Dubai has a way of turning danger into décor. Even treachery looks ornamental from the 72nd-floor terrace of the JW Marriott Marquis, where the Creek below glints like a dark artery feeding the world’s smuggling heart. It was here, in 2019, at a cocktail evening curated by the US Embassy, that the name of a Pakistani businessman sliced through the night—clean, sharp, surgical. I was there—fresh off the Hindu BusinessLine desk in Mumbai, invited to a summit under the umbrella of the US State Department.
Journalists from half a dozen countries swirled whiskey and gossip—coups in Islamabad, cabinet reshuffles in New Delhi, border anxieties in Dhaka. Back home in India, the air was still thick with rage; barely a month had passed since the Pulwama massacre that claimed 40 CRPF lives and pushed Delhi and Islamabad to the edge of war.
I was leaning against the balcony rail, the Creek glittering black below me like spilled oil, when the jazz suddenly felt too soft and the chatter too loud. A Pakistani reporter beside me, four drinks deep and laughing a moment earlier, heard me casually ask about the ISI’s fabled shadow banker. His glass froze halfway to his lips. Every drop of colour drained from his face.“You know too much,” he whispered, voice barely louder than the ice cracking in his tumbler, eyes scanning the terrace like the walls themselves might be listening.
“Don’t ask,” he whispered again, scanning the shadows. “Even here, that name can get people killed.”
That reaction—a visceral flinch—told me more than any dossier ever could. Long before Bollywood stylised economic subversion into Dhurandhar’s comic-book villainy, the real mastermind of India’s monetary infiltration had lived, operated and died across the water.
Not a maverick genius... Not a lone wolf economist... But a Karachi-based hawala titan who quietly moved more illicit money than most governments... His name: "Javed Khanani." For two decades, he helped bankroll one of the most sophisticated covert economic assaults India had ever faced.
The Mild-Mannered Man Who Moved Pakistan's Dirty Money
By the mid-2000s, Khanani was no ordinary currency dealer. He co-ran Khanani & Kalia International (KKI), a sprawling hawala-cum-laundering machine that the U.S. Treasury later designated as a “significant transnational criminal organisation.” Its corridors stretched from Karachi’s Saddar bazaar to Dubai’s free zones, Toronto’s suburban plazas and East Africa’s ports.
He looked nothing like the villains that Hindi cinema imagines when it thinks of economic sabotage. Soft-spoken. Bespectacled. Accountants’ diction, traders’ instincts. But while fictional Dhurandhars monologue about collapse, the real Khanani worked in silence—balancing narcotics cash from Mexico with terror funds routed from the Gulf, settling accounts for syndicates linked to Lashkar-e-Tayyiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed, and sanitising money for D-Company’s global operations.
By 2008, American and Indian intelligence assessments converged: "KKI" was the “financial switchboard” for militant, criminal and political networks operating under Pakistan’s deep-state umbrella. If the ISI wanted money moved without fingerprints, Khanani moved it.
The Shadow War India Didn’t See Coming: Fake Rupees as Economic Sabotage
Parallel to Khanani’s rise, India was being flooded with Fake Indian Currency Notes (FICN) of alarming sophistication. These were not crude local fakes; they were near-genuine replicas, printed on security-grade paper, complete with watermarks and fibres that fooled even ATM sensors.
Multiple investigations—Delhi Police, NIA, DRI, BSF—mapped the same pattern:
Printing inside secure, state-protected facilities in Pakistan, routing via Dubai, Kathmandu, Dhaka and Kuala Lumpur. Distribution by D-Company, LeT facilitators and cross-border smugglers. Recycling and settlement through hawala hubs like KKI
Captured operatives—including LeT’s Abdul Karim Tunda—openly described how ISI handlers oversaw the printing of high-quality counterfeit Indian notes, which were then funneled along the same trafficking routes as weapons and explosives. By the early 2010s, agencies had estimated ₹1,500–2,000 crore worth of Pakistan-origin FICN entered India annually.
Every fake note did two things simultaneously:
Funded jihad (safe houses, logistics, recruitment, explosives) and eroded trust in India’s currency
This was not petty counterfeiting. It was asymmetric economic warfare. And standing at the centre of its financial logistics was Javed Khanani.
The De La Rue Disaster: India’s Currency Achilles’ Heel
The thriller gets darker when the trail crosses London.
In 2010–11, the British banknote giant De La Rue—one of the world’s most respected currency paper makers—was rocked by a scandal after Indian audits flagged: Substandard currency paper. Falsified quality certificates. 2,000 tonnes of rejected stock
India effectively blacklisted the firm. And yet—through opaque procurement, subcontracting and bureaucratic indulgence—De La Rue continued re-entering India’s currency ecosystem, supplying threads, security components and equipment. There is also a CBI FIR that probes whether key bureaucrats bent rules to enable this.
What made intelligence agencies uneasy was something else: While De La Rue was under scrutiny, Pakistan-sourced “super notes” displayed striking similarities to Indian banknotes printed on De La Rue-spec paper.
There is no publicly proven link showing that Indian presses or machinery were sold to Pakistan. But global supply chains are leaky. And Pakistan’s sudden leap in counterfeit quality raised the same question across agencies: Who gave them the template?
Whether through indirect access to materials, replication of specifications, or global black-market intermediaries, Pakistan’s FICN quality peaked precisely when India’s currency chain was most compromised. And hawala operators like Khanani made sure the proceeds never left a paper trail.
Demonetisation: The Night the Pipeline Froze
On 8 November 2016, when India invalidated ₹500 and ₹1,000 notes overnight, the blow wasn’t just domestic—it detonated across Pakistan’s covert machinery.
Years of perfected FICN stockpiles—warehoused, smuggled, pre-sorted—became instantly worthless. Routes went dark. Accounts froze. Handlers panicked. For hawala kings like Khanani—whose business model depended on seamless circulation—the sudden disappearance of an entire currency series created catastrophic liabilities.
A month later, on 4 December 2016, the news broke: Javed Khanani had fallen from the fourth floor of an under-construction building in Karachi. As the dawn broke over Karachi's Muhammad Ali Society, Khanani's crumpled form was discovered.
Police called it suicide. Family members said it was an accident. A medico-legal postmortem was bypassed. Labourers at the site were detained, then released. No one asked too many questions. But that is Pakistan -- little surprise.
Across India, the Gulf and Pakistan’s finance bazaars, the whispers were less polite: “Too much money stuck.” “Too many secrets.” “He knew the offshore balance sheets of the state.”
No credible public evidence has emerged proving murder. But in intelligence circles, the timing remains a spectre.
Why Dhurandhar Matters — and Why It Misses the Real Villain
The film Dhurandhar revived public fascination with the idea of a super-villain printing fake currency to destabilise India. It made for good entertainment—a lone genius, a cinematic plot, stylised sabotage.
The truth is scarier: India wasn’t attacked by a flamboyant mastermind. It was undermined by a bureaucratised, state-protected ecosystem run by: ISI handlers. Terror proxies. D-Company smugglers. Hawala bankers like Khanani. It was not fiction. It was policy.
And men like Khanani were not plotting in neon-lit dens; they were balancing spreadsheets in Karachi offices, handling millions for narcotics cartels one minute and jihadi groups the next. That is why, years later in 2019, on a chilling Dubai night, the name still terrified Pakistani journalists who know the underbelly. Because the villain of Dhurandhar dies on screen. But Khanani’s ghost lingers in real intelligence files, real financial scars, real geopolitical tremors.
The Story India Still Needs to Confront
What remains of Khanani’s empire persists through splinter networks, successor hawala operators, and proxy exchangers that continue to service the ISI’s off-the-books strategy. Pakistan’s counterfeit infrastructure has evolved since demonetisation. India has tightened borders, upgraded security features, and intensified inter-agency coordination. But the war is not over.
The real lesson of Khanani’s saga is this:
Economic warfare does not look like cinema. It looks like Dubai terraces, Karachi offices, forged paper trails, shadow trades, and men who fear a single name more than any bullet. I learned it the night a drunk journalist snapped to sobriety on mere mention of Khanani's name. India learned it the hard way—one fake note, one terror strike, one hawala settlement at a time. And somewhere in Karachi’s financial underworld, the ghost ledger of Javed Khanani still balances itself against India’s vulnerabilities. |
