LICENSED TO SHOOT: (Top) Nayak (on left) and Sharma have killed over 100 gangsters in 76 shoot-outs in the past six years; (above) Bhosle has gunned down over 80 criminals

"The underworld in general is almost finished." M.N. Singh, Mumbai Police Commissioner

The cluster of rooms on the ground floor of a shabby yellow building tucked behind a police station in suburban Mumbai is a beehive of activity. Swarthy, well-built men in jeans and T-shirts hang around with pistols tucked in their waistbands, wielding ubiquitous mobile phones. Strangers come in for immediate scrutiny. A freshly painted "Crime Intelligence Unit" (CIU) in the Mumbai Police's trademark yellow and blue colours is the sole sign that suggests what goes on inside is police business.

Inside one of these rooms, Daya Nayak, 33, a sub-inspector with the CIU, divides his talktime between his two mobile phones. A wall-mounted 18-inch TV drones news headlines. His senior officer, Inspector Pradeep Sharma, 43, strolls in on the conversation.

Nayak isn't ashamed of his humble origins. As a boy he fled his village in Mangalore for Mumbai, working as a waiter in an Udupi restaurant while studying to become a police officer. Today he is a flamboyant officer with a taste for denims, sneakers and tight-fit T-shirts showing off a gym-toned body. He also packs an arsenal out of a John Woo film: a 9-mm sub-machine gun and an AK-47 assault rifle, complete with a violin case. His tabletop holds a wood-handle .38 Smith and Wesson revolver and a powerful Brazilian Taurus .45 automatic pistol, taken off a dead gangster.

Is the underworld coming anytime soon? Nayak drops low over the table and gives you his best Clint Eastwood impersonation-"Not while we are around."

Sharma and Nayak fancy themselves as a Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday pair of gunslingers. They've accounted for over 100 gangsters killed in 76 encounters in the past six years and haven't fought shy of narrating their experiences to an eager Bollywood-their names appear on the credit titles of Ram Gopal Varma's mob film Company.

"We're only doing what the gangs do to their victims-putting the fear of death into them." Vijay Salaskar, Senior inspector

POLICING THE UNDERWORLD « Earlier, underworld shoot-outs averaged one a week. In the past seven months, the crime syndicates have raised their heads just twice. « Since 1998, 337 gangsters have been gunned down in over 300 encounters. Of these, 39 were killed in 28 shoot-outs in the past seven months alone. « While dons like Dawood Ibrahim and Chhota Shakeel remain out of reach, police have managed to disrupt their crime networks within Mumbai.

Sitting inside the unmarked cabin of another nondescript building housing the second of the city's three CIUs, soft-spoken Senior Inspector Praful Bhosle's voice conceals his achievements as easily as a Buddha belly conceals the Titan Tiger revolver in his belt. He has trained with the National Security Guards, battled Khalistani terrorists in an encounter in Vikhroli, taken a grenade blast in his stomach and, yes, he has killed over 80 gangsters.

A loaded AK-47 within easy reach, Senior Inspector Vijay Salaskar, 44, sits in a police building in another Mumbai suburb, thumbing through a red diary to read out his death list-"27 encounters killing 38 gangsters". Among the dead include gang boss Amar Naik and Arun Gawli's lieutenants Sada Pawle and Vijay Tandel.

The public calls these officers in civvies and unmarked cars "encounter specialists" and they could easily be one of the myriad bounty hunters straight out of a blood-splattered Sergio Leone spaghetti western, but in Mumbai's murky underworld they spell Terror.

Particularly because they are in the trenches in the war against organised crime. A silent, twilight urban war fought using tapped cell phones, month-long stakeouts near underworld hideouts, paid informants and, of course, encounters.

The war, it would seem, has ended successfully. A triumphant Mumbai Police Commissioner Mahesh Narayan Singh passes the khallas verdict on the underworld. "The underworld in general is almost finished," he says. "The threat perception is much less nowadays as compared to the situation sometime earlier."

Even until last year, Mumbai's crime conglomerates operated with near impunity. Offshore dons Dawood Ibrahim, Chhota Shakeel, Abu Salem and Chhota Rajan ran their empires by remote control-using cellular and satellite phones to prey on Mumbai's cash-rich troika of Bollywood, builders and businessmen. Underworld shoot-outs averaged at the rate of one a week and during 1998 peaked at three separate shoot-outs on Diwali day. Targets like film producer Rakesh Roshan and Adlabs proprietor Manmohan Shetty who were unwilling to pay were shot at in broad daylight two years ago.

Shooting and killing for Underworld Inc is a bunch of killer executives simply called shooters-scrawny everyday men ranging from small-time housebreakers bailed out of prison to unemployed youth from Uttar Pradesh's notorious Azamgarh district, bitten by the lure of wielding a mobile phone and an automatic pistol. The underworld had a glut of these automaton shooters-they came cheap, were as disposable as diapers, appeared to roll off a conveyor belt and shot on telephonic instructions.

But the tide has changed and the crime graph of the big gangs is flattening. In the past seven months, the syndicates have raised their head just twice-a drive-by shooting at Bollywood director Lawrence D'Souza by the breakaway Ejaz Lakdawala gang on July 4 and another at trendy suburban discotheque J-49 last Tuesday.

A lot of this has to do with the blizzard of encounters led by the likes of Bhosle, Sharma, Salaskar and Co. Since 1998, 337 gangsters, mainly shooters and their accomplices, have been gunned down in over 300 encounters. Of these, 39 were killed in 28 shoot-outs in the past seven months.

Underworld shoot-outs imply a breakdown in law and order and the prestige of the police is often on the line. "After each high-profile gang shoot-out, I receive phone calls from politicians asking me to do something,'' says a senior police official pointing accusingly at his phone. Something needs to be done. Encounters used to make up the department's damage control strategy. But now, together with draconian laws like the Maharashtra Prevention of Dangerous Activities Act and the Maharashtra Control of Organised Crime Act, they've virtually become primary weapons in the war against the underworld.

The bullet-for-bullet policy, it seems, has been replaced by a bullet-for-an-extortion call policy. "For each extortion call the gangs make, we bump off four of their men,'' says one of these encounter officers. Retaliation for the D'Souza shooting was swift and merciless. A fortnight after the shoot-out, Imran Retiwala, who had fired five rounds at D'Souza, was gunned down by Salaskar.

Last April, Gajanand Sathe, a 23-year-old burglar sprung out on bail by the Chhota Shakeel gang, was gunned down by Bhosle just 24 hours after he had shot dead Shiv Sena shakha leader Ram Agale. "We're only doing what the gangs do to their victims-putting the fear of death into them,'' says Salaskar.

In the past, shooters had lifespans of months and years and better career prospects-a chance to become second-rung lieutenants or even dons themselves. But in Mumbai's labyrinthine underworld ecosystem today, the shooter has the lifespan of a mayfly.

This pattern, followed with ruthless rat-a-tat ferocity by the police over the past few months, has now deterred the cheap shooters, considered indispensable for enforcing the writ of the offshore dons. This is what is hitting the gangs the hardest. "It's getting tough for the gangs to find new recruits,'' says DCP Pradip Sawant of the Crime Branch's detection cell.

But the surfeit of encounters has been followed by a spate of rather unoriginal police storytelling. Here's what a typical police press release of an encounter reads: "Members of the XYZ gang were intercepted by a special police squad at an isolated spot in the wee hours of the morning. On being challenged, the gangsters opened fire. The officers returned fire, killing all the gangsters on the spot."

The gangsters die almost instantly after engaging the police, but, as in the movies, nothing happens to the policemen-though they started sustaining injuries when doubts began to be raised about the veracity of the encounters. Then in a swap of semantics last year, the department directed that encounters would henceforth be referred to as operations. Or better still, proactive policing.

What really happens is the Crime Branch officers use their excellent network of underworld informants (paid out of police department slush funds) to track down the shooters, after which the police ruthlessly hunt them down, sometimes not even waiting for them to fire first.

Though Singh steadfastly refuses to admit encounters as official policy, sticky encounters as a quick-fix solution to tackle organised crime are endorsed irrespective of the party in power. If it was former state home minister and BJP leader Gopinath Munde all but thumping his chest a few years back, proclaiming his support for encounters, then current Deputy Chief Minister and state Home Minister Chhagan Bhujbal too has tacitly supported the policy.

While dons like Salem and Shakeel continue to remain out of reach-they flit between Gulf sheikdoms and East Asian countries with the ease with which they swap mobile phone cards-the police have disrupted their crime networks within Mumbai and even sent them spiralling into a recession. Last month, a small-time caterer (name withheld) refused to pay the Rajan gang Rs 50 lakh in extortion money. The gang finally brought down its demand to a piffling Rs 25,000. "Last year, failure to pay would have meant death,'' says an officer.

Officers are hand-picked by senior policemen for these squads, based on their detection abilities and network of informants. Prior experience in encounters helps. Six-man units are paid Rs 30,000 per operation. "The money is good but the commendation notes we get along with it help our careers,'' says an officer who boasts a collection of over 100 such notes.

Being in these special squads assures the policemen of being in constant spotlight, media attention and powerful friends. With it also comes controversy, charges of corruption and even extortion. None of these charges has stuck. Earlier this year, Nayak was transferred to the Kandivli police station and the police commissioner instituted an enquiry into the school he had built in his native village in Mangalore. Nayak was subsequently cleared of the charges by Bhujbal and reinstated.

Don't the gangs ever retaliate? A conversation Shakeel had with shady Bollywood producer Nasim Rizvi, and intercepted by the Mumbai Police, has the don baying for the blood of Sharma and Nayak: "Unko chhodunga nahin (I won't spare them)." One officer says he got a call from Shakeel who threatened to bump off his family members. "I just read him a list of his family members in the city," he smiles. "He got the message."

Threats apart, there's a silent understanding that none of the gangs will ever target the police. While an ideologically souped-up Naxalite in the state's Gadchiroli district wouldn't think twice about gunning down a police officer, for an underworld hireling it's different. "There is no ideology involved-it's strictly money and business. And it's bad business to take on the police,'' says Bhosle. Yet the same logic doesn't explain why the gangsters in the encounters always "whip out their revolvers and fire upon the police party".

But just in case, none of the police officers takes the same route to work, has personal bodyguards and his movements are a closely guarded secret. A few months back, the officers stripped the nameboards off their cabins. Sawant, the tactician who controls the CIUs, talks with his eye occasionally darting towards a close-circuit television keeping a watch on the long corridor outside his office, patrolled by a beefy plainclothes bodyguard with a pistol tucked in his waistband.

Small precautions to take when you've brought organised crime to its knees.