Who is Kusum, the drug queen of Delhi's Sultanpuri?

Indian Express

21-07-2025

On September 11, 2008, Kusum (40), a resident of E Block in Outer Delhi's Sultanpuri, was arrested by the Delhi Police Crime Branch Narcotics unit for allegedly supplying smack in the neighbourhood.
Kusum told the police that her husband, Manoj, was unemployed — and high on smack, all day and every day. Desperate to support herself and her four children, she contacted Manoj's supplier and got into the local drug business.
Seventeen years and 11 cases later, Kusum is back in the news.
On Saturday, the Delhi Police seized property worth Rs 4 crore belonging to her and her family in Sultanpuri and Rohini areas. Seven of these were in Sultanpuri, including a 'mini mansion' from where Kusum ran her drug supply chain network — which now included heroin, ganja, and tramadol tablets.
Kusum, however, is missing. She has been on the run since March.
Born in 1968 in Uttar Pradesh's Bulandshahr, Kusum never went to school. When she was 16 years old, her parents married her off to a man named Raju aka Surender, a worker-for-hire. He later moved to Sultanpuri with Kusum, a police officer said.
In the early 1990s, Raju passed away due to a chronic illness. In 1992, Kusum married Manoj. A smack addict, he couldn't hold down a steady job, the officer said.
The same year, the couple had their first of four children, Pooja, her dossier noted. Kusum would then give birth to Deepa in 1995, Amit in 1998, and Cheeku in 2001, another police officer said.
Due to Manoj's deteriorating health, he started staying home for long periods. The family of six soon had no source of income.
In 2002, Kusum obtained the contact of a local smack supplier through her husband and began dealing for him in Outer Delhi.
By 2003, she was controlling the smack supply in three-four blocks of Sultanpuri. In June that year, she was booked for the time under the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances (NDPS) Act, 1985.
In September 2008, Kusum was arrested for the first time by the Narcotics division of the Crime Branch. She was released on bail in the same month, her dossier said.
She would go on to expand her drugs business to include heroin.
A senior police officer said that Kusum's brother, 'Danny', was also involved in the drug business. He would frequently travel between Bulandshahr and Outer Delhi, and would put Kusum in contact with Ashfaq, an alleged heroin supplier from Bareilly, the officer said.
Kusum's dossier mentions Ashfaq as one of her key associates.
Throughout the 2010s, Kusum's drug business expanded and she started acquiring property across Rohini and Outer Delhi to park her money, a police officer said.
Her Sultanpuri home, a cluster of modest shabby three-floor buildings from the outside, was connected to form a 'mini-mansion' from the inside, the officer said.
'Suppliers would come near the buildings on two-wheelers to take their order. Juveniles working for her would come to the windows, put pouches of heroin and smack in a basket, and lower it using ropes. The supplier would take his order, put cash in the basket, which was then pulled back up,' the officer said.
As suppliers went in and out of her now 'iconic' E Block den, a team of policemen and CCTVs across the block began to watch their every movement.
After years of surveillance and based on specific inputs, police raided the establishment in March this year and arrested her son Amit, 26, allegedly a key part of Kusum's operation and her heir apparent.
More than 500 packets of heroin, tramadol tablets, Rs 14 lakh in cash and a black Scorpio SUV were recovered. Kusum and her three daughters, police said, went on the run.
On Saturday, police reported that approximately Rs 2 crore in cash had been transferred into the accounts of both Pooja and Deepa over the past 18 months.
According to Kusum's dossier, Amit and Pooja were her most frequent visitors during her stints in judicial custody, the most recent being in March 2024.
'It's extremely difficult to keep her behind bars and collect evidence. She has an army of chartered accountants and lawyers working for her. Even during the raid this year, about 12 lawyers reached the building to try and halt it,' a senior police officer said.