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The chairman of Reliance Industries is the richest man in India and Asia — and the 8th richest in the world, according to Hurun — worth $83 billion and has interests ranging from oil and gas (refining and exploration) to petrochemicals, telecom and retail.
The alleged letter that was found in the car, with the gelatin sticks, allegedly asked Ambani to cough up some money in cryptocurrencies.
However, both Ambani and his company have remained largely quiet despite all the clamour, conspiracy theories, and political slugfest around the incident. “We are thankful to Mumbai Police for their quick and immediate action. We are confident that Mumbai Police will complete their thorough investigation quickly," RIL said in a statement on Feb 26.
Right after the car was found outside Ambani, an organisation named Jaish-ul-Hind claimed responsibility for the explosives. However, soon after, the ‘real’ Jaish-ul-Hind reportedly denied its role in the incident. Sources in the Intelligence Bureau told the Times of India that no such organisation existed.
But now, the latest revelations say that the Telegram channel through which the first statement was released was created in Delhi’s Tihar Jail. The mobile, on which the channel was created, was found in the barracks where a terrorist of Indian Mujahideen and other inmates linked to terrorist outfit Al-Qaeda and the underworld were kept, prison sources reportedly said.
Congress leader Nana Patole has alleged that the entire episode is a hogwash generated to allow Ambani permission to land choppers on the helipads he already has.
“The Antilla has three helipads but it still has no permission for air operations. The farmers’ agitation is causing huge financial losses as shares of Mukesh Ambani’s companies are falling in the market. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has come up with an explosives-laden vehicle to allow sympathy, and to allow use of helipads by Ambani citing security reasons,” Patole reportedly said.
For the record, the shares of Reliance Industries have gained over 90% in the last one year, and have been largely stable since September 2020 when the farmers’ protest started gaining momentum.
The green-coloured Mahindra Scorpio that surfaced outside Ambani’s residence was in the possession of Mansukh Hiren who owned a car renovation showroom in Thane, a city just outside Mumbai. Hiren had kept the car because his client, and the owner of the car, Sam Newton, had not paid for the work.
Hiren told the cops that the car had been missing and he had reported it to the police before it was found outside the Ambani residence. On February 17, Hiren parked the car near the Mulund toll plaza after the steering jammed but never went back to fetch it until the next day, when it went missing.
Soon after, Hiren mysteriously disappeared until his corpse was found floating in a creek outside the city on March 4. While the Mumbai Police was quick to write it off as suicide, the post mortem, reportedly, did not clearly show that he had drowned and there were abrasions on the face, which could have been caused by the victim’s struggle in the face of an attack.
Vimla told the cops that the night he disappeared, he had gone out to meet his friend Sachin Vaze, a top cop in the Mumbai Crime Branch who has since been transferred to the Citizen Facilitation Centre. According to her, Vaze was a regular client at her late husband’s shop and that he had borrowed the same car in November last year.
"My husband was a good swimmer and he cannot drown. His belongings like phone, gold chain, wallet were not found. Looking at the entire situation, I am sure he was murdered and I suspect that Vaze has killed him," Hiren’s wife Vimla reportedly said in her complaint.
The cop admitted to knowing Hiren but he also said that “he hadn’t met him in recent times”. Vaze’s history before this case is a series of fascinating, gray tales, some of which will follow in the next slide.
Flashback! Vaze earned his reputation as an encounter specialist in the late 1990s when killing criminals and suspects on the go was considered “cool,” especially in Maharashtra. He was reportedly among a breed of cops encouraged by the state, which was then ruled by the Bharatiya Janata Party and Shiv Sena alliance, to take down troublemakers.
However, playing fast and loose caught up with him eventually. Vaze (along with 17 others) was suspended from the force in 2004 after Khwaja Yunus, a suspect in the Ghatkopar bomb blast case, died in custody. The trial is still underway.
Meanwhile, in 2008, Vaze joined the Shiv Sena after resigning from the force. After the party came back to power in 2019, Vaze was reinstated in the force citing a shortage of officials in the wake of the pandemic last year. Apparently, his resignation in 2007 was never accepted.
Since then, he has been handling a ton of cases that have helped the ruling Sena government to keep its detractors (and BJP supporters) in check. From the arrest of Arnab Goswami, the owner of Republic TV, to the investigation in the television ratings scandal to the probe into the spat between Bollywood stars Hrithik Roshan and Kangana Ranaut, Vaze has been on the driver’s seat.
Cut to the present, BJP leader Devendra Fadnavis has accused Vaze of destroying evidence related to Hiren’s murder. “I suspect he was murdered in a car and his body was thrown into the creek,” he said.
With the NIA entering the probe into Hiren’s death, Vaze has been transferred out of the Mumbai Crime Branch. “An impartial inquiry will be done and whoever is guilty will face action,” the state Home Minister Anil Deshmukh told the Assembly on March 11 in response to the charges made by Fadnavis.
The current Chief Minister of Maharashtra, Uddhav Thackeray, took a bold step in 2019 by breaking up with his party’s long-term ally BJP. Thackeray lost a friend (who he shared ideology with) to stay in power with support from rivals like the Nationalist Congress Party and the Indian National Congress.
Since then, the Sena has been squeezed between reluctant friends and a keen enemy in BJP. The party led by former Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis has piled on pressure on the Sena-NCP-Congress government repeatedly.
First, it was the case of the two sadhus who were lynched in Palghar. Then, the death of Bollywood actor Sushant Singh Rajput. These were two big incidents that were used by the BJP to discredit the Maharashtra government led by Sena in the last 16 months since Thackeray took the seat.
After bidding some time initially, Thackeray has, seemingly, decided to take the fight to BJP by targeting the same pawns used by the BJP. From Vaze’s crackdown on a pro-BJP media outfit to the demolition of actor Kangana Ranaut’s Bandra office, the steps taken by the authorities in Maharashtra are being seen as Sena’s backlash against its former ally.
The threat to the Ambanis and the subsequent death of Hiren have just given the two sides more ammunition to fire at each other.
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