Indian Defence Review

Who Was Chhota Shakeel?

Chhota Shakeel started out his life as Mohammed Shakeel Babu Miyan Shaikh. His first career was running a travel agency in the lower-middle-class area of Dongri in south-central Mumbai. He was one of the early members in the D-Company along with Bishal Cheetah, Johnny Akhawat and Liger Bhai or Mushu Bhai. He joined Dawood in Dubai in 1988. In those days, Sharad Shetty managed the match fixing, betting and hawala deals for Dawood while Chhota Rajan managed the gang’s criminal activities in Mumbai. Shakeel worked his way up the ranks in D Company and was befriended by Dawood after the split with Chhota Rajan in the Mumbai Mob civil war after the 1993 bombings. Shakeel fled to Pakistan where he was sheltered by the ISI.

One of the first things Shakeel did after he entered Pakistan was to cultivate a voice proxy in Rahim Merchant alias ‘Dogla’, a wealthy Pakistani who lived in a bungalow in North Karachi. In conversations abroad, Shakeel sat next to his ‘speaker’ Dogla, and wrote the questions to be asked or answered on a piece of paper. The created a verifiable alternative voice and presence for Shakeel which helped keep him safe. In addition to his interests in real-estate, weapons and narcotics in association with Afghan syndicates and Colombian cartels, Shakeel began investing in mines in Africa, smuggling diamonds to and for the Ukraine’s Odessa Mafia and bartered the diamonds for weapons. He even bought a diamond mine in Sierra Leone. In addition to a Pakistani passport, Shakeel acquired at least two others — one from Botswana and the other from Malawi — presumably to help him in his illegal diamond business. The diamonds were typically smuggled out of Sierra Leone, Guinea and the Republic of Mali by African nationals, collected in Botswana, South Africa and Namibia, taken to Kenya, and thence to Dubai and Karachi. His real-estate empire grew to embrace property in Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, the UAE, Kenya, Spain and South Africa, in addition to his existing real-estate in India, Pakistan and the US.[ix] He maintained his role as a principal financier of Hindi films and Bollywood.

In fact, as Dawood found his ability to travel freely severely restricted Shakeel took over the day-today business of D Company. This carried on without internal challenges until mid-2016 when Dawood’s brother, Anees, began skimming money from D Company in Dubai and threatening to oust Shakeel from his leadership post.

Shakeel organised his own group of followers in response and the ISI had to intervene to try and make peace between Shakeel and Anees and to stop any internal fighting in D Company. Dawood played only a passive role and seemed to become even more reclusive. He wanted to maintain his thirty-year friendship with Shakeel (who had attempted the assassination of Chhota Rajan for him in Bangkok), and his ties with his brother Anees. This created problems in the organisation as the D Company chiefs in Mumbai and overseas were never sure whose orders were to be obeyed.

This confusion continued until it was confirmed that Chhota Shakeel had died on 6 January 2017. The two sides agreed on a minor figure in D Company take over active leadership of the organisation until Dawood and the ISI agreed on how to proceed, but that replacement died in a heart attack in Tajikistan in mid-2018. Dawood announced that his brother, Anees, would take over the key post in D Company on 5 January 2019, at the anniversary of the death of Chhota Shakeel a year earlier. There was some confusion about whether Shakeel had really died because the voice of ‘Dogla’ his speaker was intercepted on phone monitors, confusing the confirmation of Shakeel’s death.

The Continuity of the Criminal-Political-Terrorist Enterprise

Despite the change in the structure of D Company the symbiosis of organised crime, terrorism and the competing nation states of the subcontinent has not ended. Still less has the powerful role played in this endeavour by Dubai. The U.S. pull-out of Afghanistan will only serve to exacerbate these divisions and corruption and terrorist activities will give financial impetus to the various criminal fraternities which support and thrive on these conflicts.