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In the 1990s, India's first private airline after the LPG reforms, 'East West Airlines', reshaped Indian aviation through audacious business bets and powerful political connections, only to collapse amid a sensational murder and unanswered questions about who ordered it.
The evening of November 13, 1995 was like any other for the Wahid household in Mumbai. Sajeena had spoken to her husband, Thakiyudeen Abdul Wahid, managing director of East West Airlines. He told her he’d be back after a meeting with his pilots.
Less than an hour later, on a narrow Bandra street barely a kilometre from home, a van cut off his car. Armed men jumped out. One came at the windscreen with a hammer while the others opened fire into the vehicle. By the time Thakiyudeen Abdul Wahid reached the nearest hospital, he was declared dead.
Rise Of India’s First Private Airline
Thakiyudeen Abdul Wahid grew up in Odayam, a coastal fishing village near Varkala, not too far from the capital Thiruvananthapuram in southern Kerala. His father ran a dried fish business that lived and died by the sea's daily mood. By the late 1980s, Thakiyudeen and his brothers had established a travel and recruitment agency in Mumbai. The business was highly successful, issuing around 600 airline tickets a day and recruiting over 75,000 Indians for work in the Persian Gulf.
Thakiyudeen leveraged his immense success in the ticketing business to gain a foothold in New Delhi's corridors of power. He cultivated a relationship with Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi who was a former commercial pilot and eager to modernize Indian aviation. During their meetings, the prime minister actively encouraged him to launch a private airline to support the government's emerging Open Sky policy.
When the Narasimha Rao government cracked open the aviation sector in 1992 and ended the state's monopoly on the skies, Thakiyudeen was among the first to act. East West Airlines made its maiden flight on February 28, 1992. The aircraft itself were leased through a company co-founded by Tony Ryan, the Irish entrepreneur who would go on to build Ryanair into Europe's most ruthless low-cost carrier.
In its first year, East West Airlines posted revenues of over Rs 130 crore and turned a profit, while the state owned domestic carrier, Indian Airlines, was losing money. The fare was on average twenty percent cheaper than the state carrier, with seats filling quickly. Passengers included actors like Sushmita Sen and Amir Khan while Mother Teresa received a free ticket for all her travels on the airline.
Indian Airlines pilots were on government salaries of around Rs 25,000 a month while East West was paying an opulent Rs 1,00,000, which meant that pilots were flocking to East West. At one point, to break the back of an Indian Airlines pilots strike, the government even instructed East West Airlines to operate as many flights as possible on any available route.
None of it insulated the airline from the rising competition in a newly liberalised India. By 1993, Naresh Goyal's Jet Airways had entered the market and was aggressively targeting East West's routes and staff, even affecting opportunities through political lobbying, leading to an intense ugly rivalry.
Who Killed India’s First Private Airline?
After the murder, the Mumbai Police maintained that Thakiyudeen was killed by Chhota Rajan, Dawood's rival who had broken away after the 1993 Bombay bombings. Chhota Rajan had even accepted responsibility for the killing, although he was known for feeding journalists selective, self‑serving stories that failed to withstand independent scrutiny. The killing was logged as another chapter in the city's underworld wars.
In 2016, investigative journalist Josy Joseph's book 'A Feast of Vultures', grounded in intelligence files and government records, presented a different picture. Intercepts gathered by RAW in the years after the murder pointed to Dawood's network as the actual perpetrators. A 2003 intercept caught Dawood's close aide, Chhota Shakeel, venting about an unidentified "airline big shot" who had commissioned the killing and then, years later, still not settled the payment.
Joseph also documents a 2001 Intelligence Bureau letter placing Naresh Goyal in intermittent contact with Dawood Ibrahim and Chhota Shakeel over financial matters. The book traces the ferocity of the commercial rivalry between Goyal and Wahid at length. In 2023, Goyal was arrested in connection with a money‑laundering case and bank fraud.
East West Airlines folded in June 1997, nineteen months after its founder's death. The Bandra apartment where the family once lived remains largely untouched, its furniture worn down by time. As Joseph put it, the end of East West Airlines fit the post‑liberalization script with its “ruthless business tactics, politically connected businessmen, politicians on the take, and ambitious upstarts”.
