Jigna Vora - Behind Bars in Byculla: my days in prison

A resounding gunshot echoed through the corridors of Himanshu Roys home at Suniti Apartments, Nariman Point, Mumbai. His wife and two domestic helpers rushed inside his room. A pool of blood streamed around the fallen body of Himanshu Roy, an officer of the coveted Indian Police Service from the batch of 1988. Moments before, he had placed the cold barrel of his licensed revolver in his mouth and pulled the trigger. The bullet had entered through his mouth and pierced through his skull. Roys driver, a constable with the Mumbai Police, informed the Control Room about the incident. Authorities were quick to respond. Sirens from ambulances and police jeeps converged towards Gen. J. Bhosale Road, where Suniti Apartments stood tall against the Mumbai skyline. Roy was rushed to Bombay Hospital. Doctors hurried to check on him, but the wounds were the work of a man trained in the use of firearms. He had left nothing to chance. Additional Director General of Police (Establishment) Himanshu Roy, aged fifty-four, was declared dead at 1.47 p.m. His body was taken to GT Hospital at Crawford Market for a post-mortem under tight security. The hospital was metres away from the police commissioners office, the premises of which had also housed top officers of Mumbai Police, including Himanshu Roy. Tributes from fellow cops, politicians, top-notch lawyers and media personnel began pouring in. The news flashed over TV channels and flooded social media timelines. An entire city mourned the death of a super cop.

Roy had been fighting a prolonged battle with renal cancer. He had been operated upon in the year 2000, but the cancer had returned with a vengeance nearly sixteen years later and spread to his brain and his bones. This had rendered him out of action for the past two years. His skin had darkened due to chemotherapy. He had been reduced to a pale shadow of the imposing personality that had once made criminals cower with fear. The bulky muscles that often bulged in his shirts during press conferences and flexed on to the front pages of newspapers had grown frail and weak. He had lost a lot of weight. A white beard had covered his jawline.

But even in the depression of battling a fatal disease, the super cop gave no warning that he had made up his mind. Or maybe he did. The evening before his death, he took out time for what he was most obsessed about: a hard workout at the gym. He was a devout follower of Lord Hanuman, the god of strength. A photograph of Bajrangbali standing in all his glory had once adorned the wall of Himanshus office at the Crime Branch. He would visit the Hanuman temple near his office every Saturday. And on the day he killed himself, he had eaten a good breakfast for the first time in several days. The man who loved eating tandoori chicken asked his cook to prepare his favourite dish for lunch. These could have been signs that he intended to continue his fight with the enemy that had plagued his body.

Or maybe he wanted to relive some semblance of his best days before breathing his last.

Perhaps it was the latter, because he later walked into his bedroom and wrote the suicide note that was eventually found in a folder by investigators. The note read that he was committing suicide due to the frustration of his illness. Investigators also believed that he had taken out his revolver from his locker a day earlier. His note said, No one is responsible for my suicide.

As joint commissioner of police (Crime), Himanshu Roy had handled extremely sensational cases like the Laila Khan murder, the Kohinoor Mill rape, and a multi-crore diamond heist in Goregaon. He had also led the investigation in the high-profile Indian Premier League betting scandal. But the murder of crime journalist J. Dey in 2011 had put him in the media spotlight like no other case. It was covered extensively in the media because one of their own had been murdered in cold blood. The shootout was carried out by the hitmen of underworld don Chhota Rajan. Ten men were arrested, and Rajan was also charge-sheeted in the case. But in a bizarre twist to the entire episode, thirty-seven-year-old Jigna Vora, a female journalist who was then deputy bureau chief of the Asian Age, was taken into police custody for instigating the murder.

That journalist was I.

We have thirty-six damning transcripts of Jigna Vora and Chhota Rajan plotting the murder of J. Dey, Roy had told a delegation of journalists who went to meet him in the presence of then home minister R.R. Patil.

The case was heard over a period of nearly seven years. Lives were destroyed, and families torn apart. My promising career was shattered to pieces, and could never be put together again. On 2 May 2018, the Maharashtra Control of Organized Crime Act (MCOCA) court convicted Chhota Rajan and eight other accused in the case. But I was acquitted after seven long years, a part of which I spent in prison.

This is my story.

1

ENTERING LAAL GATE

9 December 2011

I stripped down to the last piece of cloth on my body. Two lady constables flanked me inside a dingy room in the Byculla Jail. The room had no windows. But the lack of ventilation did not suffocate me as much as the humiliation did. The crassness with which the constables made me shed my clothes shook me to the core. For the two women, barely in their thirties, it was routine. For me, even the dim orange glare from the tiny bulb felt like a violation.

Take off your underwear, the stout constable said.

Please, I said with folded hands. I am menstruating.

Doesnt matter, she said. Make it quick!

I pulled my underwear down to my ankles and stepped out of it. The constable checked my undergarments for contraband. To my utter disbelief, she even checked the sanitary pad I had worn without batting an eyelid.

Now, the stout constable said, sit down and stand up. Five times.

As a law graduate and a journalist, squatting, I knew, was a police drill, to check contraband that one may be carrying in their private parts. My body shivered, as I did what I was asked to. I squatted, five times, my vagina exposed, blood dripping down my thighs. Once sure, they asked me to dress up and step out of the room. I cleaned up and put my clothes back on. I picked up the plastic bag in which I had carried a comb, toothpaste, toothbrush and a bar of Lux soap that my lawyer Jayesh Vithlani had handed me when the cops dragged me out of the courtroom to be taken to the jail.