Hunting down Narayan Sai: The lone woman officer of Surat police team who got a big lead

Narayan Sai travelled incognito through various states after hiding for three weeks in Gujarat. En route, he stayed at the farmhouses of his father’s devotees. His trusted aide, Hanuman (Kaushal Kumar Thakur), was with him at all times; the driver, Ramesh, joined them later. The police described Ramesh as an ace driver who knew the roads they used to escape like the back of his hand. ‘A GPS device may fail, but Ramesh won’t,’ said a police officer in Delhi who had been part of the team searching for Narayan Sai.

Tracing Sai was not easy and the police spent a brutal fiftyeight days trying to locate him. During that time, they missed him several times. After a point, they started to raid the ashrams where he might have been hiding. They even went down to an ashram in Mumbai’s Virar, where Narayan Sai had some business interests in various trusts.

But, Sai was not to be found. They did see1 a hideaway ready on the grounds, concealed by grass. The team, which included women constables, made a thorough search of the premises and seized several documents stored in cupboards.

The police had put out notices for information that would lead to the capture of Narayan Sai. Shobha Bhutada’s phone number had been shared by a TV news station as a point of contact. She started getting around 500 phone calls per day, most of them useless.

‘Madam, this man is a traitor, hang him,’ said one caller.

‘I am a jawan on the border and in your place, I would have shot him down,’ said another passionate caller.

One regular caller was an old man from Haryana who would call to offer his blessings and told Bhutada not to get discouraged. ‘God is with you,’ he said.

There were also threat calls to that phone number. On 16 October 2013, one caller made a death threat.

‘If you don’t stop searching for Narayan Sai, I will shoot you,’ the caller, a man, said.

Bhutada was on her way to Ahmedabad at the time and disconnected the call. He kept calling back and she disconnected it several times. Finally, she picked up the call and the man repeated his threat.

‘Sudhar ja, nahin toh maar dalenge (Mend your ways, or I will kill you),’ he said. On the same day, Narayan Sai’s plea for anticipatory bail was being heard in a court and was denied.

When the threat was repeated on 18 October 2013, the Surat police registered a case against the caller, traced his cell phone location and arrested him from Madhya Pradesh. The man later said that he was not directly related to the ashram but the news coverage had inspired him to make the call.

Around 9 or 10 a.m. on 26 October 2013, another call came on Bhutada’s phone. The information it gave was so specific that it seemed quite convincing to her, she says.

‘Narayan Sai is in Ahmedabad and he has put up at Sevani’s flat, who has been Asaram’s follower for a long time. He is hiding there,’ the caller said.

Prahlad Kishanchand Sevani’s flat was located at Shopper’s Plaza VI opposite the Municipal Market  in Ahmedabad’s Navrangpura area. Inquiries revealed that he was indeed a follower of Asaram. The investigating officer, Mukesh Patel, kept busy with paperwork that day.

Bhutada consulted Asthana, quickly put together a team and set off for Ahmedabad. They reached the city around 2 p.m. and headed for Navrangpura, on the west bank of the Sabarmati, barely a couple of kilometres from the riverfront.

Bhutada was the only woman among eight policepersons, all in plain clothes, seated in two sedans, both of which were officers’ private vehicles. Bhutada sat with three others in a Swift Dzire. Police personnel had been stationed near the police headquarters in Ahmedabad, waiting for orders, in case they were needed.

The Ahmedabad police had not been informed. The Surat police wanted a quiet entry into the city, without raising any alarms, and a quiet exit, in case they did not find anything. There had already been several disappointments. Shivanand Jha, who at the time of writing this is director general of Gujarat police, was then commissioner of police in Ahmedabad.

Some of the policemen were armed. The plain-clothes constables did not have guns but the officers did. Bhutada had her Glock 9mm on her person. While her role in Gujarat has been of crime detection and maintenance of law and order, the gun was no stranger to her.

Bhutada had been trained in arms at the National Police Academy in 2008, when K. Vijay Kumar was its director. Vijay Kumar has a reputation as a super cop, and had shot to fame when he was placed in charge of the special task force which had a mandate to hunt down the sandalwood bandit, Veerappan. Vijay Kumar ended the fifteen-year-long Operation Cocoon in a short time by engaging in encounters which reduced Veerappan’s team till the man himself was traced down and shot dead in an encounter.

The experience in operational commands of the Border Security Force during militancy in Kashmir and the success of Operation Cocoon earned Vijay Kumar recognition as a counter-insurgency expert, since he had dealt with guerrilla soldiers as well. He retired as chief of the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) in 2013. I met him last when he had just retired and had been appointed adviser on Naxal management to the ministry of home affairs. Just past sixty, he was fit, maintained a rigorous discipline and continued to advise on counterinsurgency operations in central India and training security personnel for them.

At the police academy, Vijay Kumar insisted on training officers for jungle warfare, so that they could deal with guerrilla fighters. Bhutada remembers firing close to 5,000 rounds from various kinds of weapons—assault rifles such as MP-5, AK-47, sniper rifles and handguns. But it was not general target practice, there were simulations of how to fire blindfolded, with a flashlight blinding the eyes, from moving vehicles, firing from a motorcycle, and so forth.

Bhutada had first been assigned as an officer in Jammu and Kashmir and Vijay Kumar’s arms training had been important for her. Her posting was at a police station that supervised the Indo-Pakistan border of the state. During her initial days there, a flash on the police radio announced that someone, presumably a Pakistani national, had set off a fire in a field across the fence but on the Indian side of the border. The moment she went across the fence, she heard police jawans unlatch the safety locks of their assault rifles. A senior officer was not supposed to go across the fence and she was called back by her colleagues, saying the fire department would handle it.

That night, a constable handed her an AK-47 assault rifle.

‘What do I do with this? I have a handgun.’

‘Ma’am, if we all get shot, what will you do? So, keep this.’ Bhutada lay awake with the assault rifle on the table next to her bed, her heart pounding. Practice rounds had been fine, till she was left alone with the assault rifle. She got up a few times to check if the safety catch was locked, worried that she might suddenly wake up and fire the weapon in her sleep.

The novelty of carrying a gun doesn’t wear off easily. It feels good to some but storing it can be a great liability, especially if there are children around. It feels reassuring to many when they are given a tough assignment during which carrying a gun is more than a requirement of the uniform.

The Surat police team parked their vehicles in a crowded area of the market in Navrangpura, next to some street food eateries, where the sedans would not draw anyone’s attention.

The dark-tinted windows provided them cover.

During the entire stakeout, which lasted fourteen hours, Bhutada did not step out of the vehicle even once. She does not drink water in these situations to avoid washroom breaks. Even if the public would not, she did not want to risk a policeman on duty identifying her. The local police would be curious about why a Surat police team was present there without informing the local police station. After the several failures, Bhutada wanted to avoid any chance of a leak at any level that might have warned their target. Jha was sporting enough not to blow his fuse later.

As they waited, there was not much to do except exchange departmental gossip.

This excerpt from God of Sin: The Cult, Clout and Downfall of Asaram Bapu by Ushinor Majumdar has been published with permission from Penguin Random House India. 

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