Tihar jail theek hai for Chhota Rajan

When underworld don Chhota Rajan said theek hai (it’s alright) to his sentencing to life imprisonment in the journalist J Dey murder case on Wednesday, he could well have meant that the punishment was quite proportional to his crime, well done, judge. Ego massaged. Wasn’t it fickle ego that drove him to commission the murder as J Dey had the gall to call him a petty gangster in an upcoming book he was writing? What angered him more was that Dey considered Dawood Ibrahim a much superior ganglord.

For long, Rajan was an Indian intelligence establishment ‘asset’. He was cultivated to hit the D-company that had masterminded the 1993 Mumbai riots. Both dons hunted each other down and retaliatory killings followed but the biggies managed to stay alive.

The closest Dawood got to bumping off Rajan was when his lieutenant Chhota Shakeel organised a massive raid on his hideout in Bangkok in 2000. Amid a shower of bullets, Rajan survived and stayed under the radar of Shakeel’s spotters across the globe till 2015, when he was arrested in Indonesia’s Bali and extradited. By then he had wanted to kind of retire as he had renal ailments. And the intelligence agencies let him encash his IOUs, which was how Bali happened, if you were to believe in conspiracy theories.

Now lodged in Delhi’s high security Tihar Jail, he is said to be leading a pretty good life, with a separate room and an attached toilet and other perks. Since he is on dialysis, he would fancy his chances of survival better inside the jail rather than in the free world outside. For him then, Tihar is theek hai. The sleuths too want him in Tihar, out of harm’s way from the D-gang.

So the special MCOCA judge perhaps did Rajan a favour by awarding him a life term for killing Dey. The cold-blooded murder killed the career of fellow journalist Jigna Vora, who was charged with tipping off Rajan about Dey, attributing it to professional jealousy. The court acquitted her, but who will restore her honour?