tweeted that his detractors in Mumbai Police were back at targeting him, and that this time it’s far worse, that he’s fixed for good and might have to call it a day by paying with this life!
If it’s end of the road that Vaze was hinting at, it’s poetic. Of late, these days, every unnatural death in Mumbai is ruled as “suicide” by the Mumbai Police. Sushant Singh Rajput’s sudden death. Disha Salian’s untoward death, plummeting 14 stories down a Mumbai high-rise, and Mansukh Hiren’s death, all of them ruled as “suicide” by Vaze and his boss Mumbai Police Commissioner, Param Bir Singh.
Vaze was taken into custody at 11.50 pm a couple of nights ago, 10 minutes more and it would have been a another day! The Uddhav Thackeray Government was not happy. Uddhav said Sachin Vaze was being portrayed as if he was Osama bin Laden, who was hunted to Abbottabad in Pakistan and his fate ‘Sealed’, the body rolled up in airtight canvas and dropped to the dark depths of an unknown ocean, a gift for fish and whale!
Sachin Vaze is no terrorist; Sachin Vaze is not Osama bin Laden, he’s just Sanjay Raut’s good ole Mumbai cop. There’s no need to vilify him for doing his duty, says Raut. So what if Vaze landed up in the early hours at Arnab Goswami’s Lower Parel residence and got his men to shove and push and force the voluble anchor into a police van, that was only him doing his duty, like any good honest cop would against any and all odds.
Also, so what if Vaze took an honest interest in the Fake TRP case? Again, he was only doing his duty and was getting paid for it in honest dinero! In the latest shenanigan that Vaze is involved in, the Hiren murder and the gelatin sticks laden Scorpio outside Mukesh Ambani’s Antilla case, which the Shiv Sena alleges is political, it’ll get worse before it starts getting any better! Vaze has to go through the NIA meat grinder.
If it was the CBI, Uddhav Thackeray would have told the caged parrot to go take a hike! But it’s the NIA and that’s the hitch. For Vaze, now, the shoe’s on the other foot, Sachin Vaze’s foot. And it pinches! Then, again, it’s hard to recollect when was the last time a cop got so notoriously famous? There’s of course Chulbul Pandey, but that fellow is reel not real cop, and more bombast than actual threat. Sachin Vaze is the sort who scares the crap out of staid solid sorts, a man of few scruples. The manner in which Mansukh Hiren was drowned, it was diabolical, a murder most foul, a vintage whodunit? (IPA Service)
