Ramya made an expansive gesture. ‘My family owns the house and the estates all around. We visit this place regularly.’
The cook took Muthulakshmi on a tour. Though the estate was barely 20 acres, he cheerfully enhanced its area, claiming that it extended right up to a waterfall some distance away.
Finally, they halted at a spot which lay across the Dhimbam Hills. Muthulakshmi could identify the location and her mind was flooded with memories. That’s where she had been separated from her husband during the STF raid. She returned to the guest house in a pensive mood.
As Muthulakshmi grew closer to Ramya, the STF discreetly arranged for Muthulakshmi’s second daughter, Prabha, to move in with them. Shortly after her birth, her mother had left Prabha with her parents and had gone back into the forest. The STF had then handed her over to a Telugu couple who had raised her. The couple were deeply attached to Prabha and were reluctant to be parted from her, but Inspector Ramalingam persuaded them to allow the girl to be reunited with her mother. The first daughter, Vidya, was studying in a boarding school.
All this while, Muthulakshmi had not revealed her true identity to Ramya. But on 26 February, after a picnic on a pleasant day at the waterfall near the tea estate, she poured her heart out.
‘You’ve become a dear friend. I want to tell you the truth about myself. But I want you to promise that you won’t break our friendship,’ she said hesitantly. ‘I am the wife of a famous person. He is wanted by the police.’
‘What are you saying!’ exclaimed Ramya, looking suitably shocked.
‘Don’t judge me before hearing me out,’ pleaded Muthulakshmi.
Then she narrated the complete story of her marriage to Veerappan and the events thereafter. After she concluded her tale, Ramya wiped her tears and embraced her. ‘You’ve been through such a lot. Don’t worry. You can stay with us as long as you like.’
Within minutes of the conversation, Ramya had passed on the details to Kannan, who, in turn, conveyed them to me.
It was time for the endgame to begin.
Ramya was quickly briefed. At this stage, she panicked. ‘I don’t want to be part of an encounter,’ she said, her voice cracking on the last word.
‘There will not be any extreme action. We intend to capture him alive,’ Kannan was quick to reassure her.
The next day, when Muthulakshmi brought up the topic of Veerappan, Ramya was ready.
‘I was up all night thinking. You told me your husband needs to get his eye treated. I know a doctor who can take care of it, no questions asked. Also, he hasn’t seen Prabha since she was a baby. Why not ask him to come over? This way he can meet her too.’
Muthulakshmi got excited and said she would propose the idea to Veerappan.
Ramya got in touch with us, and we started preparations in right earnest.
Muthulakshmi and Ramya returned to Coimbatore for a few days. While away, Inspector Umapathy, known to the STF as Ultra, swung into action. A trained engineer and a wizard with electronics, Ultra quickly rigged up surveillance outside the house to keep an eye on any suspicious-looking people in the vicinity. He moved into a location close to the guest house to monitor the footage.
The inspector handling logistics hired a Mahindra jeep and an Indica. Kannan and I travelled in the jeep up to Kothagiri, and then to the guest house in the Indica. We were very careful not to use any official vehicles, as we didn’t want word of police presence getting around.
We studied the area and all the access roads thoroughly. The guest room had a small attic, which could be accessed via a trapdoor in the roof. ‘That could come in handy if Veerappan is in the room and we want to roll in a stun grenade and take him by surprise,’ I noted.
While all these preparations were on, we hit a snag. The ‘driver’ assigned to Ramya’s family wanted to quit. ‘I’ve got three female bosses. The old hag is a pain. Cleaning the car is fine. But she expects me to mop the house and pick up the dog’s poop as well. I did not join the STF for this,’ he lamented.
Kannan stepped in to counsel him, quoting an old Tamil adage, ‘This would be like breaking the pot when the butter is about to churn.’
The mollified driver went back to muck-raking, quite literally.
From Vadavalli, Muthulakshmi recorded an audio cassette in which she spoke about her past travails and hopes for the future. She listed all the ways in which Veerappan had failed in his duties as a husband and father, trying to inculcate a sense of guilt in him. At some places, she broke down. She shared some of the details with Ramya. By now, Muthulakshmi trusted Ramya so much that she even allowed her to fly with Prabha to Chennai for a few days.
Meanwhile, more tapes were sent by her to Veerappan, in which she informed him of the beautiful tea estate and guest house. The STF tried to follow the audio tapes to his den, but to no avail. Our men managed to follow a lanky youth, acting as the courier, till the Erode bus stand, but lost him there.
Whatever we could glean from Muthulakshmi’s conversations with Ramya indicated that Veerappan was likely to take the bait. Kannan rushed to Madurai and spoke to an eye specialist. He informed the latter that he would be needed on short notice to treat someone important, though he didn’t give the name. A nurse too was put on standby. Fortunately, the doctor did not ask too many questions.
From Ramya’s information, it seemed that Veerappan would emerge near Bannari. There were some hillocks below Dhimbam where he had kept Rajkumar hostage. It could be a possible route for him.
Kannan and I discussed the possibility of posting some women commandos posing as woodpickers in the area. We shortlisted some probables from the 3,000-odd women in the Tamil Nadu Special Police.
But then things took a turn for the worse.
On 23 March, Muthulakshmi noticed three missed calls on her mobile within a space of two minutes. She walked to a nearby phone booth and called back. When she returned, her demeanour had changed. She became nonchalant towards Ramya. But the two were scheduled to go on a picnic to Valparai Hills, so they went anyway. According to their plan, they would have a leisurely lunch and head back at around 4 p.m.
Around lunchtime, Ramya’s mother rang up Kannan. ‘Ramya just called. Muthulakshmi suspects she is under surveillance,’ she said in an agitated voice.
‘Don’t worry, we’ll take care of it,’ said Kannan.
The moment he put the phone down, he called the driver. ‘Pretend that the car has developed engine trouble. Whatever you do, make sure you don’t start from there before 6 p.m.’ Then he called Ultra. ‘Pull out. Hide the street cam. She shouldn’t find anything.’
By the time the two women returned, there was no trace of Ultra. But things were never the same between them again. Muthulakshmi even stopped letting Prabha spend time with Ramya.
A few days later, the surveillance camera recorded an image of someone hanging around early in the morning on a foggy day.
A long time was spent analysing the footage, but the person could not be identified. Taken in conjunction with the tip-off that Muthulaksmi had received over the phone, it was too much of a coincidence to ignore. The lab’s effort to enhance the image came a cropper. It remained grainy.
‘Who could it be?’ I asked Kannan.
Could the mysterious visitor be a mole within the STF?
‘It may be a rogue cop or a civilian,’ said Kannan grimly, but didn’t sound too convinced. Then he voiced the question that had been bothering me. ‘Should we call it off?’
After much agonizing, we decided to persist with Operation Boston. Even if Muthulakshmi had an unknown visitor (we never found out who that was), it was unlikely that he would know about the op itself, as it was carried out on a strictly need-to-know basis. Only five people within the STF knew all the details—Kannan, driver Selvaraj, the cook, Ultra and me.
But one day, Veerappan abruptly called off his plan to visit Muthulakshmi.
There could have been many reasons for this. Apparently, an astrologer had warned him about the p
eriod being extremely inauspicious, which may have prompted him to lie low.
Also, Mohan Nawaz had launched a guerrilla force called Anjaneyas (after one of the many names of Lord Hanuman). The Anjaneya units were small, consisting of four to six men. At times, only a buddy pair would move, with the second pair keeping an eye from a distance. They lived on two meals of ragi balls every day. This was a step above Bidari’s five-member civilian teams, called ‘ragi squads’. They dressed like tribals and carried small bundles on their heads, which held their favoured weapons—sawed-off.303 rifles and shotguns.
There was only one way of differentiating an Anjaneya from a tribal—they did not have the spindly legs and splayed toes of the locals, who had spent their entire lives walking barefoot on hard terrain. But that would necessitate close scrutiny, by which time it would be too late, especially for a wanted man. Veerappan had come to hate and fear these hermit commandos. Their patrols in the crucial Dhimbam Hills had severely curtailed his movement.
In all, there were some ninety Anjaneyas. Realistically, they could only hold a maximum area of 10 by 10 kilometres. But their psychological effect was such that they had successfully sealed off an area almost fifty times larger.
Could the fear of crossing the Anjaneya-infested Dhimbam Hills have stopped Veerappan from visiting Muthulakshmi? If so, that was truly ironic. Perhaps Veerappan sensed that the STF was somehow involved. The mere thought was enough to scare him.
Whatever the reason, Operation Boston flopped. During the famous Boston Tea Party, chests of tea were dumped into the ocean. In this ‘Boston’, our hopes, plans and a lot of time and painstaking effort sank without a trace.
It was a demoralizing blow for those who had pinned so much hope on the operation. Fortunately, we got another crack at Veerappan soon.
28
Operation Inundation
August 2003
‘All sources indicate that Veerappan is holed up within a 10-km radius of his village, Gopinatham,’ I began, marking a circle on the map. ‘Hidayatullah’s debriefing has made it clear that Veerappan is getting fresh food whenever he crosses over to MM Hills. Can we choke his supply line? We can’t dry up his civilian support, but how about flooding the area with multiple teams of our own …’
I broke off as I saw some of the STF officers trying to suppress their smiles.
‘Is anything the matter, gentlemen?’
A brief silence, and then Hussain cleared his throat. ‘I beg your pardon, sir, but there have been other big operations in the past that have achieved very little. The boys are a little sceptical.’
Their scepticism reminded me of the axiom: ‘Tanks can’t catch mice’. This was reinforced when the United States had carpet-bombed Tora Bora but Osama bin Laden had slipped away. In Kashmir, we would create huge cordons yet the target would manage to get away. We would then try to coax innocent men, women and kids with impromptu medical camps and subsidized canteens.
I knew Hussain was alluding to Operation Jungle Storm, a mammoth mobilization that the STF had carried out in June 2000. More than 1,000 men had churned the jungles for over two months under IG Balachandran, who had meticulously prepared the plan.
But Jungle Storm did not yield the desired outcome. Instead of actually scouring the dense forest, the teams got bogged down by the attempts to achieve daily targets for kilometres covered, villages visited and sources met. They stuck to beaten paths. Food was delivered by jeeps and vans. To collect it in time, the teams loitered near the pickup points, instead of performing in-depth patrolling. Most aspects of the operation were micromanaged and the local commanders’ own tactics and initiative were mothballed.
There is an old adage that one should not confuse activity for progress. Unfortunately, despite the good intentions with which it was launched, there was hardly any progress. Within a month of Jungle Storm winding up, a far bigger storm had struck—Veerappan had abducted Rajkumar.
The previous year had seen huge sweeps by the Tamil Nadu Police to ferret out the bandit, be it Operation Vanamalai in 1989 or a decade later, Operation Tusker. But neither had been successful.
Despite a string of failures, I was convinced that if we persevered and changed the tactics, we would strike gold.
‘I’m fully aware that so far it has seemed like a lot of sound and fury, but here is what I think we should do …’ I said.
That was the launch of Operation Inundation. DSP Tirunavukkarasu, or Tiru, was its sheet anchor. This time, instead of sending large unwieldy patrols, we poured in fighting-fit, agile mini-teams equipped with GPS, night-vision devices and other gizmos. A significant part of the area covered fell under the Karnataka STF, but they were generous enough to allow us the tactical freedom to conduct the operation.
Though surprise, speed and simplicity were the buzzwords, there were two operational problems. First, the hills blocked the signals. We seldom received the signal, and when we did, it resonated from our walkie-talkies as garbled static. A weak signal is as bad as mangled code. Military legend has it that during World War II, ‘camel ruptured’ was read as ‘Rommel captured’. The results speak for themselves.
Then a brainwave hit the police’s whizkids—weak signals could be boosted by putting up unmanned repeaters atop the tallest and most inaccessible parts of MM Hills.
‘What if the gang vandalizes the repeaters?’ asked a sceptic.
‘It will tell us for sure that they are in that area,’ responded ‘Ultra’ Umapathy.
About 100 km away, overlooking Chennimalai (renowned for its cotton bed sheets), was a hillock atop which was a temple. Right next to it was a wireless station, part of a chain that provided the police network coverage. A portable repeater, the latest from Motorola’s stable, quietly buzzed into life there. Suddenly, talking to a guy beyond the folds of MM Hills across the Cauvery felt like speaking to him next door. All my concerns were assuaged at that moment.
The next problem was graver. With so many small STF teams milling around in a small swathe, the odds of friendly fire had spiked radically, only aggravated by poor communication. The STF still recalled the tragic death of Ananjeya Kumar. The last thing we needed was another such episode.
This issue was resolved by extensive training and demarcation of responsibilities. The area was divided into 16 squares of 2 km by 2 km, with a kitchen for every six squares. Each square was allocated to two six-member teams—one on stand-to and the other on standby mode. In the STF’s long history, teams had never had such small and well-defined turfs. Each team was in constant contact with the others. It was understood that if Veerappan attacked any team, the other thirty would rush in to its aid in overwhelming force.
Veerappan had a very cost-effective ‘I-Com’ wireless set—similar to the equipment employed by the LTTE, among others—that allowed him to tune into the STF’s communications. His gang members had revealed in many a debriefing post-surrender that he could identify our personnel simply by listening to their voices. He particularly enjoyed the very chaste Tamil spoken by Karuppusamy. The bandit had apparently laughed heartily when an SP of the STF was nearly washed away in a flash flood.
But now Veerappan was flummoxed to hear only numbers and no words.
The STF had come up with a simple solution to counter Veerappan listening in. The over 60 sq. km that fell within these sixteen squares were divided into smaller squares. Then we superimposed an imaginary clock on the overall square for easy reference. We used clock positions to refer to our locations, which were easily understood by our teams, but not by others listening in.
At a loss to understand the barrage of numbers, Veerappan now had to constantly worry about the direction of a possible attack by the STF. To add to his misery, the teams would sometimes deliberately lapse back into Tamil and pretend to have spotted his couriers, even when they hadn’t. Veerappan was always on edge. After all, we were messing with his mind.
Another STF innovation was the use of Liquid Crystal Diode (LCD) on their caps during night
patrols. LCDs, available in TV remotes, are invisible to the naked eye, but when seen through night-vision devices, they glow like stars. When the teams maintained strict radio silence at night, this innovation proved crucial in differentiating friend from foe.
Veerappan’s spies, who tracked the movement of any man or beast in their neighbourhood, were rattled by our new tactics. They had never seen so many STF men per square inch. The six-member teams were too small to stage a massive raid, but were big enough to strike into the enemy’s comfort zone and wreck his peace of mind.
In our attempt to employ the latest technology, we also engaged a tracker, meant to keep track of tigers, hoping that the sensor inside it would infiltrate Veerappan’s camp. But this proved a disappointment. One time, a rifle that Veerappan’s gang had sent out for repair reached the STF’s armourer. The sensor was inserted in that rifle’s butt, but the gang never managed to retrieve the gun.
However, our sustained efforts were boosted by some unexpected assistance.
One day, Karuppusamy came to me and said, ‘Some victims of the gang want to help the STF.’
‘How?’ I asked
‘By joining the hunt. They want six muzzle-loaders in return. Nothing more.’
We verified the antecedents of the six men. They were shepherds and hunters, village folk who had suffered at the hands of the gang. Soon, they were serving as irregular scouts for the STF. Their knowledge of the terrain and local customs was invaluable.
We also tried to draft dogs, mostly seized from hunters, into the STF ranks. For a few days they outperformed the STF’s trained Dobermanns and German Shepherds. But once they acquired a permanent government job, they became lazy and ineffective. We then decided to demobilize them and send them back to their masters. Ironically, their efficiency levels shot up again!
Initially, Veerappan had hoped that this was a brief exercise that he would be able to wait out. But as days went by, he realized that this was something else altogether. As the noose tightened around him, he retreated deeper and deeper into his lair. He and his men were forced to stop hunting, as they could not risk their gunshots being heard. He also stopped ordering hot curries from his village’s popular non-veg eatery, which was now doing brisk business thanks to the STF boys.
Veerappan: Chasing the Brigand Page 20