Pappu Kalani

Suresh Budharmal Kalani, known popularly as Pappu Kalani (born c. 1951) is an Indian criminal-politician from Ulhasnagar, Maharashtra.

In the 1970s, Ulhasnagar was a booming lawless town settled by entrepreneurial refugees who had emigrated from Sindh, Pakistan after the Partition of India in 1947.

Sharp business practices (Ulhasnagar was known for its "duplicate"s or forged goods) combined with illegal construction and unauthorised industrial units made for an atmosphere where "protection" emerged as a profitable business.

A number of gangs were soon working under the patronage of political parties.

Pappu Kalani's uncle Keemat Kalani, also affiliated with the Congress party, ran the gang headed by Chiman Tejwani, while the opposing parties, under politician Gop Behrani, employed the gang of Govind Vachani and Gopal Rajwani.

It is reported that both gangs were connected to the Dawood Ibrahim gang.

They also use media effectively, and hush money were regularly paid to journalists.

After emerging as the leader of an organized crime syndicate in the 1980s, he was elected president of the Ulhasnagar municipal council in 1986.

In 1983, Gopal Rajwani was for a while aligned with Pappu Kalani, and they executed the brutal knife murder of the editor A. V. Narayan of Blitz magazine.

Rajwani was arrested for this, but he was eventually acquitted due to lack of witnesses and shoddy prosecution.

In April 1985, Rajwani was arrested in an extortion case, apparently at Kalani's bidding.

As Rajwani was being escorted to the police station in a rickshaw, Kalani arranged for his men to attack him with bombs and guns.

Rajwani survived the attack and eventually relocated to Dubai, with the help of Haji Mastan, a notorious smuggler and senior don of that time.

In 1986, Pappu Kalani was elected president of the Ulhasnagar Municipal Council (UMC), and the same year, he was chosen by the Indian National Congress party as its candidate for the state legislature from Ulhasnagar, and easily won the seat.

Meanwhile, Gopal Rajwani and Pappu had fallen out over the division of extortion money.

In April 1989, Pappu's uncle Dudhichand Kalani was murdered, allegedly by the Govind Vachani / Gopal Rajwani gang, at the instance of Gop Behrani.

This led to reprisal killings – as many as 22 murders in five months.

It was said during this period that "there would be a killing in Ulhasnagar every Tuesday."

It was during this period that Pappu Kalani emerged as the leader of his own organized crime gang.

He was elected to Maharashtra Vidhan Sabha in 1990 elections as Indian National Congress candidate from Ulhasnagar constituency.

Ghanashyam Bhatija was murdered on 27 February 1990 near the Pinto Resorts in Ulhasnagar of Thane district.

In February and April 1990, nephews of Gop Behrani, Ghanashyam and Inder Bhateja were

shot dead, despite having been given state police protection.

Also shot dead in 1990 were gangster Anna, and rickshaw union leader and bodyguard of Rajwani, Maruti Jadhav, both of whom were affiliated with the Gopal Rajwani gang.

Jadhav in his dying declaration, as well as another person who was injured in the revolver attack, identified Pappu Kalani personally, and he would later be refused bail in this murder case.

In 1990, when Pappu Kalani was formally named in some of these murders, he was expelled from the Congress party.

Pappu was charged with the gang murders from 1990 and with the JJ Hospital shootout-ably executed by D-Company's Shyam Kishore Garikapatti alias "Black Scorpion"; a total of 19 cases were filed against him.

Several appeals against his incarceration failed – the court found him sufficiently implicated in the Maruti Jadhav murder to label him as However, TADA laws were found inappropriate in some other charges –

particularly for both the Bhateja murders, and also in the JJ Hospital shootout case, which were transferred to a sessions court.

He won two elections in the period 1992–2001 when he was in jail on murder charges.

In 1992, when the clean-imaged Sudhakarrao Naik took over as Chief Minister from Sharad Pawar, he launched a drive against criminal-politicians.

Media pressure increased tremendously after the September 1992 shootout where Dawood Ibrahim's gang killed Shailesh Haldankar of the Arun Gawli gang as well as several on-duty policemen at Mumbai's JJ Hospital.

Thereafter, Pappu Kalani were arrested in November 1992, along with some others gangsters.

He won 1995 and 1999 assembly elections as Independent.

His brother Inder Bhatija, who had seen the murder, was also shot dead on 27 April 1999 despite having police protection.

Born into a wealthy family, Pappu Kalani's uncle Dunichand Kalani was the president of the local unit of Indian National Congress.

The family ran a liquor business and owned a number of distilleries and hotels.

He was elected the MLA from Ulhasnagar again in 2004 as a member of the Republican Party of India (Athawale).

Kalani is currently on bail in 19 cases including eight of murder.

He served a life sentence on 3 December 2013 in a 23-yr-old murder case of Ghanashyam Bhatija.