All in the family: Delhi woman, six sons in Tihar jail with 99 criminal cases

A 62-year-old woman and her sons accumulated 100 criminal cases between them since she began selling bootlegged alcohol in 2000.

This could be the knockdown version of the Corleone family, minus the godfather. A woman and her six sons are in Tihar jail for committing a range of crimes in the Capital — from bootlegging to theft, and from extortion to murder.

A woman and her six sons are in Tihar jail for nearly 100 crimes. (Vipin Kumar/HT Photo)

The 62-year-old homemaker and her sons, aged between 15 and 38, accumulated 100 criminal cases between them since she began selling bootlegged alcohol in early 2000, after the family migrated to Delhi’s Sangam Vihar locality from Dholpur in Rajasthan. The seventh son was arrested this June for theft and sent to a juvenile detention home.

At the top of this criminal family tree is Basiran, a mother of 11 who is imprisoned for extortion.

But her husband Malkan Singh is clean. As are the couple’s four daughters.

The family’s home in Sangam Vihar, one of the city’s largest unauthorised colonies, was padlocked when Hindustan Times tried to contact the father and daughters.

Neighbours said Singh, 64, rears goats and spends the day in the nearby woods. Two of his daughters were married and live with their husbands. The other two were not at home. “We don’t interact with them much,” a neighbour said.

“The liquor business was ripe. Most local criminals bought liquor from her. The sons, Shamim and Shakeel, were lured by these criminals. They quit school. It was downhill from that day,” said a neighbour who asked not to be named.

Basiran and her sons gradually advanced from selling moonshine to petty crimes such as snatching and stealing.

Till their arrest over the past 10 months, they ran an organised syndicate, specialising in stealing cars, running a water supply mafia, and brewing and selling illicit liquor, police said.

Records show members of the family were charged with serious crimes such as extortion, keeping illegal arms, and murder between 2004 and 2017.

Basiran has three criminal cases against her. The latest was from June 2016 when she was allegedly charged with extorting Rs 20,000 from a man at gunpoint.

In police records, all of Basiran’s sons are “bad characters” — a term used by cops for people they need to keep an eye on.

If Wakil is facing 10 charges of robbery and rioting, Shakeel has 15 cases against him, and Shamim alias Gunga, the gang leader in mom’s absence, has 61. Wakil was first arrested for bootlegging in 2002.

A fourth son, 26-year-old Sunny, has four cases and Faizal, aged 21, has three. Brother Rahul, who is 19, was charged with murder just after his 18th birthday.

“The family was involved in all sorts of illegal activities here ... We put pressure on some of Basiran’s sons to come out of hiding and got them arrested,” said Upender Singh, the Sangam Vihar police station in-charge.