‘Robinhood Bhai’ of Bhandup remembered 34 yrs after gangland hit

Mumbai: Mangatram Petrol Pump on the arterial LBS Road in Bhandup (W) looks like any regular fuelling station, but this one was witness to a shocking underworld hit 34 years ago -- on April 23, 1992 -- when local gangster-turned-BMC corporator, Kim Thapa alias K T or Kim Bahadur, was gunned down by five men lying in wait in a white Fiat car.Thapa, 37, a rising Shiv Sainik, had stepped out of a restaurant opposite the pump on a sweltering April afternoon, when he was suddenly caught in a hail of indiscriminate firing. It brought an end to a budding career but focused attention on the nexus between organised crime and politics.So why is Thapa still being lamented three-and-half decades since with posters in Bhandup and Kanjurmarg? Most of them have been put up by old associates and party members of the erstwhile united Shiv Sena. There is also a Nepali community in Mulund-Bhandup who worked as guards in factories here and considered Thapa, a one-time militant trade unionist, their guardian.Old timers say Thapa enjoyed the reputation of being the "Robinhood" of Bhandup and the "hero of Sarvodaya Nagar" where he lived, especially after being elected the Sena corporator twice, in 1985 and 1989. Among other things, he is known to have lobbied for BEST bus routes 605 and 606 to provide easy connectivity to Bhandup railway station. However, the darker side of his persona is what yesteryear journalists and crime chroniclers recall. "In the early eighties, the Kanjurmarg-Bhandup-Mulund belt was dominated by factories and heavy union politics. There were no swanky residential towers like today and crimes like making hooch and transporting them in rubber tyre tubes were very common. Thapa is said to have controlled some of these hooch dens," said senior journalist Prabhat Sharan, who did crime reporting then.In the early nineties, there was also the shocking murder of a freelance reporter who wrote under the pen-name 'Pralay' for Jansatta, a Hindi newspaper. While fingers were pointed at hooch kingpins in Mulund and Bhandup, nothing could be proved, and the case remained buried in police files.Senior journalist Baljeet Parmar had once mentioned in his YouTube channel that Thapa had very humble beginnings in Bhandup, where he worked as a guard for factories. After Shiv Sena supremo Bal Thackeray made him a Sena member in the eighties, Thapa is said to have clashed with Congress-backed trade unionist, Dina Bama Patil, father of the Bhandup-based MP, Sanjay Dina Patil. Urban lore has it that the fights between Thapa and Patil were mediated by the maverick BJP corporator (later MLA) from Bhandup, Sardar Tara Singh, according to Parmar.While 16 persons were chargesheeted for Thapa's murder, and the underworld don, Chhota Rajan aliana 'Nana', alleged to be the mastermind, the case ended with a closure report in a CBI court in 2020. Rajan had allegedly ordered the kill due to Thapa's growing prominence. Thapa had earlier worked with Rajan, but later separated. The fugitive gangster, Subhashsingh Thakur, who was hiding in Nepal after the JJ hospital shootout of 1992, had reportedly wowed to avenge Thapa's murder. Rajan's shooters -- Diwakar Chhuri, Sanjay Raggad and Amar Jocker -- were gunned down by Thakur along the Indo-Nepal border and their bodies thrown into a river.While these gang wars are a thing of the past today, the landscape having given way to bustling real estate activity driven by aspirational living, these throwback banners recalling a blood-soaked past still evoke curiosity.
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