After 30 years, sisters meet Chhota Rajan

After 30 long years, mafia don Chhota Rajan on Friday met his two older sisters, with one of them pleading that he should be treated "well".

Sunita Chavan and Malini Sakpal met Rajan, 56, at the headquarters of the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) after Special CBI judge Vinod Kumar gave the go ahead.

The occasion that brought the sisters and brother together was the festival of 'Bhai-Dooj'. The emotional reunion lasted some 25 minutes, before which Sunita Chavan, the younger of the two sisters, told IANS that they had not spoken to him during the last three decades when he married crime.

Chavan and Sakpal live in Maharashtra, and reached New Delhi on Thursday with a lawyer with the intention of meeting Rajendra S. Nikhalje alias Chhota Rajan, who is in a CBI lock-up here.

"We are meeting him after 30 years," a visibly excited Sunita Chavan told IANS.  "We never knew where he was living all these years. We never spoke to him even on telephone."

She said both sisters "are feeling very good that he is back in India, even if he is in custody". Asked if they had any view on Chhota Rajan being in custody in Mumbai or Delhi, she said: "He is in custody, which custody doesn't matter. The CBI is a bigger agency, so we feel he will be treated well."

Sunita Chavan insisted that her brother was being framed on most cases he is accused of. "If he was living in Australia all these years, how could he be involved in crime here (India)?" she asked.

"In any case, he has not done anything against the country," she told IANS, trying to draw a line between an underworld involved in crime and an underworld with terror links. "So he should be treated well."

Chhota Rajan, a former close associate of now India's most wanted man, Dawood Ibrahim, was brought to New Delhi on November 6 after his arrest in Indonesia on October 25.

He is presently in 10-day CBI custody. The sisters, who met Sessions Judge O.P. Saini at his Gurgaon residence on Thursday night, had moved an application before him at the Patiala House Court seeking clearance to meet him.

The judge made it clear that the meeting could take place only if the CBI gave the green signal. The CBI did that.

But before the meeting took place, the two sisters had to pass through a layer of security checks, CBI sources said.

Chhota Rajan, who once escaped an attempt by the Dawood gang to kill him, is said to be involved in some 85 criminal cases including those of murder, extortion, smuggling and drug trafficking.

He was first arrested in Mumbai in 1980 for murder and again in 1983 for attempt to murder. He left India in 1988 and remained a fugitive.