Veerappan: Chasing the Brigand

by K. Vijay Kumar

  3

  Rise of a Brigand

  July 2001

  ‘Ayya (Sir), Veerappan has had quite an eventful career,’ said the lean man standing in front of me, holy ash smeared prominently on his forehead.

  I couldn’t help but smile, both at the dry wit and the elegant colloquial Tamil of Inspector Karuppusamy, so typical of southernmost Tamil Nadu where he had spent his childhood.

  More than twenty years after he had joined the police as a sub-inspector, his belt size was still 28 inches and his weight 60 kg, helped, no doubt, by his austere vegan diet. ‘This man is truly a yogi in camouflage,’ I thought.

  Among the first volunteers to join the STF in 1993, he was determined to stay on till its mission concluded successfully.

  Thanks to his long, uninterrupted stay with the force, Karuppusamy had become something of an encyclopaedia on not just the area’s geography and local medicinal plants, but also on Veerappan, his operations and his legend. The STF’s operations covered some 400 hamlets in Tamil Nadu and Karnataka; Karuppusamy had contacts in each one of them. He was loved by his men for his scrupulous honesty.

  He was the best man for me to talk to, to get a sense of Veerappan, including the incidents that had shaped him. I gestured to Karuppusamy to take a seat and got straight to the point.

  ‘Tell me what you know of Veerappan’s life,’ I said.

  ‘Ayya, I’ll share all I know about A-1 and the gang,’ he replied. A-1 is a cop’s shorthand for accused-1, as mentioned in the First Information Report (FIR)—in this case, Veerappan. ‘The gang’ stood for Veerappan’s gang.

  He recounted a tale that had the makings of a fantastic Bollywood potboiler. As he proceeded, it was easy to see why Veerappan had captured the imagination of movie makers and the public alike, a fascination that continues till today.

  In fact, so much mythology has sprung up around Koose Muniswamy Veerappan that it is practically impossible to weed out fact from fiction. Many differing dates, some almost a decade apart, are cited for his birthday. But his actual date of birth was 18 January 1952. The STF figured this out later, when it got hold of the brigand’s horoscope.

  Veerappan was the second of four children, raised in the village of Gopinatham on the fringes of a deciduous forest. Its inhabitants were quite comfortable spending long periods of time within the jungle.

  Several villages in this region were submerged when the Stanley reservoir (popularly known as Mettur Dam) was built in the 1940s. The population was resettled. Later, when states were reorganized in 1956 on the basis of language, a substantial Tamil-speaking population in Kollegal taluk, in which Veerappan’s village was situated, ended up in Karnataka from Coimbatore district in Tamil Nadu.

  The area was rich in natural resources but was economically backward, and governance wasn’t always visible or effective. It was equally difficult to make people understand the importance of conservation when pillaging the surrounding forest offered quick, easy money to supplement their uncertain and meagre incomes.

  Like the Wild West, where guns and gods command equal reverence, every second family in the area possessed a crude firearm of some kind—typically unlicensed, homemade muzzle-loaders, mostly used for protection against wild boars and other forest animals, but sometimes employed for more sinister purposes.

  Every once in a while, the police or forest department would raid the village. Some weapons would be confiscated; most would be quickly hidden. After the raid, the hidden cache of weapons would be surreptitiously retrieved and life would return to normal.

  Having grown up with guns all around him, Veerappan soon made a name for himself as an ace shot. Old-timers swear that they had seen him shoot monkeys in mid-air, as the unfortunate animals leapt from one tree to another. Given the limited capabilities of the muzzle-loaders that he was toting, that would indeed be marksmanship of the highest calibre.

  Before too long, Veerappan’s prowess with firearms began to get the wrong kind of attention. The first case against him was registered for hunting a wild boar. When a forest officer came looking for him, he fled into the woods. He was just a boy then. The rest, as they say, is history.

  Veerappan wasn’t alone for long in the forest. His alleged prowess caught the attention of a local poacher, Sevi Gounder, who, according to old-timers, had the backing of a local Tamil Nadu Member of Legislative Assembly (MLA). Very soon, Veerappan became a valued member of his gang. He is believed to have killed his first elephant as a juvenile and quickly went on to become a notorious poacher. His favoured technique was to shoot at the forehead of the elephant, killing it instantly. Even as the number of elephants killed by him piled up, he is said to have claimed that he was actually performing an act of charity by killing the tuskers, as millions of living beings, like birds and ants, could be sustained by feeding on a single elephant carcass.

  I often wondered if all this was just part of his propaganda to portray himself as some sort of Robin Hood. No doubt Veerappan enjoyed a certain degree of popularity with the local populace. Petty authorities—whether police, forest or revenue—are not welcome figures in remote areas. They tend to be seen as something of a nuisance. Veerappan defied them and this endeared him to the locals.

  Whenever any local had a grouse, Veerappan, who was one of them, was quick to exploit their resentment. This again generated a certain amount of popularity for him. Though only a few people actively helped him, it appeared that the entire population supported him. This led to strict action against the populace, which created resentment, which he further fanned. It became a vicious cycle.

  Veerappan was not very charitable, but was a generous employer. The closure of granite mines in the area had rendered several people jobless. This gave him a large pool to recruit his gang from, as well as for peripheral members like couriers, guides, lookouts, etc. He also employed several locals for sandalwood cutting and smuggling from villages on the Tamil Nadu-Karnataka border around the Palar River. His smuggling operation was quite large and he paid daily wages, which was the only source of livelihood for the poverty-stricken villagers. In fact, Veerappan ensured that they were able to pocket twenty-rupee notes for the first time in their lives.

  Karuppusamy continued, ‘Soon enough, Veerappan was heading his own motley band of poachers, one of the many in the region. A single act of audacious brutality catapulted him to undisputed number one. The local police active at that time found out later that Veerappan had invited members of the biggest rival gang over for a meal, ostensibly to carve up exclusive poaching areas within the forest for each gang. At some point during the meal, Veerappan served betel nuts to his rivals. That was a signal for some of his men, lying concealed in the forest, to open fire immediately, thus wiping out the competition.

  ‘It’s certainly a fascinating coincidence,’ I mused. ‘You know, the ancient sect of Thuggees used to do something similar. They would befriend their intended victims and then strangle them after offering them betel nuts.’

  ‘Maybe outlaw masterminds just think alike,’ responded Karuppusamy, as he continued the tale.

  By then, Veerappan headed the largest gang in the area. Others were quick to see the writing on the wall and either swore allegiance to him or quietly faded away.

  Veerappan was regarded with fear and awe. He had a larger-than-life image, which he was conscious of and cultivated meticulously. He was ruthless with people whom he regarded—correctly or otherwise—as police informers. That ensured that he was rarely denied assistance if he ever asked for it.

  Veerappan’s poaching business flourished and he soon expanded into sandalwood smuggling, decimating large tracts of the forest. He ruthlessly killed any rivals—real or imagined—but largely stayed under the radar of the authorities, with one exception. On 27 August 1983, he allegedly killed forest guard K.M. Prithvi near Mavukal in Karnataka, when the latter intervened and tried to stop elephant poaching by the gang. By and large, though, Veerappan preferred to come to terms with pliable forest offic
ials and avoided the honest ones.

  But all that changed in 1986, when Veerappan was arrested in Bangalore. He had come to buy ammunition and ended up in a quarrel with the dealer who, in turn, informed the police. Unfortunately for Veerappan, a South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) summit was due to be held in the city in a few days and all antisocial elements were being rounded up as part of the security arrangements.

  The police tracked down Veerappan to a restaurant. He was handcuffed and handed over to M.V. Murthy, an SP in the forest cell.

  During his captivity, Veerappan, for the first time, met a man who would later become a thorn in his flesh, Deputy Conservator of Forests (DCF) P. Srinivas. A slight man, Srinivas had been a topper all through his school years and later. But book learning alone does not always make one a great officer. The beard-sporting Srinivas rapidly proved to be a conscientious man, who was prepared to think out of the box.

  Srinivas knew he had hit the jackpot when Veerappan landed in his lap without much effort. He soon started gathering information about Veerappan’s criminal activities.

  One day, Srinivas took a handcuffed Veerappan to a guest house in the interiors of the Boodipadaga Forest. He then left the latter in the custody of some forest guards in order to attend to some other work. While he was away, the wily captive sensed an opportunity to escape and decided to capitalize on it.

  Veerappan begged for some oil to ease his throbbing headache. While one guard was sceptical, the other, more gullible one obliged. That night, as the guards slept, Veerappan deftly transferred the oil on his head to his spindly hands. In a few minutes, his wrists slipped out of the handcuffs. Then he climbed out through a small window and fled into the darkness. Fourteen years later, during a hearing on the Rajkumar kidnapping case, the Supreme Court reiterated the seriousness of this lapse and demanded to know all details.

  I shook my head. It was hard to believe that the guards had bungled up so badly. Veerappan had been in custody and yet he managed to go free.

  ‘Do you believe that’s what really happened?’ I asked, thinking about the way the man had turned into a menace and a legend after that.

  Karuppusamy shrugged. ‘That’s what the official records say.’

  I had read something similar earlier, including the fact that even though Veerappan was in custody for a brief period, his fingerprints were not taken.

  Sceptics scoffed at the official version. It was easier to believe that Veerappan had probably bribed his captors to let him go. Whatever the truth, Veerappan was once again a free man. He now nursed a sense of resentment against the authorities. And the brigand, known to hold a long grudge, eventually took it upon himself to eliminate his nemesis, Srinivas.

  Karuppusamy went on to quickly recap Veerappan’s rise in the area, including the manner in which the man’s name in itself spelled awe and terror among the local population.

  Veerappan began his rise by first extorting money from the black-granite quarries that dotted the area, forcing them to pass on explosives to him. Eventually, the Karnataka government had no option but to ban quarrying in the area as long as Veerappan remained active. This meant a huge loss in revenue to the state exchequer, as well as a loss of jobs to the locals.

  Making matters worse was the fact that police efforts to nab Veerappan were floundering. They suffered an especially demoralizing setback on 9 April 1990, when he ambushed a jeep carrying ten policemen, leaving three sub-inspectors, including a very active SI Dinesh, dead and a constable badly wounded.

  By now, Veerappan’s activities had become too alarming to be ignored. He had popped up in faraway Coorg and the grapevine was that Kaziranga in Assam too was in his sights for its ivory. On 16 April 1990, then Karnataka Chief Minister Veerendra Patil announced the creation of an STF to apprehend Veerappan. K.U. Shetty, an IPS officer who had previously served in the army, was its first chief.

  Soon after its creation, the STF was approached by an unexpected volunteer—Forest Officer P. Srinivas.

  Veerappan’s escape haunted Srinivas. Every time he heard of a fresh escapade by the outlaw, it felt like salt being rubbed into his wounds. Unable to bear it any longer, he volunteered to go to the area where Veerappan was known to be active and adopted a strategy that was simultaneously hard and soft.

  The ‘hard’ part of Srinivas’s game plan consisted of numerous raids. He joined the STF on its marches. Having heard the story of the brigand’s escape, the STF men were sceptical about Srinivas’s assistance, but he soon earned their respect, carrying his own equipment and weapon, just like everyone else, and sharing the same rough living conditions.

  But it was the ‘soft’ part of Srinivas’s plan that really started to pay dividends. Srinivas set up camp in Veerappan’s village, Gopinatham. He worked hard to befriend the locals, often using the funds sanctioned for operations against Veerappan for the villagers’ benefit. He even built a small temple in Gopinatham with some funds from volunteers but majorly financed by him. Though he knew that the villagers were aware of this fact, he did not want them to feel obliged, as it was the sense of participation that mattered the most.

  Bit by bit, he developed a reliable network of informers. His popularity rose after he set up a dispensary in Gopinatham. His herbal and indigenous medicines soon restored the health and faith of many.

  What bothered Veerappan the most was the fact that Srinivas was in regular conversation with Arjunan, the outlaw’s younger brother.

  Unlike his brother, Arjunan was a bit of a wastrel. Locals claimed that Veerappan would often chide him for his excessive drinking, smoking and womanizing, warning Arjunan that his wasteful ways would one day lead to his downfall. But the brothers were known to stay in touch. Srinivas hoped to convince Arjunan to persuade Veerappan to surrender.

  Arjunan wasn’t the only sibling whom Srinivas befriended. Veerappan’s youngest sister, Mariammal (Mari), a lively, affectionate and well-liked young woman in the village, was a volunteer at the dispensary.

  One day, some STF members picked up Mari on the suspicion that she had helped her sister-in-law, Veerappan’s wife Muthulakshmi, escape from virtual house arrest and join Veerappan in the forest. Unable to get any information, the STF released Mari, but not before threatening her with dire consequences. Locals claim that she went in tears to Srinivas’s home, but nothing came of the meeting. Shortly thereafter, Srinivas went to Mettur to meet a potential informer. Upon his return to Gopinatham, he learned that Mari had killed herself by consuming pesticide.

  A livid Veerappan blamed Srinivas for his sister’s unfortunate death. Recalling his time in captivity, Veerappan was convinced that Srinivas had enlisted Mari’s support with the sole purpose of getting back at him.

  Even as Veerappan nursed a rising hatred, Srinivas led a highly successful raid into one of his jungle hideouts, leading to the confiscation of almost 800 kg of sandalwood and the surrender of twenty bandits. While the loss of sandalwood was undoubtedly a blow to Veerappan, it was the surrender of his men that really riled him.

  Gang members who surrendered later revealed how Veerappan successfully used Srinivas’s strategy against him.

  One night, Srinivas was attending a wedding in Gopinatham when Arjunan sidled up to him.

  ‘Anna is ready to surrender,’ whispered Arjunan. ‘He has asked you to walk towards Namdelhi (about a two-hour walk from Gopinatham). He’ll meet you halfway. Wait for his message.’

  A few days later, an excited Srinivas left for the meeting, accompanied by Arjunan and some villagers. In his mind, he must have pictured the moment when Veerappan would surrender, and the celebrations that would follow.

  During the trek, Srinivas didn’t notice that one by one, all the villagers had quietly slipped away into the shadows till only Arjunan remained. The two men arrived at a muddy pool, where Arjunan stopped. Several figures rose from the bushes. One of them was a tall, rangy man with a handlebar moustache.

  Srinivas was initially triumphant, but soon
realized that something wasn’t right. Veerappan was holding a rifle and staring at him.

  Srinivas looked around. Reality sunk in. He realized he was alone with Arjunan. As the extent of his predicament dawned on Srinivas, Veerappan and his men began to laugh.

  Before Srinivas could react, Veerappan fired. He slumped to the ground, dead. But Veerappan was still not satisfied. He chopped off Srinivas’s head and carried the grisly trophy back to his camp, where he and the others kicked it around like a football.

  The news of Srinivas’s murder sent shockwaves throughout the region. The message was unmistakable—nobody was safe from the bandit’s vengeance. More than the killing, it was the sheer brutality of the act (Srinivas’s head wasn’t recovered till almost three years later) that enhanced Veerappan’s reputation as a terrifying foe.

  ‘What happened to the temple Srinivas built in Gopinatham?’ I asked Karuppusamy as he finished the gruesome tale. I had goosebumps and barely managed to control a shudder at the horrific account.

  ‘It’s still there,’ he replied, volunteering to take me to the temple, which I visited that same evening.

  The temple was about a four-hour journey from the STF headquarters at Sathy. It had a large portrait of Srinivas, and a board displayed the details of his life as well as the Kirti Chakra that he was awarded posthumously. The villagers clearly revered him as a saint.

  Karuppusamy told me that a legend had sprung up around Srinivas’s death. Locals claimed that there had been many ominous signs, including animals howling in the jungle, on the day that Srinivas was killed.

  We hung around the temple area for a while. An aarti was performed before Srinivas’s portrait. A sense of serenity pervaded the area, completely at odds with the gruesome manner of his death.

  ‘Srinivas may live on in the hearts of the villagers,’ I thought, ‘but he has still not got justice.’

  Visiting the temple only strengthened my resolve. I would try my best to nab the brigand and make him accountable for all his crimes. He would have to pay for all the lives he had taken.