A Brief History Of Smuggling In Gujarat !

 BY R.K.MISRA

History and geography are like a perennially copulating couple, too intertwined to separate. And yet  the hemline of history unfolds only when the sensuous contours of geography are defined. Thus it is that the recent  spurt in narcotics seizures on the Arabian sea washed- Kutch coastline has one  drawing back the curtains on a colourful part of a clandestine past of the Saurashtra-Gujarat shores.

Half a century of reporting a state  has helped firm up an uncanny insight into the innards of the underground, the clandestine and the cash sleaze trail. It emanates from this sandy soil, travels half-way around the earth and returns back to base.

The history of clandestine trade on , what was then the Kathiawar coast ,goes back  to the times  when Bombay was a mere fishing village and Surat and Karachi thriving ports. Surat was the chief port of the Moghul empire and northern India’s gateway to the Afro-Asian maritime world. It held sway into the days of the East India Company. The thriving maritime  trade  from  both Surat and  Karachi were  threatened by  growing sea piracy ,cradled by the Kathiawar shores. The seeds of what is today a hydra-headed pure, unadulterated black money trade ,were sown then.

Times changed, Surat declined, the British left, Saurashtra and Kutch became states in independent India and later merged into Gujarat after Bi-lingual Bombay state was divided to carve out Maharashtra. Nevertheless, the kindred ties of the clandestine  and their global tentacles endured , changing business to cater to altering needs.

If  sea-piracy died, the discovery of oil saw affluence flowing gulf countries become  an aquifer  for gold smuggling into India and Pakistan. The Saurashtra coast thrived as the shortest routed landing ground, Kutch additionally had a porous land border with Sindh in Pakistan with the harsh Rann standing out as the main deterrent though hardly one for the locals on both sides.

Smugglers ruled the roost  from Kutch to  Daman and thereon to Bombay. If Mumbai had its Haji Mastan’s, Karim Lalas and Vardarajan Mudaliars, Daman had its Sukar Naran Bakhia, the Saurashtra coast also had its Haji Haji Ismails, and Surat its Ratilal Navik to name just  a very few of them. Navik was a good friend and offered me keen insights into his world.

 I had met Bakhia while he was behind bars in the government hospital in Daman.it was not because I wanted to meet him but vice versa. And for all the half a dozen armed sentries posted  in the long corridor leading to his internment quarters, all doors miraculously opened to let me in. Such was the clout they wielded. And those who followed in the trade still do. All lights in Jam Khambhaliya town of Saurashtra, would close shut so that the  ship- to- shore signals of the contraband landing crafts could be clearly visible.

In the seventies while gold  remained the flavour of  a long extended smuggling  season, electronic goods began making  their entry on the scene. A Gulf-smuggled VCP cost  Rs 60,000 and a VCR,Rs 1,20,000.Iam aware that when a senior civil servant of Gujarat wanted a particular brand of cooking range.it was smuggled in for him from Dubai through Kutch.  In the interregnum silver smuggling also caught up. In fact in the early eighties, a maverick businessman  and a cop teamed up to commandeer a silver smuggling truck, sell the precious metal in Punjab and the truck in the ‘kabadi market’ of Agra to be taken apart  within hours.

Relations in the underworld may be mercurial but cut across national boundaries with enduring ties fuelled by monetary interests. These channels are also  used by intelligence agencies for their own purposes as well. It was not for nothing, that police chiefs in Kutch would  often find  subsequent postings in either Central intelligence or RAW. One could reel of a list of names.

After the switch from gold smuggling to electronics, it was the same conduit (characters, changed as did the fronts) which reverted to narcotics and also to arms. The  turn to narcotics  came about by a chance development elsewhere. In the early eighties, Burmese warlord Khun Sa operating in the Golden Triangle(a part of Burma, Laos and Thailand) was  attacked and forced to flee leaving behind a  crop estimated to yield 50 tons of opium. Through a circuitous route this crop found its way to Pakistan where refining units  sprang up overnight to convert it into heroin. The refining agent  required for this conversion, Nitrous Anhydride was smuggled into Pakistan from Madhya Pradesh via North Gujarat. The finished product, heroin found its way back to the Kutch-Saurashtra coast.

Even after the Pakistan based  refineries dried up, heroin from the North-East  began vending its way  to this part of Gujarat coast turning it into an international transit point. The narcotics consignment  would be taken from the coast to small atolls in the sea   and therefrom by non-conference sea-liners onto Somalia into the waiting arms of  its warlord ,Mohammed Farrah Aidid and thereon to the Mafia for global distribution. Every business deal  has to have a  return payment . This  came back in the shape of diamond roughs from conflict areas-conflict diamonds as they are called. No one ever uttered a word about it  but these would then be cut and polished in Surat and then would find their way out neatly embedded in artistic jewellery. One can go on endlessly but…

Experience  helps explore the past to understand the present and foresee the future but more about it later. 

This syndicated news column was published in the respective newspapers edition dated  October 3,2023  whose links are given below:-

http://odishapostepaper.com/edition/4662/orissapost/page/9

http://epaper.lokmat.com/lokmattimes/main-editions/Nagpur%20Main/2023-10-03/6

and Eenadu

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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