Antilia Bomb Scare Exposed Mumbai Cops, Hit Uddhav Thackeray Government

The Antilia affair also exposed, in spectacular fashion, an uncomfortable truth about India's economy: The law enforcement bodies policing it are in many cases rotten.

At the height of the pandemic, when many people in Mumbai were staying home, Ramvinder Singh Gill noticed a strange car parked near the residence of the city's richest man. A 53-year-old ex-colonel in the special forces, Gill held one of the most important bodyguard jobs on the subcontinent, overseeing a 300-person security force responsible for protecting the billionaire industrialist Mukesh Ambani and his family. The focus of their work was Antilia, the Ambanis' 27-story vertical mansion, equipped with three helipads, yoga and dance studios, and a "snow room" chilled to frigid temperatures. To avoid exposing their clients to Covid-19, bodyguards would spend 15 days quarantined at a nearby hotel before beginning monthlong shifts inside.

The car that piqued Gill's interest that day in February 2021 was a green Mahindra Scorpio, an Indian-made sport utility vehicle. Right away, Gill noticed that though the car was coated in grime, its license plate looked spotless, as though it had just been screwed in. When he ran the number, he found something even stranger: The plate matched the registration of a Range Rover used by Ambani's wife, Nita. Alarmed, Gill called the Mumbai police, who sent a team to search the vehicle. Inside a blue backpack branded with the logo of an Ambani-owned cricket franchise, they found a bag of industrial explosives. The explosives weren't connected to a detonator, but whoever placed them had left a chilling handwritten note. "Next time the wires will be connected," it read. "We have made arrangements to blow up your entire family."

Ambani had accumulated his share of enemies while his sprawling conglomerate, Reliance Industries Ltd., built dominant positions in everything from petrochemicals to retail and made him a crucial partner for Narendra Modi. But it soon became apparent that Mr Ambani hadn't been threatened by a business rival looking to shove him aside or a terror group enraged by his support for PM Modi. Instead, the events at Antilia were part of one of the most extraordinary scandals in the history of Mumbai. One person involved has turned up dead; another, an elite detective named Sachin Waze is in jail awaiting trial for charges including criminal conspiracy, extortion and murder. The ensuing uproar claimed the career of the city's police commissioner, drove a senior state government minister into hiding and contributed to the diminishment of Shiv Sena, the political party that had dominated Mumbai since the 1990s.

The Antilia affair also exposed, in spectacular fashion, an uncomfortable truth about India's economy: The law enforcement bodies policing it are in many cases rotten. According to a 2019 survey by the anticorruption group Transparency International, at least half of all Indians pay a bribe each year, and the police, who look to supplement their meagre pay by extracting cash wherever they can, are among the most common recipients. Cops have their own bribes to cover; many take out loans to secure postings in lucrative locations. This pervasive graft poses a severe threat to the competitiveness of a country that investors are counting on to power global growth. Businesses large and small are routinely shaken down by corrupt officers, and even powerful international companies dread any trip through the sclerotic courts, which have a backlog of 40 million cases.