The Bombay Connection: India Is Major Player in World Drug Trade

The elegantly dressed woman gave a sigh of relief as an airport customs officer glanced cursorily through her bags and waved her on to the departure lounge. Within minutes she would have been on a flight to Barcelona with her 11-year-old daughter.

But intelligence agents had been tipped off that the woman, a 35-year-old Indian model residing in West Germany, might be smuggling narcotics. They waited for an accomplice to check in for the same flight and stopped both of them before they boarded the plane.

In the woman’s bags, they found two shirt boxes, both neatly gift-wrapped and tied with ribbons. In each were 4.4 pounds of high-grade heroin in plastic bags, worth about $40 million on the streets of New York.

Six Gang Members Nabbed

As a result of the recent heist, intelligence sources said officers nabbed six members of a gang involved in smuggling narcotics through India to the United States, Europe and Africa.

The haul was just a small fraction of the narcotics that are now pouring through India, which has emerged in the last two years as one of the world’s major supply centers for illegal drugs.

In 1984, Indian customs and narcotics control officers seized about 440 pounds of heroin. Last year, the amount was a staggering 5,700 pounds, the bulk of it intercepted in the western port of Bombay, which experts say has become the largest airport transit point for narcotics in the world.

In addition to heroin, large amounts of marijuana and hashish and smaller quantities of raw opium have been seized. Although the sources say it is impossible to estimate what percentage is getting through, they say the drugs confiscated are only the tip of the iceberg.

“The India route began as an emergency exit,” said B.V. Kumar, India’s director general of revenue intelligence. “Now it has become a major transit country for illicit narcotics because the drug-runners have found that it works.”

India Was Unprepared

But narcotics experts say India was unprepared for the explosion in drug trafficking across its borders and still lacks the financing and know-how to deal with it. They said such is the scale of the problem that drug runners even employ diplomats as couriers.

The flow of narcotics through India has also increased the domestic availability of drugs, creating a serious addiction problem. Sources estimate that India now has about half a million addicts, with the largest concentration of about 200,000 in Bombay. Rough estimates are that there were probably less than 100,000 addicts in the country five years ago.

And as the drugs go out, massive amounts of gold are smuggled in to pay for them.

“The usual pattern is for the drug barons to invest the money overseas they receive for their merchandise and then smuggle some of it back in as gold to pay their suppliers,” said one source.

Drugs shipped through India come from the two biggest drug-producing regions of Asia, the so-called Golden Crescent of southern Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan, and the Golden Triangle of Burma, Thailand and Laos.

Previously, drugs produced in these areas were sent to the West either overland through Afghanistan, Iran and Turkey, where it was picked up and shipped to Western Europe, particularly Marseille, or by air and sea through Bangkok from Southeast Asia for markets in the United States and Europe.

But those routes were disrupted by a combination of political events, including the 1979 revolution in Iran and the war in Afghanistan, and smuggling crackdowns in Turkey and Southeast Asia, where some governments declared the death penalty for drug trafficking.

From 1979 to 1982, smugglers relied on Pakistan’s southern port of Karachi as an export point. But the route became so well-known that all shipments arriving in the West from Pakistan were thoroughly searched. In addition, Islamabad, pressed by Washington, tightened its anti-drug laws.

“Pakistan became too big a risk for drug smugglers,” a source said. “The only way out was to take the drugs through India. Gangs already established began smuggling drugs in a big way here from 1983.”

The sources said about 85% of the heroin that now exits India comes from laboratories concentrated on the northern sector of the Afghan-Pakistan border that manufacture the drug from Afghan-grown poppy crops--a source of revenue for centuries. The area also produces the bulk of the hashish shipped through India.

In the early 1980s, traffickers moved their opium refining labs from Europe to the rugged frontier region to be closer to the opium fields and take advantage of a lack of government control.

Heroin and hashish from the region are now smuggled across the Indo-Pakistan border, chiefly into India’s desert state of Rajasthan, where the frontier is not demarcated and is so inhospitable that even border security troops cannot live there.

To the east, small amounts of refined heroin also enter from Burma, a major poppy-growing region from which tribesmen can freely travel across the Indian frontier. Much of the contraband then goes overland to Nepal, the sources said, from which it is either exported by air or re-enters India. Marijuana also arrives from Nepal, which Indians can visit without a passport.

Bombay’s Crime Families

“The Indo-Burmese border is becoming a major concern,” said one source.

Bombay in particular has advantages for traffickers because it is a major port handling the bulk of India’s growing exports, is well connected to other international cities and has a tradition of smuggling by the city’s organized crime families.

From Bombay, smugglers vary their international routes, but the sources said African cities, in particular Lagos, are among the primary destinations and transit points.

Couriers hide the merchandise in everything from books and photo albums to chili powder, hollow transistor batteries and automobile parts. Often, wet heroin is impregnated into fabric, a major Indian export, which is then dried. The cloth is re-soaked at its destination and the drug squeezed out.

“The more sophisticated equipment we get, the more the sophisticated methods of concealment the smugglers find,” said one intelligence source.

The sources, however, said the most common technique is to pack heroin into condoms, which are then swallowed or hidden in body cavities. The caches cannot be detected except under X-ray, which can only be used if officers have sufficient evidence to suspect a traveler.

They say that in New Delhi, traffickers frequently employ diplomats, who have immunity from prosecution. While the rare case has become public--representatives of Nigeria and Belgium have been detained on drug smuggling charges in the past few years--the sources said most are kept quiet.

“We can’t even interrogate them directly,” said one intelligence source. “They are just declared persona non grata and leave the country.”

The drug trade has also proved lucrative for rebel groups in the region, souces said.

Tamil militants are known to have established an extensive drug smuggling racket through India to Europe to finance their independence campaign in Sri Lanka, and Afghan guerrillas are believed to deal in opium and hashish to provide funds for their 8-year-old war against the Soviet-backed government in Kabul.

India has arrested Sikh traffickers who are members of separatist groups in the northern state of Punjab, but the sources said they have as yet no hard evidence that Sikh extremists are funding their operations through illegal drug sales.