NEW DELHI:As per Delhi Police crime statistics, 180 women masterminds are facing charges of homicide, attempt to murder, robbery, abduction and prostitution. Sixty-three women crime bosses running prostitution rings have been operating freely and 92 involved in bootlegging and betting rings have not fallen into the police dragnet. Around 430 women criminals are running gangs of thieves and are involved in cheating cases. Until the arrest of Rekha and Sheetal, Delhi Police had been busy concentrating on gangs of male crime bosses.
Women criminals often inherit crime. This holds true for 25-year-old Darshana, who controlled a nationwide narcotics racket, which was handed over to her by husband Manoj. When he died, the young bride stepped into the crime world. She became a force to reckon with, lording over Mubarakpur and Peeragarhi. Eventually, her luck ran out and she was caught with heroin worth Rs 30 lakh.
Being the fairer sex makes no difference when it comes to some of the most dreaded women Corleones. Shakila and Sonu Punjabin are so powerful that even male gangsters prefer to keep out of their way. Shakila, 58, who goes by the infamous alias Sakko, has been running an illegal hooch business and betting rackets for decades. Many cases of robbery and murder have been registered against her. The power of this Delhi woman capo di tutti capi (boss of all bosses) extends beyond the capital; the police had slapped the Maharashtra Control of Organised Crime Act, 1999, against her. More than a dozen other cases are pending, but she gets bail every time and continues to run her gang with impunity. She is so ruthless that she doesn’t stop at anything encroaching on her empire.
In 2009, her brother Anis attempted a coup. She fled Delhi. After two years of careful planning, she married Shakil, one of her most ruthless aides, and struck back. Anis narrowly escaped assassination. The threat was over and she reclaimed her territory. Her inner circle comprises seven of the city’s most dreaded male gangsters. The majority of women who are arrested for running illicit liquor rackets are from West and Southwest Delhi and keep shifting their places of residence to safehouses to trick the cops.
The sleazy world of prostitution in the capital has many women bosses at the helm. They operate in posh South and Southeast Delhi; in places like Greater Kailash 2, South Extension, Kalkaji and Dwarka. In this domain of illegal sex, Dilsukh is the queen of crime. She has been arrested several times—in 2011, 2012, and 2013. The difference between her and other crime bosses is that she is from Uzbekistan. Police suspect she is involved in trafficking women from eastern Europe and has forced many Uzbek girls into the flesh trade.
She operates in Delhi and Uttar Pradesh, but keeps changing her location. Not surprisingly, her associate-cum-husband is an Indian with a criminal record. Her ‘girls’ are sent to parties as belly dancers, as high-end call girls to upscale weekend parties and as escorts to vacation destinations such as Shimla, Jaipur and Goa. Hers is a story of survival and success: forced into prostitution herself at a young age, she became a crime boss. She operates through escort’s advertisements in newspapers and has a client list of some of the city’s wealthy businessmen and officials.
The story of Geeta Arora aka Sonu Punjaban is as old as crime in Delhi. She runs an organised sex racket worth hundreds of crores of rupees, according to police sources. Born in 1981 in Delhi’s Geeta Colony, her father Om Prakash was a poor autorickshaw driver. The family lived in a small tenement. As a teenager, she fell in love with small-time gangster Vijay. They got married. Vinod was killed in a police encounter during a carjacking in 2003. Thereafter, it was left to Punjaban to take over the reins of Vijay’s operation.
After she was arrested, she was sent to Tihar Jail, but was soon out on bail. Her influence was such that she continued to run the prostitution racket from the jail, using mobile phones. Her rivals are two heavyweight male traffickers Kamaljit and Ichadhari Baba, but for now she seem to have got the better of them.
However, many women criminals, perhaps because of their gender, abhor prostitution. They are mainly involved in burglary and cheating. Recently, the police arrested a gang of six women burglars—led by 45-year-old Geeta—for a series of thefts from shops in Northwest Delhi. Their modus operandi was quite devious: they would go to the targeted shop and conceal their associate under their shawls as if she is trying out new clothes. She in turn would break the locks, and the gang would sneak in later and flee with cash and valuables. Additional Deputy Commissioner of Police Shweta Chouhan said with their arrests, 17 cases of burglary in West and Northwest Delhi have been solved. Geeta started with burglaries and later formed her own gang, which specialised in looting shops.
“Some of these women kidnap children from hospitals and bus stops, since they feel that being a woman there is less chance of getting caught. But these gangs are in collusion with their male counterparts,” said Deputy Commissioner of Police R A Sanjeev. Police recently unearthed a gang run by women that was involved in kidnapping children and newborn babies. Led by 27-year-old Shikha Choudhry and her associates Vinod Kumar and Anil Pandey, they had sold more than 20 children. Interrogations revealed that they would procure the children either by stealing and kidnapping and would sell them to childless couples. The gang was using a devious contemporary method, operating as an NGO named Rashtriya Janhit Jansewa Sansthan based in Dwarka.
Some of these women gangsters have remained scot-free since the 1970s and have managed to evade the long arm of the law again and again.
It is said hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. In Delhi’s criminal circles, these women of Delhi scorn even the rules of Hell.