How Mumbai police gears up to fight the evils of Amavasya and black magic

Illustration/Uday Mohite

Almost every police station in Mumbai is in the throes of activity when it gets a new senior police inspector, and not just because the rank and file is eager to please the new leadership. The usual anxiety of what the next boss is going to be like aside, the one task that is of paramount importance is the chair.

We are not fibbing; senior police officers are known to carry the same chair to every new office and posting they bag. The reason: their predecessor's chair could be "unlucky" for them. Some officers in Mumbai who have been using the same chair for 15 years, getting it refurbished as many times as is necessary.

Despite monumental advancements in science and technology, and Maharashtra being the only state to have a dedicated law against the practice of black magic, the Maharashtra Police, in 2023, harbours chuckle-worthy superstitions. This extends from the chairs, to the way they arrange their office, how their work day is divided to how the duties are assigned.

Blind faith and the police force became news recently when Director General of Police Vijaya Kumar, Uttar Pradesh, issued a circular instructing all his personnel to track new moon or Amavasya days to plan their policing duties. In Mumbai, too, policemen tell us, officers on night duty are especially jumpy from 12 to 1 am, and there are some who prefer not to step out at this hour at all. "It gets doubly worse if they must [step out] and a black cat ambles across," a police inspector posted in western Mumbai tells mid-day.

Hamid Dabholkar and Jaywant Hargude

The Mumbai Police comprises personnel hailing from across Maharashtra, and each new recruit brings his or her own beliefs. The usual practices of hanging lime and chillies above doors, avoiding colours like black and having chairs face a "lucky" direction are so commonplace that they are not regarded as out of the ordinary.

And some practices are so ingrained, they have become part of protocol. For instance, Station House duty is assigned to a different officer every week, and the Station House officer's chair is nothing short of sacred for the police station. "Nobody else is allowed to sit on that chair, even if the officer is away and there are people waiting to report their grievances. It is regarded as a harbinger of bad luck if a cop sits on the chair when it is not his or her turn for Station House duty," says a constable.

The Station House officer is only supposed to tackle fresh incoming cases while sitting in the chair. No old or pending work can be done, because it is believed that this will add to the common nightmare of all policemen - pending cases.

"Even if the officer has a pressing chargesheet to complete or a report to send, he will move to another chair and table, where he can finish the work before coming back to the Station House officer's desk," the constable adds.

As far as chairs go, though, the unluckiest chair is regarded to be that of an officer who gets arrested for graft by the Anti Corruption Bureau. His chair is all but quarantined, cops tell us.

Till nearly a decade ago, the Mumbai Police was also plagued by a particularly archaic practice of sacrificing a rooster in the police station premises, after which its meat was cooked and eaten on the occasion of Gatari Amavasya, the last no moon night before the month of Shravan in the Hindu calendar. This was done to supposedly ward off evil influences from the police station and its entire jurisdiction. When things got out of hand, the top brass decided to issue a circular before every Gatari, warning of strict action if the practice was conducted.

"The irony," says anti blind faith activist Hamid Dabholkar, "is that our country has literally set foot on the moon, but we continue to look for the auspicious and inauspicious in lunar cycles."

Hamid, like his father, the late rationalist and thinker Dr Narendra Dabholkar, has dedicated his life to fighting superstition and blind faith, and currently heads the Andhashraddha Nirmoolan Samiti, a non-profit that holds workshops to combat blind faith. For him, he says, to learn that the investigating team probing his father's murder used an Ouija board when the investigation did not yield any clues, was ironical.

Dabholkar was shot dead on August 20, 2013 while he was on a morning walk near the Omkareshwar Temple in Pune. Ten years down the line, the Central Bureau of Investigation is probing alleged links between his killing and those of activist Govind Pansare, writer MM Kalburgi and journalist Gauri Lankesh.

As retired Assistant Commissioner of Police Jaywant Hargude puts it, there is, after all, a human being in the uniform. A veteran of the Crime Branch and the encounter era, Hargude says he spent most of his career patrolling the streets, with no interference from lunar or feline influences. "There came a point when, if a cat crossed my path during my night rounds, I was very sure I'd catch a most wanted criminal," he chuckles.

Even senior officers are not immune, mid-day finds. Several top cops, after taking over a new posting, immediately remodel the entire office, moving the desk and chair to a different position than the way their predecessor had arranged them. If junior cops move chairs, the top cops move all the furniture.

Not all remodelling, though, is out of blind faith, we find. A senior inspector in charge of a central Mumbai police station told mid-day that he installed a fish tank in his office, directly in his line of sight, "for peace of mind, but not my own".

"Whenever my seniors come visiting, they sit in my chair as per protocol. It helps to have something in front of them to keep them calm, so that they don't yell at me," he says, tongue firmly in cheek.