Image via intoday.in
On Monday, the 26th of April, millions of Indians woke up to a curious piece of news: Mastermind of the Mumbai 1993 blasts, Dawood Ibrahim, is suffering from gangrene, and could very well lose both his legs. Some smiled, and remarked that there finally was some kind of justice. Some joked that diabetes did what the Indian intelligence agencies never could. Some others didn’t care and simply moved on with their day.
In a nondescript apartment on a nondescript street somewhere in Delhi, a group of nondescript young and old men, who neighbours thought were regular people in regular jobs, erupted in joy, whooping and high-fiving each other, as they celebrated the first signs of success in an intelligence operation that was 20 years in the making.
“This has been one of RAW’s greatest operations,” said an unnamed officer, wiping tears from his eyes, “Twenty years ago, a few visionary intelligence officers sat down and laid out various options of taking out Dawood. We had several ideas on our plate, most of which involved sneaking in our agents into Pakistan and taking him out. However, what went against these ideas and eventually ruled them out were the lack of deniability and the risk of failure.”
“That’s when someone suggested that we go for halaal instead of jhatka. We came up with an intrepid new operation, and codenamed it ‘Killing him softy’.”
“The plan was to lull him into a sense of complacency and manipulate him into killing himself. We did the first part by having the government send Pakistan dossier after dossier begging the Pakistani deep state to return Dawood. The idea was to make the Indian government seem like a joke, and make Dawood feel safe. We even posted jokes on forums and social media on the dossier diplomacy under anonymous handles to help the process along.”
“Then, we started couriering him sweets and desserts, from all over the world. Pastries, cakes, ice-creams, South Asian delicacies, sweets from his native city Mumbai, you name the sweet, and we can give you the number of times and the dates on which we couriered them over. Typically we picked one of his gang members or business associates as the sender, preferably someone relative lower in the food-chain that Dawood wouldn’t speak to directly.”
“Dawood never suspected anything. He interpreted it as the usual ass-kissing by his people and devoured all of them, indiscriminately. A few years later, our spies in Pakistan reported that Dawood had been diagnosed with diabetes.”
“The next step was to increase his already high Blood Pressure. We achieved it very simply by leaking his home address and phone numbers to Arnab Goswami. Within a day, Dawood’s BP shot up to dangerous levels, which along with diabetes, further exacerbated his condition. Rot began to creep in into his legs, as his body could no longer withstand the relentless assault.”
“And the rest,” said the officer with a smile, “is history.”