I was brought back to the present by some noise in the underbrush, which forced the entire party to a standstill. As we waited, I remembered what Ashok Kumar had told me about the later events of that day and the subsequent investigation.
When news of Kolandapaiyan’s death was conveyed to his wife, she apparently broke down and said, ‘This is bound to happen when you ignore Veerappan’s warning.’
Three days before the Good Friday massacre, on 6 April, an urchin had met Kolandapaiyan’s wife and told her that her husband’s younger brother Govindan had asked her to come to the Chettypatty River ghat. When she went there she met a stranger who said, rather cryptically, ‘Tell your husband to keep away from the jungle.’
‘Is that a warning or a threat?’ she had wondered as she mopped the sweat from her forehead. She looked towards the messenger for a clarification, but he had melted back into the forest.
A couple of days later, the same urchin had repeated the message to the thoroughly alarmed woman, who had warned Kolandapaiyan and pleaded with him to sever all links with ‘Rambo’ Gopalakrishnan.
Whatever his reasons, Kolandapaiyan had decided to go into the forest that day. Perhaps the senseless killing of the twenty-two people could have been avoided had the man simply told the police officer about the warnings his wife had received. But his pride had stopped him, even as a misguided sense of loyalty made him walk into a trap.
The Good Friday blast sent shockwaves through the states of Tamil Nadu and Karnataka. Overnight, Veerappan was catapulted to celebrity-hood, albeit for all the wrong reasons. The price on his head now shot up fourfold to ₹20 lakh. His name began to evoke awe and dread, particularly in the areas he frequented.
Rambo was severely injured in the blast, but legends like him die hard. Or maybe his sheer size helped minimize the damage. He was rushed to Salem, where the medical team was amazed to see that he had survived. Doctors and nurses who attended to him later said that while being treated he mumbled ‘My boys’ twice before losing consciousness.
When he woke up several hours later, he was again in for a shock. He found then Chief Minister J. Jayalalithaa by his bedside. ‘The doctors told me you’ve taken it well. You should be okay,’ she said.
Rambo may have survived, but was forced to go on medical leave for more than a year. He also underwent almost a dozen surgeries, and lived in constant pain since then. Eventually, Rambo passed away on 11 September 2016 at a Chennai hospital.
I had been standing right behind the CM when she met Rambo, as I was in charge of the CM’s security detail at the time. After my stint with the SPG, I had returned to my home cadre, Tamil Nadu. Due to her tough stance against the LTTE, there was a threat to the CM’s life, especially after the assassination of former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi. I was tasked to set up an elite protection group for the CM, called the Special Security Group, which I created as a hybrid of the SPG and NSG.
At that moment in the hospital, I bristled at the thought of how much damage one man with so much negative energy could cause.
Jayalalithaa had been grim-faced when she emerged from her meeting with Gopalakrishnan. ‘This cannot go on,’ she declared, and followed it up with a series of meetings with her counterpart in Karnataka, M. Veerappa Moily. The two states immediately agreed to cooperate to bring Veerappan to justice, once and for all.
As a result of the meetings, the Tamil Nadu STF formally came into being, with my mentor Walter Davaram as its first head. The first thing Walter did was to issue a clarion call for volunteers. Many sub-inspectors simply wrote ‘joining STF’ in their respective police stations’ general diary and went off to join the force. But Walter picked only the finest. Eventually, some 250 volunteers from the 60,000-odd personnel in the Tamil Nadu police force made the cut.
Rambo’s Jungle Patrol was transformed into the operational nucleus of the STF, with Ashok Kumar and many others of the original team making it their life’s mission to get Veerappan. The Karnataka STF too was similarly energized, with Gopal Hosur reporting as SP the day after the massacre, for the second time, under Shankar Bidari, who had joined as DIG just two months before this episode.
Back then too I had desperately wanted to be part of the STF, but knew that it would be difficult to be relieved from my assignment of handling the CM’s security. Even so, I decided that I would do all that I could to help make the STF an elite team.
I recall asking my team member ASP Sanjay Arora if he would like to volunteer. He had jumped at the offer.
‘You’re very lucky,’ I told him, adding that he was free to take anyone or anything from the SSG. Sanjay didn’t need to be asked twice. He immediately requisitioned some AK-47s (ironically, these weapons had been seized from the LTTE, which had led to wry jokes among the STF members about how they had probably originated from India to begin with, since it was an open secret that India had equipped the LTTE in its formative years). Sanjay also shortlisted seven of the best sub-inspectors. In all, fifteen men from the SSG went to the STF, whose members also received training at our centre on the outskirts of Chennai.
Jayalalithaa personally met all fifteen men that I had skimmed from her security detail. Far from being upset at losing them, she wished them the best of luck on their mission.
Meanwhile, unknown to us, there was a silver lining to the ambush. We found out months later that when Ashok Kumar and his team had opened fire, Simon, the explosives expert, had hastily jumped from a large rock to flee, but ended up fracturing his leg in the process. Maybe he was being made to pay for his sins.
Simon was quickly carried away by the rest of the gang, but was forced to go to a hospital in Tiruppur a few months later, where he was arrested following a tip-off. As his leg was still pretty badly injured, Simon was carried around in a palanquin by the STF men, when he revealed all the places that he had extensively mined. He, along with three others, was sentenced to death in 2004—the same year that Veerappan was killed. They are still on death row, awaiting the Supreme Court’s disposal of their plea.
Simon’s revelations eventually saved many lives. But the disclosure didn’t happen till a few months after the Palar blast—by which time a large STF contingent and I had had a miraculous escape.
7
Three Hit, Not Out
July 2001
Walter patiently emptied about twenty dead leeches—swollen with the blood they had sucked from him—from one boot. He extracted a similar number from his other boot. He had just returned to the travellers’ bungalow in Coimbatore after spending a day trekking through the jungle, chasing elusive leads. As usual, he had ignored the fact that leeches and the blood-thinning medicine the doctors had ordered him to take were not a good combination.
His extraction of leeches done, Walter handed me a booklet, ‘The Hunt for Kimathi’. ‘You’ll find this interesting. The Mau Mau insurgents in Kenya used tactics very similar to those employed by Veerappan,’ he said. ‘They even shared the same large doses of good fortune.’
I couldn’t help but smile. At sixty-plus, the legendary super cop still retained his fire and the ability to motivate all those who served under him. With his bristling moustache and imposing physique, he instantly commanded attention, even if one had not heard of his awe-inspiring achievements.
‘That damned bandit has had more lives than a cat, and some of his luck seems to have rubbed off on his men. But we’ll get him one day,’ he continued.
Walter was now overseeing the operations of both the Tamil Nadu and Karnataka STFs. I was delighted to be reporting to him once again. While I was serving as SP in Dharmapuri and Salem between 1981 and 1985, he was my boss and the DIG, Vellore. He was credited with nearly wiping out Naxalism in the area in those five years. He had set many records—including being the only officer to have visited each of the over 1,100 police stations in Tamil Nadu, during which he left delightful visiting notes.
Most of my weekends during my stint under Walter were spent conducting raids or going on treks le
d by my boss, who liked nothing better than to be out in the field. That suited me just fine, because I too deeply dislike sitting behind a desk, pushing paper.
Exactly a month after the Good Friday blast, the STF entered Veerappan’s den. In his first ambush against Veerappan, Walter nearly succeeded in getting him. But not only did the wily bandit escape, the STF ambush in Veerappan’s core area produced one of the most interesting episodes in the STF’s history.
‘I have heard this story before,’ I said. ‘Could you please tell me in greater detail, sir?’
Walter leaned back, put his feet up, and began, ‘It was nearly a month after the STF had been formed, following the attack on Rambo …’
8 May 1993
The fifteen-man patrol party exchanged glances as Walter Davaram took up position with them around midnight. They had been staking out Gundam, a funnel-like place surrounded by the villages of Neethipuram, Marimadoovu and Chinnamalai Kanavai—all favoured hubs of Veerappan—when Walter decided to join the operation.
As dawn broke, Walter told most of the men, ‘Go back to the thanda.’ A thanda is a cluster of huts of the itinerant Lambadi tribals.
Lying inert for long was not in Walter’s nature. He had won numerous medals in snap shooting, where the target would disappear in three seconds. Here, he lay quietly for six hours without a target in sight.
After the inactive night, he felt restless and decided to explore the area a bit. He asked for four men to stay back from the party and accompany him on an impromptu patrol.
A scout went in front, followed by Walter and the three others. Walter was not wearing his sew-on insignia. This served a dual purpose. One, it quietly spread the ‘no distinction on the basis of rank’ culture in the STF; and two, it was a tactical move. An epaulette or badge can be spotted from miles away. That’s how LTTE snipers perched atop coconut trees had picked off Indian Peace Keeping Force officers in Jaffna, back in 1988.
The five men marched for four hours, each one keeping a regulation gap of about 15 feet. They skipped their breakfast of a loaf of bread. They ate a late lunch instead and continued their march.
Suddenly, the scout turned slightly, raising his finger to his lips. Human voices! He leaned forward, his left palm pressing on a tree trunk, neck craned, standing on his toes, straining to see something.
As the rest of the team waited on alert, he signalled. Enemy. No weapons.
He spotted the sentry of the gang. The sentry not only failed to notice the intruders, he was completely distracted at that point. Ideally, he should have been aloft a tree. But at the time female gang members were bathing around the bend in the river and would have lost their privacy. So the adolescent sentry was relocated and told strictly not to peek. Rengaswamy, the camp cook who gave a detailed account of that day upon his surrender, said that it was obviously asking a lot of a young lad. The sentry had been battling his voyeuristic instincts for almost an hour, but when a burst of laughing and giggling broke out from the forbidden zone, it dissolved his willpower.
He inched forward, trying to ensure that he would not be spotted by the men in the camp, and craned his neck to get a better angle. He could hear the women clearly, but couldn’t see much. As he tried to get a better angle, some movement registered in the sentry’s peripheral vision.
What was that?
Jerking his head half a circle, he spotted the five intruders. He looked at his bare hands.
Where was the gun?
It was leaning against a tree. Recovering quickly, he leapt for it.
Walter and his men were hoping to take out the sentry silently. But the element of surprise was lost and the sentry’s gun was now pointed at them.
‘Shoot!’ yelled Walter.
All five STF men opened up. The bandits, who had not expected a personal visit by the STF chief, were busy washing clothes and bathing in a stream, and were caught completely unawares. ‘Oru vaaramachu! Naaruthu. Nalla kullingada (It’s been a week since you bathed. You guys stink. Bathe properly),’ Veerappan had joked with his gang. Before he could finish, bullets began flying all around. The sound of the bullets merged with the screams of the women and bewildered questions shouted by the men. Then Veerappan’s stentorian voice cut through the hubbub.
‘Odungada (Run),’ he shouted.
The gang did not need to be told twice. Chased by bursts of AK-47 fire, they scrambled out of the water—both men and women, their bodies wrapped in whatever clothes they could grab. Some were still naked.
Two of Walter’s men chased them, across the stream and up a small hump and then over the hard ground that suddenly dipped steeply downward.
Walter saw a group of bandits fleeing some 50 metres away. At that distance, it isn’t easy to hit a rapidly moving target, but Walter, a pistol champion for over two decades, fired without hesitation. Soon, he caught up with his boys.
One of them excitedly said, ‘Ayya, moonu per ulundhutangoe (Three chaps have fallen).’
‘Veerappan?’ queried Walter eagerly.
The man shrugged. ‘Can’t be sure, but three men definitely went down.’
Walter peered into the shadowed underbrush. There was no sign of the wounded men anywhere. As the adrenalin of the sudden encounter wore off, his tactical brain took over.
Running around in the approaching darkness on a riverbed that was probably mined would be unwise. The enemy knew the terrain better and would regroup soon. What if they staged a counter-attack? A full team of fifteen men with an LMG would have really helped. Still, there was no point wasting time on regrets.
He tried to use the wireless set to call, ‘LION calling control.’ No response. He tried again. He wanted reinforcements, but couldn’t get through. ‘It’s a shadow area, sir,’ said the man operating the radio.
‘The whole bloody place is swarming with shadows,’ cursed Walter and reluctantly ordered the team that had cut its teeth in the very first ops to return to camp.
The next day, Walter returned with the full squad of fifteen at the crack of dawn. ‘Be careful about the corpses. The bandits might have booby-trapped them or set an ambush for us,’ he warned his team.
The fifteen men split into three groups. Team 1’s scout and his buddy scampered off to the area where the dramatic chase had taken place the previous day.
The scout slowed down, then stopped. A puzzled expression appeared on his face. The rest of his team peered over his shoulder.
‘What’s happening?’ asked Walter, catching up.
‘No bodies, sir,’ replied the scout. ‘Only blood trails.’
Walter examined the soiled earth. In a few hours, the blood had turned from bright red to dark brown. For the trained eye, blood has its own distinctive signature. If frothy, it must have emerged from the lungs. If heavy and slimy, it is most likely from the head. And if it resembles gelatin, it has probably come from the abdomen, perhaps mixed with digestive juices.
But this blood trail seemed steady, normal. ‘Must be from the trunk,’ guessed Walter. ‘A fair amount of blood had been spilt, but not enough to drain out the lives of the wounded,’ he concluded.
Even though ants and fleas were busy on the blood that had not already seeped into the ground, there were still three distinct streaks of dried blood on some rocks.
‘Look,’ pointed one of the men.
There were some drag marks on the ground that went on for about 50 metres and converged with two other blood trails.
The three men had possibly been given first aid there.
Team 2 tracked some intermittent crimson spots for another 100 metres uphill. At that point, the trail went cold.
The mystery was solved three months later, after one of the three men who were injured that day surrendered and narrated the series of events.
The three—Sundanvellayan, Arunakkaveetu Chinnaraj and the samayal (cook) Rengasamy—had been hit and were bleeding heavily, but the bullets had exited through each one without inflicting fatal damage.
Sundanvellay
an was the worst hit—four bullets, each packing nearly 2,000 joules at the muzzle end, which should have normally incapacitated or killed him but had gone through him without doing either.
Chinnaraj had taken three rounds and collapsed to the ground. He had lain there for some minutes, to all appearances dead. But once again, the 7.62 x 39 calibre bullets had not dumped their entire kinetic energy in his body before exiting cleanly. He had managed to drag himself to the rendezvous point, where all three were quickly treated with herbs, even as Veerappan and the remaining men prepared to repel any unwelcome guests.
Rengasamy, who surrendered, gave a blow-by-blow account of the encounter. It was met with considerable scepticism till he peeled off his shirt and showed his scars. The bullet had cut through the forearm muscle and snapped a bone, but had not touched any major artery, vein or nerve. A high-velocity bullet can cause serious damage if it hits the heart, brain or bladder. But it has a more benign impact on muscles and bones, which was where the three had been hit.
Eventually, all three men—including Rengasamy, who later rejoined Veerappan—would fall to STF bullets. But not that day, and not to those bullets.
Their survival only inflated Veerappan’s sense of hubris, especially after he learned that Walter himself had been present at the raid.
‘The gods love and protect me,’ he had bragged to his associates. ‘Yarum masurai pudunga mudiyadhu (No one can pluck a single hair of mine).’
8
The Fort without a King
July 2001
‘Do you miss the STF?’ I asked Sanjay Arora, who had just returned to Tamil Nadu as DIG after a five-year stint in the Indo-Tibetan Border Police.
Sanjay was the first IPS officer (apart from Walter) to have volunteered for the STF in 1993, after he relinquished his post in Jayalalithaa’s security detail.
He smiled and said, ‘I don’t think my wife does, though she was a good sport about my first stint with the STF. She joined me along with our son, who was just a baby, and we stayed in one room in the then STF headquarters in Mettur. She never complained even when I was out on patrols every day. I think she’s glad she doesn’t have to worry about me on a daily basis now. But I must confess that I do get nostalgic every time I come here. It’s always good to catch up with the boys.’
Veerappan: Chasing the Brigand Page 6