Ganesh Kendale
LUCKNOW: Adorned in a grey checkered shirt and blue denim jeans, posing alongside a sleek black TVS Raider motorcycle, the Instagram post appears innocuous at first glance, until one scrutinizes the caption…’Yaar tera gangster hai jaani’. Precisely 80 days before allegedly assassinating NCP leader and three-time MLA Baba Siddique, one of the three accused,Shivkumar Gautam, had been flaunting his self-proclaimed ‘Gangster’ status on various social media platforms.
Currently evading authorities, the accused hails from Gandara village in the Bahraich district of Uttar Pradesh.
DCP Mumbai Crime Branch Datta Nalawade announced on Sunday that the three accused, Gurmail Baljit Singh, Dharmaraj Rajesh Kashyap, and Shivkumar Gautam, had conspired to initially incapacitate the victim with pepper spray before opening fire, but Shivkumar discharged his weapon prematurely.
With 229 followers, and following 49 accounts, including union minister Chirag Paswan, PM Narendra Modi, and Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath, the accused had made 33 posts, frequently depicting himself as a gangster.
In one instance, he used a voice-over from the 2010 neo-noir crime thriller ‘Once Upon a Time in Mumbaai’, stating, “…Yeh umar sudhar ne ke nahi, bigadne ki hain…muskil toh yeh hain ki mein abhi theek tarah se bigada bhi nahi.” (This is not the age to improve, but for getting spoiled… The problem is that I haven’t even managed to get spoiled properly yet.)
In another post, while capturing an urban landscape, he used a voice-over from KGF Chapter 2, which proclaims, “Power people make places powerful”. In yet another post, he brazenly referred to himself as a villain, accompanied by a Bhojpuri song voice-over…” Neta na kono vidhayak, majnu hamar khalnayak hai.”
According to his mother Suman, “Around April 2, 2024, Shivkumar had departed for Pune to work at a scrap yard; however, the accused’s Instagram post from April 10 revealed that he was employed at a warehouse where he packed and shipped online orders.”
